Rejected by Steam

[Iain]

Sumbitted Spheres of Chaos to Steam yesterday.
Today I get a reply:
'We have taken a look at the information provided and determined that Steam is not a good fit for distribution.'

<Insert rant here about not being as indie-friendly as claimed etc etc>
I shall use the tagline 'Spheres of Chaos 2012 - rejected by Steam'. I bet they didn't even play the demo I sent them.

So, I'm looking for distribution suggestions, in particular looking for people with contacts at usefull places, who can short-circuit the first-line-of-defence no-bots. PSN would be nice, but absolutely no change of getting on there I think.

My trouble has always been I can write great software, but I don't know the secret sales language. And I keep getting ripped off. e.g. Andre LeMothe put a CD-only licenced version of my game up for sale on a website at $10 a pop, without telling me. 'kool dog' SoC is still on sale at places like Amazon, many years after their publishing contract expired.

Meanwhile, I updated the website www.spheresofchaos.com, rebooted the forum, and made a youtube video in blurr-o-stutter vision. All that is needed now is some cracker protection, since crackers can't tell the difference between me and microsoft. I just hope I get lamers like the creators of the three cracks for the previous version, because none of them worked. Apart from the one that was a trojan, that probably worked fine as a trojan.

</rant>

[gilesgoat]

I think among the various things steam used not to take any game that had a metascore below a certain % ... Which was a bit of a catch 22 situation .. Dunno if things been changed in that.

[RiK]

You should get a bunch of people to mail them and say "Oi, Steam, are you nuts? SoC is the dogs danglies, you need to sell it to me now please KTHNX"

[Iain]

I think among the various things steam used not to take any game that had a metascore below a certain % ... Which was a bit of a catch 22 situation .. Dunno if things been changed in that.

What's a metascore?
Googles 'metascore'. Ahh, I don't think I even have one of those, not for the old version, definitely not for the new version.

Looking at the server logs I see they didn't even download the demo I made specially for them.

[gilesgoat]

Honestly I may have got a bit confused, it's been SO LONG ago I can't 100% remember but I do remember now 100% that the story of Metascore DEFINITELY applies/applied to some magazines/etc. they were not able to publish a review of a game if that game IIRC did not have at least a 75% on Metascore.

Which was the Catch 22 because you need reviews to make your metascore up ..

[Mat]

Spheres of Chaos is aces if I'm remembering correctly. Boo Hiss Steam.

[guythp]

I don't have steam as I don't get it, but I'll happily send you cash (if need be) for a copy of the game*.





*after payday (the 21st)

[exobuzz]

Just a little comment as I went to watch the video, and it was pretty destroyed due to encoding artifacts. How about a higher resolution/higher bitrate video ?

[Iain]

Just a little comment as I went to watch the video, and it was pretty destroyed due to encoding artifacts. How about a higher resolution/higher bitrate video ?

Even at that low resolution the video recorder dropped the framerate right down to 20 fps instead of 60. My PC is getting on a bit now.
I thought of writing some code to dump each frame to memory instead of to disk, and then pause when it was full and then dump to disk.
Youtube squashes the videos down to approx 50M even if you upload 1G. It's the first youtube video I made, maybe it needs more cats?

[Jamesac]

http://www.hardcoregamer.com/issues/030 ... 20Sony.pdf

That's V.3 Issue 1 of Hardcore Gamer Magazine. I wrote a review of the original Spheres of Chaos in if, found on page 69. The magazine had fairly decent distribution at that point in its life, so I hope it can count in your favor. Feel free to throw it Valve's way, if it's any help.

Warning- big .pdf is big.

James

[Iain]

Cool, I've not seen that one before.
The reply from Steam had a 'decision is final and we are not prepared to discuss' feel to it. I suspect getting SoC on Steam will require going past the front desk to someone higher up.

Someone who is prepared to actually download and play the demo.

A nice quote from someone I can't remember: 'Only the Boss can say Yes, the minions can only say No'.

[Jamesac]

My advice- send the demo RockPaperShotgun's way. They generally quite like this sort of thing. Heck, toss it to as many media outlets as you can think of- Joystiq, Kotaku, etc. Even a little media exposure can go a long way.

Getting it on a Humble Bundle and maybe Desura and their Indie Royale is worth checking out too. Really Big Sky was Desura-only for a while until the December Indie Royale included a Steam key, and now it's been officially released on Steam. It probably helps that the Really Big Sky guys kept updating and polishing the game after it was released.

James

[Governmentyard]

Stream's a massive bag of wank really. I'm not remotely surprised that they are too stupid to give SoC a good look.

[gravy]

My advice- send the demo RockPaperShotgun's way. They generally quite like this sort of thing.

Spot on.

Space Giraffe PC was rejected by Steam initially until RPS wrote a great piece on it.

[super charlie]

My advice would be to send it to some journalists, and get people talking about the game. Do you use twitter? It's worked pretty well for me.

Cheers
Charlie