I think it's great.

I once suggested to MS that they should have been charging 99$ per game uploaded to the XBLIG service instead of a 99$ a year fee, which let people compile to 360, and let them upload every piece of junk they compiled. Android is the same way. It's a once in a lifetime fee of 25$.

There is this one company that keeps flooding renamed versions of their fake game onto the android market. It's a low quality, mal-ware type thing. They rename it, change the icon, and upload about 50 new copies a day. With a fee, that bullshit would be impacted significantly, if not stopped altogether.

The people who complain are mostly the exact types of people the system is trying to weed out in the first place. 99$ is nothing. About the cost of a pair of shoes, or 10 trips to subway on my lunch break. Work a single twelve hour shift at McDonalds and you're all set.

99$ is a drop of water in the ocean after months, or years of paying for software, coding, artwork, sound, equipment, legal fees, and etc.

It's also nothing compared to the cost of real retail. What is the cost of having 50,000 discs pressed and then trying to get people to carry them? What do you make back after every sale of a 10 dollar disc? Maybe a single dollar if your lucky. What happens when you have to buy back 49,000 of those discs because only your mom bought a copy?

With these app stores, and steam, you get eternal shelf space and infinite supply (something that doesn't exist in the real brick and mortar world). The amount that the store operators take off the top of every sale is nothing compared to how much you'd lose in a real retail sale. It's about 30% off the top, and that means you keep 700%+ more on that 10$ sale. And none of that has to go towards materials, or shelf space, distribution, a publisher, etc...

And all that for a tiny double digit fee!? Oh my god! What a tragedy!

I think the fee is a once off $100 fee. I think if you did the spamming of infringing content they'd kill the user account and you'd have to pay $100 again. Also the fact that it has to go through 2 approval processes means that they wont get any money back from their spamming. Those last two things should stop the spammers, and the $100 should stop people from spamming those last two things. Valve will probably keep working on this, it's still early days for it, and hopefully they can do something to cut down on the idea stuff; except that they have a section for concepts and future projects so people can use the service to develop a community behind their game. Which is a lesson I learned sometime around 2004 you do not do, for fear of disappointing people when you don't finish because the art or whatever just doesn't come in.

EDIT: was sort of being sarcastic about the $100 making me sad, pc is so f**king cheap compared to getting hardware and getting licenses for the stuff you need to have a decent devflow for that hardware, and now there's a submission portal that you can actually publish a game through and hope for some success.

Would it be ok to just pay 100 dollar to have the game on greenlight just to advertise your game.

No, being "greenlit" just gives you the opportunity to talk with them about a publishing deal.

really cheap and powerful advertising if you don't have to release it on steam afterwards.[/quote]Hah, that's interesting! I wonder how many views you'd get compared to $100 worth of paid promotions / banner ads / etc...?