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[NemoDev]

Valve doing the right thing for indie devs!

http://steamcommunity.com/greenlight

What is Steam Greenlight?

Steam Greenlight is a new system that enlists the community's help in picking some of the next games to be released on Steam. Developers post information, screenshots, and videos for their game and seek a critical mass of community support in order to get selected for distribution. Steam Greenlight also helps developers get feedback from potential customers and start creating an active community around their game as early in the development process as they like.

I think a lot of developers will be happy with this. I know quite a few who are pissed off at having their game rejected. If you are sure it's quality now you can at least have it on Steam via crowd support.

[Destral]

I've only skimmed through it, but it sounds pretty exciting.

[e_va]

it took mutant mudds for them to do something?
anyway its a good initiative except a voting system is a terrible idea where all the minecrafts will get on top. i know they say in their faq they wont be looking purely at votes but i dont even trust their regular submission process- which brings me to the next thing...

they should make a build (demo) required, seriously... so much buggy shit gets on steam and they don't seem to bother to play any of them when they're picking.

[Defcon1]

I think it's a great way for Valve to take the pulse of the community. However, there could be a few problems like votedown trolls or over crowding.

Still exciting though!

[bome99]

I'm excited about it. Hope they find a way to make the voting work as intended.

[iffi]

Time to try to get La-Mulana onto Steam.

There will no doubt be kinks to work out, much like there are with Kickstarter, but I'm convinced that the overall effect will be positive. If anything, it'll help Valve deal with the mass of games looking for a Steam release that they likely don't have the time to look at thoroughly.

[falsion]

This is actually bad news for indie devs.

Now you're going to have to win a popularity contest if you want to get your game on Steam, instead of a professional evaluation process.

I have more faith in Valve giving an official look over a game than I do in winning the opinions of internet sites and jaded ass fucks like 4chan, the Steam community, etc.

I see people compare this to Kickstarter but this different because with Kickstarter projects you put down money and "fund" it rather than vote. Here, it's simply a poll. And with polls, it just takes one person and their personal army (from whatever website) to screw up everything.

EDIT: Also another thing that bothers me is that AAA games are not subject to this process. It's like they're giving indie games their own little sandbox away from the bigger more mainstream titles. I really hope this isn't the case, because I always assumed Valve to be better than that.

[Mittens]

I don't like it,
There a good reason publishers like Steam use hired people to personally scrutinise if they wish to publish a product or not, giving that job (or any job) to the internet is not a good idea.

I can only see this opening the gates to have steam flooded with games just like most/all other game markets or websites at the moment, making it really hard for decent games to gain the recognition they deserve.

 its not fair on games that could be really excellent but don't have a huge community backing
and it helps terrible halo clones and such, which can be a horrid game but has a mass following of fan boys

BAD SYSTEM
BAD!

[Fallsburg]

Well, maybe I'm misinterpreting it, but I think the doom and gloom is a bit overwrought.

1) They didn't say that they are getting rid of the old process, just adding this new one.  I'd guess that they are still going to keep the other process around.

2) They aren't using only votes to decide who gets on.

The way I see it, they are using this as an additional filtering system.  Instead of a developer needing to generate buzz through other avenues (write ups on blogs, big following on a forum, etc.), they can now generate buzz directly on Steam.  They are still going to have a person looking and deciding what games get on.

[TheGrandHero]

I really like this idea, but it's one of those things I'm going to have to see in action before I'm totally comfortable with it. I'm also worried that there's going to be an onslaught of games fighting it out for acceptance the first few months, and that this is going to be the focus of a good chunk of the indie community (devs and customers alike) during that time. I was planning to have my game done in October, but I'm a little worried it will get lost in the flood at that point, no matter where I decide to release it.

[Mamma Pixel]

"This is actually bad news for indie devs.Now you're going to have to win a popularity contest if you want to get your game on Steam, instead of a professional evaluation process."

I've sat on many judging panels and organised the judging panels for conferences and game comps.

After seeing the decision making process of who wins and who doesn't, I can 100% say that I will take public opinion over the vetting process of a few experts behind closed doors any day.

Why? Because 5 people can be overworked, tired, bored, pissed off and heavily bias.

500,000 people decreases the chances that one dude on a bad day could cost you your game getting approved.

Also, give us some credit folks, most people aren't bots and we're good at recognising bullshit comments and rankings from praise-for-hire services.

[moi]

I don't like that it will taint the pure, simple, easily understood form of Steam, which destruction process must be put into motion imminently.

[Uykered]

I can see this getting a huge flood of low quality unpolished games, especially since there is practically no barrier for submission.

