Guess how many votes I was Greenlit with

At a first glance over the internet, by the low whispers of fellow indie folk, the number of Yes votes for a game to be Greenlit vary from 700 all the way up to 3000. Most tend to say between 700 and 1000 and then they add in weird things like “but that number must be achieved in the first 2 weeks” or “only if yes/no ratio is better than 40%/60%”. Bullshit.

Worthless information

Knowing all these things is useless. Valve stated numerous times that the Yes votes do not matter as much as the general interest of people in the game and that interest can be analyzed by looking at other things, such as:

• where the traffic came from; if it’s a key giveaway website you bet it’s gonna be a problem for you
• how the traffic arrived (apart from people checking Greenlight projects on steam, was it organic traffic or spikes); the latter could show some excessive promoting and again, giveaways. Sure you can promote your game all you want, but if the organic traffic is next to zero (if it stops once your promoting stopped) …well… good luck with that.
• what the users did when they landed on the page. If they don’t watch jack shit, don’t interact at all with the developer and whatever community is around, that means no engagement – bad.
• developer’s response and PR. It’s not OK to never communicate with whoever comments on your game, it’s not OK to stay there all day and write novels either; common sense, that’s what’s OK.

303 votes, 2 weeks

Black Bobby The Hole was Greenlit with 303 votes in 2 weeks, a kickass greenlight campaign and a facebook following that was actually interested in the game.

And here are the statistics.

I would use up some time to analyze them but nobody knows if yes/no ratio matters or any other numbers for that matter.

How?

The game is pretty special and original, and so is the campaign. I can only assume, so your best bet at a decently relevant response is to ask Steam. I will however write a future post of how the Greenlight campaign was prepared and all that stuff, stuff that again – will probably not work for other games.

Here‘s the Greenlight campaign for anyone interested.

My game sat on steam for a half year stuck on 36% vote's.

Then all of the sudden it got greenlit.

Without getting more vote's.

A week later my second game, same story.

I don't know how or why.

But im happy.

Good luck to your game on steam!

Weird are the ways of the Valve. Good luck to you too!

My stats were pretty similar. Congrats!

Congrats! I hope to get one of my games on steam one day.

— Fawk

bclikesyou

Congrats guys.

Which stage of development would you recommend to get into steam? Can I get my game on steam only for feedback requests and then upgrade the page of my game to be voted when it's ready?

I would not suggest that, the biggest influx that arrives on your page happens in the first few days. If those people don't see much they will vote no. Afterwards you'll have to earn your own traffic.

Which stage of development would you recommend to get into steam?

I'd say you'd need to be at a stage where you can show some final artwork and some complete levels so you can show gameplay.

Placeholder art and no gameplay video will just get you "No" votes.

Can I get my game on steam only for feedback requests and then upgrade the page of my game to be voted when it's ready?

If you just want feedback on an unfinished game, consider using Steam Greenlight Concepts category - that's what it is there for - and then you can switch to a main Greenlight listing later without it without being held back by the early "No" votes.

Concepts is useless, there is a lot of shady stuff in there and nobody bothers to look at it. Plus is does not get any visibility from Steam at all.

I suggest you join some facebook groups about indie game dev and ask for feedback there.

I'm active on the indie game dev hangout group....but you need really thick skin there

I'll be looking for feedback on forums and twitter then.

that its easy to understand, valve needs more games = more funds for their own projects.

now you might not have a lot of people to sell to as a project since ur a smaller one, but from their perspective, if they have 100k developers like u , with 2 3 projects, and they all sell 30-50 products trough steam, imagine their cuts as they get a % of each sale. so its in valves interest to get u approved even if ur 5% under the greenlit stage... but this is only what i see and it shouldnt be so surprising ... but maybe im wrong and might be their system got faulty

however this is looked at, one thing is for sure... community campaigns to get greenlit is irrelevant from this problems perspective.

i hope you guys are doing well on sales

I agree that just the Greenlight campaign cannot say how well your game will do. Also the fact that Steam wants more developers to fuel its own projects can be true. They did promise a better sorting though, so hopefully that will help us in turn.

Same thing. My game was halfway to top 100, and then it got Greenlit out of the blue. Well, not really - I have added my game to a bundle a few days before that, and published a demo version. So I think Valve looks at the game's activity and how much the developers actually care. Plus, they might have liked the game generally.

The problem I see is too many games getting into Steam nowadays so it's becoming more like Kongregate - people don't have any guarantee their games will do well or even be noticed. I guess that Greenlight was once proof of a game's good quality, but now devs have to assure their games are good.

I don't mean to bring up an old thread, but I have a few questions. I have a game currently going through the Greenlight process, fairly early on into everything I must say. It's only been on Greenlight for four days and has reached similar numbers. Is there anything I should be doing to try and help my odds? Or did these games with these stats just happen to get greenlit at these numbers.

Here are my current stats (Day 4):

And here's the greenlight page: goo.gl/km7oqD

Should I be doing anything different? I was quite intrigued when I saw some games get greenlit with similar stats.

Thanks!

FlagmanJeremy your game has as much in common with C2 as my tree with politics.