Valve Announces Steam Greenlight

[-smash-]

Steam Greenlight is a new service that will let you, yes YOU, pick which indie-developed games make it to Steam in the future. From the services info page:

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.

Valve is encouraging developers to publish their games to Greenlight as early as possible so that the game and the developers can gain as much support as possible before it's ready to ship. This will give the developers a better chance of seeing their games on Steam.

If the game is not accepted at any point, well, Valve is nice enough to let developers to continue to use their server space to advertise their games.

Valve's Anna Sweet commented on the difficulty of the publishing process saying

"Making the call to publish or not publish a title isn't fun, many times opinions vary and our internal jury is hung on a decision. But with the introduction of the Steam Workshop we realized an opportunity to enlist the community's help as we review certain titles and, hopefully, increase the volume and quality of creative submissions."

Steam Greenlight is set to be released on 30th August.

 

[Tollbooth Willie]

Oh boy now we have a say in which terrible games with all "style" and absolutely zero substance get added to the Steam library. Woo.

 

[Paulaner]

This... is... awesome.
The more indie games make it to Steam, the better.

 

[Hectic Glenn]

What an excellent step forward in the continued support Steam has given to indie titles. I know Valve get inundated with indie teams wanting their games on Steam and it's really hard to grade whether they make the grade. It's a job too big for the Valve now, I'm sure the consensus of the consumer will give them all the statistics they need.

 

[Pi Mu Rho]

Very interesting indeed.

 

[Sheepo]

Oh boy now we have a say in which terrible games with all "style" and absolutely zero substance get added to the Steam library. Woo.

It's so cute how your lack of pretention is so pretentious.

 

[Tollbooth Willie]

It's so cute how much I want you to kill yourself.

 

[Wanted Bob]

Wow, sounds like a great idea to me! Always like to see the creative games that indie developers come up with.

Yet another way Steam plans to destroy my wallet ;_;

 

[Krynn72]

Yay, Valve is letting their customers do part of their job for them! What a great service!

I dont see how this helps anything, or anyone except for Valve in that now they can tell indie devs to **** off without feeling bad about it, because hey, wasn't their decision.

 

[StardogChampion]

Yay, Valve is letting their customers do part of their job for them! What a great service!

I dont see how this helps anything, or anyone except for Valve in that now they can tell indie devs to **** off without feeling bad about it, because hey, wasn't their decision.

The point is that it shouldn't be Valve's job.

They have a bunch of people working for them that don't have a clue about games, and they get to decide what gets added to Steam.

This will fastrack games that people want to buy/play.

 

[-smash-]

Exactly. Let the invisible hand of the indie market do the work.

 

[Paulaner]

Yay, Valve is letting their customers do part of their job for them! What a great service!

I dont see how this helps anything, or anyone except for Valve in that now they can tell indie devs to **** off without feeling bad about it, because hey, wasn't their decision.

A lot of wonderful indie games don't make it to Steam because Valve employees aren't able to tell gems from shit. More power to gamers will correct that.

 

[bobtheskull]

There are plenty of horrifically bad indie games currently available on Steam. How many decent games lost out on distribution on Steam because of bad choices on their part? Here's hoping this means more of the good ones get through! Only time will tell if this will work, but I don't imagine any major issues would hinder it.

 

[Krynn72]

What good indie games have been rejected from Steam?

 

[Paulaner]

An indie developer talking about getting his game on to Steam:

"I can understand why it would be initially rejected though. The people working around the clock for Steam seem to be always pushed to their limit, and their submission process is always completely overloaded, so its easy for them to dismiss or pass on a game at first glance. You have to keep in mind that these people are getting possibly hundreds of emails a day, and most of the time you don’t hear back because they simply didn’t have time to respond, or they saw your email and forgot about it later. If you keep emailing, you’ll eventually catch them at a time where they do have a chance to check it out, and it might work out in your favor."

Source