Steam Next Fest is being flooded with thousands of low-effort games, while developers are becoming reluctant to share their work for fear of seeing it quickly cloned.
That might be true but it still seems like it might significantly hampers the trend chasing clone effect. Its not stopping the cloners from making the clones but throwing them off of the trend rhythm and making the clone less able to skim money from people. A legit dev will likely have to take into account the waiting period but that can just be part of their dev cycle now. Or maybe if your studio is partnered with an already established publisher, you can just release the game no waiting. I know that sucks for fully independent devs but there are extremely indie friendly publishers out there like Devolver Digital.
The 3 month period is not really effective if you can avoid it in any way. Which is why it needs to be strict, like not using a publisher to speed it up, but having the 3 month period for each different game. And that replaceable placeholders do not count for the 3 months by strictly requiring the game to have something that would reset the timer, like changing the genre tags or the name of the game.
That might be true but it still seems like it might significantly hampers the trend chasing clone effect. Its not stopping the cloners from making the clones but throwing them off of the trend rhythm and making the clone less able to skim money from people. A legit dev will likely have to take into account the waiting period but that can just be part of their dev cycle now. Or maybe if your studio is partnered with an already established publisher, you can just release the game no waiting. I know that sucks for fully independent devs but there are extremely indie friendly publishers out there like Devolver Digital.
The 3 month period is not really effective if you can avoid it in any way. Which is why it needs to be strict, like not using a publisher to speed it up, but having the 3 month period for each different game. And that replaceable placeholders do not count for the 3 months by strictly requiring the game to have something that would reset the timer, like changing the genre tags or the name of the game.