On June 6th, 2017, Steam closed down its “Greenlight” feature, where game developers could, for a small fee, submit a game for voting in the community to determine if it should be published on Steam or not. While seemingly a good idea to begin with, Greenlight quickly became the doorway for a flood of overall poor quality games – reaching a point where in 2016 more games were published on Steam than had been every year of the platforms existence combined!
http://steamcommunity.com/greenlight
Steam Greenlight was one of those things that just makes a person ask why? Namely, why do so many people have to flood the site with terrible, unoriginal, buggy messes of software that somehow actually, in many cases, gets voted for approval and makes it way onto Steam as an actual purchasable piece of software?!?
YouTuber Jim Sterling spent much of his time covering these games in detail, and while he isn’t the only one, he was certainly one of the most famous. I never really dealt with Steam Greenlight at all directly, and while there are plenty of good games that were approved and published via this method, certainly the majority were terrible.
To that end, though, I don’t have much directly to say on this: Steam is planning to replace Greenlight with a service they call “Steam Direct” and while it sounds somewhat better, I still feel it could just as easily be flooded with Who knows though.
I’ll just leave the Wiki link for Greenlight here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_(software)#Steam_Greenlight
Beyond that, to keep things interesting, how about Jim Sterling’s video on the final game to reach Steam Greenlight, just 15 minutes before the service was closed – The Underground King.
In the video, Jim does discuss some of Steam Greenlight and the future Steam Direct, so it’s worth watching even just for that information.
Jim has other videos on the subject, and while I won’t post them here, I’ll leave a link here just in case you want to check them out. (Only not sharing as the videos are rather.. dynamic, to be polite. Some might not like them initially)
https://www.youtube.com/user/JimSterling/search?query=steam+direct
As for Steam Direct, let’s see what happens….
Oh, and as for Greenlight, I’ve got a few more videos to share on that subject, so keep an eye out for them.
Mixed up feeling about this! As a videogame developer i’m happy that Greenlight barrier is wiped out, as our games won’t have to pass on “greenlight bundle” to get some votes (which was meaning a lot of wasted revenue) . But the thing that i’m unsure it’s the new “identity check” feature… Will outside usa will be easy to be identifiable? I mean in many country, like in Swiss, cellphone, bank account, credit card all hide information of their customer… So will people will outside USA will have to expense on insanely costly document to get identified on every game they gonna submit? That’s the big question…
I would hope that Steam does indeed have a way to verify things in various nations. Considering on a whole that Steam is a good company, I can only imagine they have though that element through – I won’t lie that I haven’t read too much up on all of this, but that’s due to me not being much of a PC gamer anymore.
Regardless, I certainly do hope that this doesn’t affect small developers in any negative way, but at the same time keeps the “junk” out. We can hope it will, anyway.