I'm in desperate need of some advice regarding Greenlight, and I thought maybe my fellow indie devs might be able to help me. Basically, I'
m not sure whether I should purchase a Greenlight subscription.
Here's the situation:
I recently released a little narrative-focused exploration/horror game called The Moon Sliver, on Desura and itch.io (http://videogamepotpourri.blogspot.com/2014/05/the-moon-sliver-story-focused.html). I'd like to try and earn enough money off it to purchase a Unity Pro license.
It's going to be included in two bundles thus far, the first of which (the next Groupees Community Bundle) will be releasing this coming Tuesday. If I decide to purchase a Greenlight subscription, I'd want to do so before the bundle(s) released, so I can put a link to the Greenlight page in the game's bundle profile, to possibly get a few more votes.
In the future, I'm hoping that a few of the bigger Lets Players will be taking a look at it, and if I purchase a Greenlight sub, I'd like to do so before they play it, so that their videos might garner me some votes. My previous game, Fingerbones, was played by Markiplier, Yamimash, Cinnamen Toast Ken, and Raedwulfgamer, and the combined views on all of their videos was probably close to a million. That's great publicity, and if they linked to a Greenlight page, I could probably get a fair number of votes out of it. However, I have gotten no real response from any of them about The Moon Sliver (despite sending all of them free copies), and there's no gaurantee they will be playing it.
The research I've done shows that a game needs somewhere around 20,000 "yes" votes on Greenlight to make its way into the top 100, and get onto Steam. Greenlight itself is absolute rubbish as far as visibility goes, so unless your game is already fairly popular you aren't going to get many people to vote for it. Currently, there's no way there are 20,000 people who would even know about my game, much less upvote it on Greenlight. However, I am actively working to market the title, and am gradually building momentum, and it would be best to have the Greenlight page already up, ready for votes, when (if) the game does take off.
A Greenlight subscription costs $100, which I have sitting in my savings account from sales on itch.io, and once it's purchased I can put as many games as I want on Greenlight. However, Steam has stated that they will be getting rid of Greenlight in the future.
Further complicating matters, I recieved a publishing/distributing offer from http://flyinginteractive.com, which would put my game on Greenlight and promote it. However, I know little to nothing about this service, and what the advantages and dis-advantages are.
Any advice about what you think would be my best course of action would be appreciated. Naturally I don't expect someone else to make the decision for me, but I would greatly appreciate some help and guidence.
