Steam Greenlight: Is it working?

T

Treiger

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What do you all think of Steam Greenlight? Do you think it's an effective system for allowing independent game developers on to steam? In my opinion I think It's not. 

Firstly, a lot of gamers don't do their research on a game. Some just scroll through some of the screenshots, MAYBE watch the video, and then vote for it. This is a great way for terrible games to get on to Steam, as developers can just manipulate the screenshots to make the game look better. Also, some just look at the game concept, think to themselves, "Hey! This looks cool," and just vote for it. This is why many Minecraft clones get on to steam. Like it or not, there are a lot of children and teens that play games. These games are specially catered to that audience, so whether the game is good or not, it will get through. The game "Survival Games" is a great example of a game that got greenlit recently and will probably be no good.

Secondly, the developers can bribe gamers. Well, what do I mean by bribe? Let's look at an example here. The game "Air Control" got on steam thanks to the promise of steam keys. Guess how the game turned out? Really, really, really bad. I unfortunately got this game in a bundle, and recently found out the controversy surrounding it. This is a case of a bad game making it on to steam with a little bribery, which in this case, was steam keys. Also, the developers can make a bunch of false promises towards gamers and never deliver on them. For example, Towns got on to steam through Greenlight, and now they're stopping development because "they can't afford it anymore". 

Finally, there are way too many amateurs submitting games on Greenlight. There are so many games that has art done in MS Paint, and it's ridiculously that we have to go through so much trash to get a decent game to judge. Valve themselves should be quickly overview the games before letting them on Greenlight, because it really shouldn't be our job to go through so many obviously bad games to get a decent one we want to bring on to the platform. This should be Valve's responsibility. 

Greenlight is a seriously flawed system. Valve desperately needs to hire a team dedicated to reviewing games and putting them on steam. The steam store is being flooded with early access, and terrible games, and it needs to stop. I seriously fear for the future of this platform.
 
I wouldn't be fearing for the future of this platform right now, far from it actually.  That being said, I can agree with some of the points you brought up.  There are a lot of games being greenlighted that shouldn't be, but there is nobody pointing a gun at your head to buy them.  If you think a game might be bad, simply don't buy it.  The same argument can be applied to early access games.  Many people complain about the market being over-saturated by early access games, but again nobody is pointing a gun at you forcing you to buy the game.  Should Valve review games more closely?  Perhaps, but arguably they shouldn't have to.  Greenlight works because whether or not the game is good people still buy it.  Money is money, unfortunately.  My intent is not to sound rude, but unfortunately there has been many posts on many forums about early access being this terrible thing that will doom us all forever and cause societal collapse, which is from what early access really is.  Early access is simply a broken game that you agree to buy broken with the promise that it won't be broken later on.  Whether or not that promise will be kept is not important, because you need to have the attitude that buying an early access game is a gamble and you wouldn't be very upset and broken if the game wasn't to release fully.  You need to be happy with what the game is at the time, else it's not worth buying and you probably shouldn't buy it.
 
I think Greenlight has it's fair share of problems, but I still think it's a better and more effective system than the one Valve had in place previously. Though I do agree with you on some of your points, I agree that Valve needs to do something to cut down on the amount of bribing that goes on at Greenlight, games should make it on to steam because the userbase wants it on Steam, not because people want an extra game on Steam..

Personally, I also think that Valve is greenlighting too many games. I think that the 75-100 games that are greenlit every 2 or so weeks is a bit much.
 
You have valid points there. I have voted for a few games which are interesting and which will now come soon on the Store. However, I have seen voting spam a lot; there are giveaways and stuff where you have to upvote on Greenlight to get a sweepstakes entry or even a game key. I suggest that Valve has a separate department for game approval into the Store. They should manually review each and every game they get requests of. They should only allow the game into the Store when the game meets a set of quality standards. Also, Valve should honour reports of any bribery and should take appropriate action against such developers.
 
I think that Steam Greenlight is a pretty cool idea. It sort of helps the community of Steam get involved to help pick things like the games. But I don't think that it really matters what games are being released. Sure gamers don't really research their games, but that doesn't seem to matter to them. All they want is something to play, so whether it's a researched vote or not, it's still a vote. As long as it releases the game for them, they don't really care.
 
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