Awhile back Valve teased the introduction of a new system to Steam, known as Greenlight, that would allow the indie community to submit games that would then be voted on by the Steam community as a whole. If a game gets the required amount of support, it would be put up for sale on Steam, without having to deal with the entirety of the Valve’s typical submission process, which many indie games don’t make it through for one reason or another. It sounded like a pretty cool idea.
Yeah… but then it wasn’t.
Greenlight’s barely been up for a full day yet and already it’s packed to the brim with garbage that makes the Xbox Live Indie Games section look like a bastion of quality ideas. You’ve got dozens of 2D Slender Man games that completely miss the point of Slender Man, all sorts of half assed RPG Maker games and just project after project of things that seem to be either jokes or made by children with ADD (or both). Valve has already had to take down a 9/11 simulator.
Not that I’m completely against RPG Maker games making it onto Steam, but we’re gonna need to see a lot more effort than this.
It’s pretty clear at this point that some basic layer of submission moderation is needed if Greenlight is going to be a success. As it stands the system gives free reign to every idiot that thinks they’re being funny by submitting an intentionally bad RPG Maker project they put together in five minutes and every wannabe game designer with no programming experience who feels like shoving a bunch of Deviantart sketches they did up on Greenlight and calling it a legitimate project. As much of a pain as it might be, some ground rules need to be established. Somebody needs to be looking at these submissions before they go up to make sure they adhere to some basic requirements before they can be submitted for voting.
So many new and exciting ideas!
Obviously the idea is that the community is supposed to moderate Greenlight, upvoting the good, downvoting the bad into oblivion, but if they’re forced to wade through page after page of pure dreck to find the one or two games that are actually worth being made available on Steam, people just aren’t going to bother with it. Quality, not quantity is the name of the game here.
Our coverage of Greenlight is just getting started. If I can manage to drag myself away from Guild Wars 2 for an hour sometime this weekend I plan to put together a top ten of the worst projects I can find on Greenlight. Look forward to it.
Demos really need to be a requirement to get onto Greenlight, how is anyone honestly supposed to evaluate the value of a game from a couple screenshots and maybe a video. Honestly if a game isn’t at the point where they have anything playable why do they even need to apply to Steam yet?
It’s weird, because before Greenlight you had to have a demo available, but now suddenly they removed the qualification for some reason.
I concur, you can’t know a single thing about a game by looking at pictures, and this has been proven multiple times in the past. Even AAA devs should be required to release a demo, if ANYTHING for hype. I absolutely /hate\ getting really excited with a game, and then it turns out the control scheme is a complete flop.
Eh I was against this idea from the beginning, as someone who wants to make a game, I don’t want my game to drown in tons of crappy games. Nobody would pick my game out of those 300(now already over 550 in 2 days and it’s still growing) games, simply because nobody would care enough about this service in a few months to even check out the upcoming games.
I used to use Gamemaker a few years ago and I checked out game submission on gamemaker site, they had over 10000 games and the only way to make your game noticed is advertising, which is shunned by image boards and sites like that, while wasting money on ads would be really counter productive for an indie developer.
This system blows and it’s going to change drastically in the near future, I hope they’ll give out some kinds of rewards for greenlight voters, because otherwise it’s as fun as looking for gold in piles of shit.
You know what? I think I’ve seen more Terraria clones than Minecraft clones.
Terraria is easier to clone.
Please, DO make top ten lists. But ONLY of serious submissions, not of joke submissions that are only a picture.
It’s something people were commenting should be made.
Speaking of joke submissions… saw the one with Gabe Newell’s Troll face in a astronaut suit. Its about Gabe in space. I can’t find it (think its removed) but it made laugh a little. Only little.
So GW2, that good huh?
Do we honestly need several dozen zombie games?
Personally, I’ll hold my judgment of the system until a week or two has passed. Although, I don’t exactly see if being stellar and will have to agree that the lack of serious moderation was a big mistake.
You must try Age of Decadence. One of the best games out there.
Eh, it’s the same as every other thing like it, Kickstarter, Indiegogo… I can’t think of any others really. I like the idea, but it just doesn’t work because people think they can just slap some stuff together in a few weeks and sell it. While there are some awesome projects I’ve seen (maybe do a top 10 of best ones you’ve seen? Or hell I’ll do it probably), they are certainly weighed out by the insane amount of awful ideas.
I think you people are clearly misunderstanding the purpose of this service.
It isn’t intended as a marketing tool, it’s not there to help you to give visibility and popularity to your products.
It’s simply a submission process exactly like the one Valve handled privately before, but they are now using the community feedback to streamline the process.
A filter *before* the submission on Greenlight is exactly the opposite of its reason to exist in the first place.
That said, there’s a lot of room for improvements, for sure.
For a start, I would allow submissions just for projects that are ready to release or at least have a public working demo.
Another good idea would be to change the UP/DOWN votes with a bunch of five-six pre-set buttons/comments like: “I would buy it”, “It looks nice”, “Not interested”, “It looks bad”, “Terrible” and so on.
I just find it hilarious, people complain about valve having a closed platform in steam and then they make public the shit submissions they used to have to sort through every day. Greenlight really just a way of them saying “You think this shit’s easy motherfucker? YOU do it.”
And you know, the kind of submissions, it looks an awful lot like xbox live’s indie game section. How horrifying.
Like Xbox Live’s indie game section, good stuff floats to the top. I like slogging through the shit and finding a real gem that I can promote myself.
And if Greenlight had more moderation, it wouldn’t be giving you a real glimpse at the process from prototype to retail. Greenlight should proceed the way it is.