The Kickstarter for Daymare 1998 may have failed, but for everyone who wanted to see the 1990s inspired horror game, there was some good news earlier this week- developer Invader Studios has announced that the game will be hitting Steam Greenlight, and that production on the game will be continuing in spite of its Kickstarter falling short by over $180,000.

“We wanted to share the great news with you all. Thanks to the passion of our supporters, Valve has announced that Daymare: 1998 is successfully greenlit. We are all very excited by this news at Invader Studios. We did not imagine that we would be greenlit this quick and we are grateful to your support,” the studio said in a statement, adding that it will be supporting the game fully, and that it will have more news to share soon.

So yes, in the end, the Kickstarter cancellation turned out to be a bit of a hitch, but it seems like we may end up seeing this game after all. Happy times for all.

Steam Greenlight was Valve’s attempt to make it easier for games to get on the Steam storefront, by having the community pick directly whether or not a game deserved to get on there. However, over time, multiple issues with the system began to manifest themselves, and Steam Greenlight ended up having more problems than utility.

Replacing steam Greenlight with something more functional has been on the agenda for a while now. Now, Valve has finally revealed what Greenlight’s fate, and replacement, will be, announcing that Steam Direct will be replacing Steam Greenlight come March.

“After the launch of Steam Greenlight, we realized that it was a useful stepping stone for moving to a more direct distribution system, but it still left us short of that goal,” Valve said in a blog post. “Along the way, it helped us lower the barrier to publishing for many developers while delivering many great new games to Steam. There are now over 100 Greenlight titles that have made at least $1 Million each, and many of those would likely not have been published in the old, heavily curated Steam store.

“Greenlight also exposed two key problems we still needed to address: improving the entire pipeline for bringing new content to Steam and finding more ways to connect customers with the types of content they wanted.”

The solution will be Steam Direct, which attempts to add some restrictions in place for just what can get on the store. “The next step in these improvements is to establish a new direct sign-up system for developers to put their games on Steam. This new path, which we’re calling “Steam Direct,” is targeted for Spring 2017 and will replace Steam Greenlight,” the blog post reads. “We will ask new developers to complete a set of digital paperwork, personal or company verification, and tax documents similar to the process of applying for a bank account. Once set up, developers will pay a recoupable application fee for each new title they wish to distribute, which is intended to decrease the noise in the submission pipeline.

“While we have invested heavily in our content pipeline and personalized store, we’re still debating the publishing fee for Steam Direct. We talked to several developers and studios about an appropriate fee, and they gave us a range of responses from as low as $100 to as high as $5,000. There are pros and cons at either end of the spectrum, so we’d like to gather more feedback before settling on a number.”

I think I can largely agree with Valve’s solution, and the rationale behind it. And sure, while I can see that, say, $5000 would be a bit of a hurdle for a relatively smaller developer, it would also be an investment- and that developer would have a very fair chance of getting that $5000 back once the game was on Steam. $5000 would also hopefully act as a deterrent to those who otherwise spam Steam with quick, low quality efforts.

Let’s see how it turns out.

A new tactical first person shooter called Squad will be launching next month. The game will be launching exclusively on PC via Steam, and is notable for being built on Unreal Engine 4, and for supporting a staggering number of players per match- the game is built around 50v50 player battles, and and is balanced around organized teams using fortifications and vehicles to control the battlefield. Which means that for once, you actually need to communicate with your team in a shooter, instead of ignoring voice chat as background noise, and attempting to lone wolf it.

If you pre-order the game by November 30, you get a Founder patch and tag, alternate weapon skins, the game’s soundtrack, and your name in the credits. That last perk is admittedly pretty sweet. If you don’t pre-order by then, you can always get the game at or after launch, for its $40 price.

Check out the game’s launch trailer below.

Steam Greenlight was intended to be a more demographic way of deciding what does and does not make its way to Valve’s leading Steam platform for the PC, but it has been nothing short of a royal screw-up and monumental disaster every step of the way. The latest development which sees it being completely undermined is developers just exploiting the system, trading away free keys of their game if consumers vote yes to get said game on Steam via Greenlight in the first place.

Valve has taken notice of this fact, and they don’t seem to be too happy. “We do not think these votes accurate reflect customer interest,” Valve said, “and it makes our job harder in deciding which games customers would actually buy and play on Steam.”

“Additionally, when you give away copies of your game for votes, then every other developer on Greenlight thinks that is now the thing they need to do in order to get noticed,” Valve said. “We don’t think that is healthy for the system or really what customers want.”

Valve noted that if this practice continues, then the lead in time from being voted yes on Greenlight to final approval may get even longer as Valve tries to parse out games that actually got voted in, to games that were essentially bought with bribery.

You know, for once, I actually agree with Valve here.

After teasing the same, Scott Cawthon’s Five Nights at Freddy’s 3 is coming soon and will look to continue the trend of animatronic beings with malicious intentions. The third game appears to try and take this further as this latest teaser shows us. Check it out above.