[Mamma Pixel]

LOL there's already a huge flood of crap games being submitted.

Just imagine the poor unfortunate Valve staff who've had to endure that up until now!

Seriously - it is torturous knowing that you are wading through a mountain of applications made by people who don't even respect you enough to make sure that the install files work before they hit "send".

There's a chance that you'll never get to the AMAZING and undiscovered indie dev because you've got 450 guys in front of him who submitted a game made because it was easy to make...not because it was fun to play.

Amazon.com

How would that content portal be improved if you took the crowdsourced quality control and replaced it with 5 interns?

[falsion]

Eh, I guess I'm just weary of letting the internet do anything, especially with how easy it is to say, post something in a forum full of trolls and get them to vote in all the most awful games possible or mass report legitimate game submissions (EDIT: or mass thumbs down projects, I almost missed that detail).

I've seen countless polls rigged by 4chan and other such sites before. I can easily see the same happening for this.

[Klaim]

I think we should wait to see what it means in practice before thinking that it forces you to be a popularity seeker.

I mean, you still need a pool of people to be your audience to make a project viable. The problem is about the size of this audience. If they choose only big audiences then yes, it's a popularity thing. If there is a minimum size that is not that much, then maybe it's good.

Anyway, that's a step in the good direction: if Valve does something like that, that will force console makers to consider providing a similar feature.

I'm wondering what about the big publisher's games? I guess they will pay to be on steam anyway...

[larsiusprime]

Leveraging public user-reviews are actually a GREAT way to open up the floodgates to everybody, but still separate the gems from the crap.

Kongregate is a great example of this - it's incredibly rare for a game that the kong audience would love to get overlooked. You have all kinds of rough, weird gems that any sane panel of reviewers would pass over that instead get a fair shake because the audience can discover it.

With most stores, you have a zero-sum kind of situation. The more exclusive the store, the better it is to be on there, but of course YOU don't actually have a shot (pre-greenlight steam). The other extreme is the "everybody is welcome" stores like the Apple app store - almost no barrier to entry, but just being on there isn't worth much.

A well designed user-review system (and yes, there's many poorly designed ones) can break this zero-sum symmetry, so you can have a largely open system that isn't clogged to the gills with crap, and lets the system approach meritocracy.

I detailed this in a gamasutra article about a month ago. Really cool to see it come to life!

[ANtY]

anyway its a good initiative except a voting system is a terrible idea where all the minecrafts will get on top.

and

This is actually bad news for indie devs.

Now you're going to have to win a popularity contest if you want to get your game on Steam, instead of a professional evaluation process.

[Klaim]

Ah yes I've read your article, greenlights made ma think about it actually, and I was wondering if they consulted Kongregate or took some example from it.

For example, one thing if I remember correctly in Kongregate is that some users earns more credibility and it shows on their profile or something like that.
It don't look like they are doing this in GreenLight, and I find it curious because I think it's part of the success of Kongregate (or maybe I'm mixing with something else?)

Anyway I read http://steamcommunity.com/greenlight/ and now I have these questions for them:

 1. Why is there a negative vote?? I mean, on the screenshots on this page you can see the thumb down. I think this is dangerous. If they manage to weight the system like the stackexchange.com websites, it would work nicely, but it don't look like they will do it that way...

 2. They accept concepts? Wow that's quite surprising... I wonder why?

So it looks like it's both a way to make your game visible AND a way for them to setup a priority list of release or something like that.

I hope they learn fast. I guess they do.

[larsiusprime]

Yeah, the devil's in the details.

As for Kongregate, I'm not 100% sure how they weight the votes, though I do believe that there's some magic sauce in the background that takes your reputation in the community into account (ie, amplifying the voice of good, useful, feedback, and silencing the voice of trolls).

Newgrounds has been doing that for a long time, too, and Kong built on that model. Stack exchange applied it to answering questions. All great examples to learn from.

The down vote button does seem a little weird to me - I can't really think of what it would be useful for. On Kong/NG, you need to say how much you like a game, so a low star rating option makes sense there. On stackexchange you need to vote on how good an answer is, and so up/down votes make sense. But saying, "Hey! Make sure this DOESN'T get on steam!" ...?

Although my gut tells me there's no great non-malicious reason to vote something down... (the downvote could easily lead to reddit-style "bury brigades") maybe I'm underestimating the glut of "made it in an hour" cheapo things that will be uploaded. The Kong/NG model is  veeeeery good at making sure those kind of entries get filtered out, and that does depend on downvoting.