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[oodavid]

I understand that once a game reaches a broad enough following, and that presumably Steam likes the concept they choose to greenlight games. But what does this really mean to a developer? Are you likely to succeed after this point?

Curious to know if anyone has experiences to share.

[Constan7ine]

Getting greenlit is just a point where Valve will allow you to release the game on Steam. It isn't much else, and it certainly does not guarantee Steam will feature or market your game in any way.

I've noticed that people's ability to say "yes" they will purchase the game if it were on steam differs vastly from there ability to actually purchase the game.

Greenlight is also a massive popularity contest more than anything else. Rock simulator, despite being a sort of joke game is, or was number one. Not because its a great game, because people think it's amusing.

You most certainly cannot lean on greenlight to get your game to sell like hotcakes.

[joe_eyemobi]

From what I saw early on, being on SGL for indies did provide quite a bit of exposure, but now it seems that the rate of games getting greenlit is increasing rapidly, so it doesn't mean that much to be on SGL any more.  From what I understand, eventually Valve will remove the whole curation process, and turn steam into an app store which will be even worse for us indies.

[TwistedJenius]

Are you likely to succeed after this point?

At this point getting on Steam doesn't guarantee any success.  But in most cases, you still need to be on Steam if you want to be successful.  It is by far the largest game distribution platform out there and even though it's accepting more games than ever, and it's much easier to get buried there now, it's still almost essential to get on there if you want to make any real money off of your game.  It's just now easier to get on there, and more difficult to become successful once you are on there.  

Of course there are other ways of becoming successful, in theory.  You may be able to get to enough people to buy your game directly off your own site, for example.  But that too, is one big popularity contest (responding to Constan7ine's observation).  That's what marketing is really, any way you look at it, it's a numbers game.  The only way to become successful is to sell a whole lot of copies of your game.  And the chances of that are significantly increased if you're able to get on Steam because it's just so large and has so many users (meaning potential customers).  

[qwurp]

Had two titles Greenlit. One very early into Greenlight and a much smaller game about 2 months ago. The small game will be releasing on Steam soon. I never received a boost in "visibility", "followers", "likes" etc after either Greenlight (early and late). So no real tangible impact other than that the game can be released on Steam when ready.

That being said, (and as mentioned above) you NEED to be on Steam. It's not the gateway to success it once was but it definitely is the gate you have to pass through if you want to sell your game. I also wouldn't call getting through Greenlight "easy", even after they loosed up the standards (first game had over 14k "yes votes" and last one had over 6,000). Either way, you need to generate a relatively significant amount of interest in your game to get through it.