As of now, Five Nights at Freddy’s 3 is on Steam Greenlight and is open to voting. As a first person horror game, it will likely return to the same setting and protagonist as previous games. This means you’ll likely be another security guard looking to survive the night. Then again, if the second game managed to keep things fresh after releasing so soon after the first, the third game should likely introduce a wrench into the mechanics.

Five Nights at Freddy’s 3 doesn’t have a release date yet so stay tuned for more information in the coming weeks. In the meantime, let us know your thoughts about the teaser in your comments.

Destructive Creations’ Hatred is now back on Steam Greenlight after Valve’s Doug Lombardi confirmed its removal yesterday.  As it turns out, the removal was a mistake. Valve head honcho Gabe Newell recently addressed the removal in a statement to Destructive Creations (seen on their official Facebook page).

“Hi, Jaroslaw. Yesterday I heard that we were taking Hatred down from Greenlight. Since I wasn’t up to speed, I asked around internally to find out why we had done that.

“It turns out that it wasn’t a good decision, and we’ll be putting Hatred back up. My apologies to you and your team. Steam is about creating tools for content creators and customers. Good luck with your game.”

What are your thoughts on Hatred being back up on Steam Greenlight? Let us know below.

Destructive Creations’ isometric shooter Hatred, which has garnered a fair amount of attention for its graphic execution scenes and subject matter, will not be published by Valve through Steam Greenlight. This comes just several hours after it became available for voting.

Valve’s Doug Lombardi revealed to Eurogamer that, “Based on what we’ve seen on Greenlight we would not publish Hatred on Steam. As such we’ll be taking it down.”

The developer later responded officially, stating that, “‘We wanted you guys to know that based on what we see on Greenlight we would not publish Hatred on Steam. As such we’ll be taking it down.’

“Even though games like Manhunt or Postal are still available on Steam we of course fully respect Valve’s decision, as they have the right to do so. In the same time we want to assure you that this won’t in any way impact the game’s development, game’s vision or gameplay features we’re aiming for. The game is still to be released in Q2 2015 as planned.

“Moreover we don’t treat this as a failure because yet again this showed us a huge community support we’re totally overwhelmed with. After only a couple of hours Greenlight campaign being live, Hatred gathered 13,148 up votes and ended up on a #7 on Top 100 list.”

What are your thoughts on Hatred not being published through Greenlight? Let us know in the comments.

Hey, do you know who Richard Garriott is?

If you answered with ‘I don’t know,’ then you should be ashamed to call yourself a gamer, and you need to stand in the corner till you realize you have no sense of history for your hobby.

Everyone else, of course, knows who he is: one of gaming’s most influential designers and developers ever (possibly the most influential one), who was behind the much acclaimed and revered Ultima series of role playing games for various computer standards back in the day.

Anyway, he has been working on a brand new game for a while- it’s called Shroud of the Avatar, and it is, as would be expected, a new RPG. It is crowdfunded over Kickstarter (at least in part; it appears its budget now far exceeds the original Kickstarter target), and it is now on Steam Greenlight, with a targeted release some time in the first half of 2015.

We’ll keep you posted.

Kodoku Chronicles is an innovative horror visual novel that was announced quite a while ago for PCs running Windows and Mac OS X, PlayStation 4, PlayStation Vita, Xbox One, and iOS platforms such as iPad, iPod Touch, and iPhone. Today, the developers announced that the game is going to get its very own Kickstarter campaign that should hopefully help with funding, as well as a Steam Greenlight page, that should maybe enable it to get onto the most popular storefront for PC gaming.

Kodoku Chronicles, of course, looks very intriguing, mixing as it does Japanese folk lore and H.P. Lovecraft’s sensibilities when it comes to horror. The fact that the game is a visual novel, meaning there will be no expectation for combat to take away from the atmosphere, further increases my excitement for the title.

Stay tuned to GamingBolt for further coverage and news of the game, because we should have more for you soon.

This is actually a bit of a long story, a sort of puzzler, so hold on to your seats tight, because it’s gonna be a bumpy ride.

Kobra Games is an indie game developer, who put up its game, Island Light, on Steam Greenlight. So far, nothing unusual. The game was, like so many games on Steam these days (and especially on Greenlight or Early Access), less than stellar, and so got called out for that in reviews. Yep, so far so good.

The bizareness starts right about now. You see, people who posted negative reviews on Youtube of the game started getting strikes against their accounts- this is a pretty serious thing, a strike puts your account in bad standing, and makes it liable to be deleted- the strikes being for ‘copyright infringement’ even though all footage was footage used solely for reviews. The fact that these were issued only for accounts with bad reviews on them makes it all the more suspicious.

Unfortunately, one of these accounts happened to belong to Jim Sterling. And if there is one constant in the gaming industry, it’s that you don’t exactly fuck with Jim Sterling.

The situation spiraled out of control when someone realized that the game’s logo seems to have been directly copied from the work of an uncredited DeviantArt user.

The situation completely went out of control, with the comments on the game’s page being rather… vocal. All of this culminated in the developers simply delisting the game from Steam entirely.

Huh. Okay then.