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Steam's Greenlight feature was supposed to do two things: free up Valve from the laborious process of looking through every game submitted to it and simultaneously make it easier for developers to get their games on to Steam in the first place. It's worked well, with hundreds of games being submitted and a good number of them making it to the online store. However, the word on the mean streets of the Steam Dev Days is that Valve is actually going to ditch the feature that has only been with us for a year and a half.
According to Hot Blooded Games CFO Dave Oshry (via GamesIndustry), Valve's head honcho, Gabe Newell said that “our goal is to make Greenlight go away.” However the reasoning wasn't because Greenlight sucked or Valve wanted to return to the old days, but because it wanted to “evolve” the process.
Bet you didn't see that metaphor coming
It's not quite clear what that evolution will be at this moment, but some have previously speculated that the step where Valve approves a game could simply be removed, leaving it up to gamers to decide which games make it and which games die.
That's partly the case now, but there's still a Valve gatekeeper at the end of the road. Without that some have suggested it could mean the overall quality of games on Steam would drop down, but the upswing of it is that more niche games should make it through. As long as there's a good enough way to find games that you like and for good and bad games to be categorised without too much difficulty, then it should work out alright.
Kitguru Says: It'll certainly be an interesting experiment. What do you guys think of Valve potentially making Greenlight more of an open submission system?
Not for it. Steam’s becoming a hive of unfinished games. There are so many people playing games like DayZ, Rust, Kerbal Space Program, and other such “Released but unfinished” games, it’s removing the entire point of even bothering to finish a game.
I’d rather they scrapped the system and returned it to pre-WarZ fiasco; if a game isn’t finished, it’s not for sale, end of.
As if you even listed KSP as an unfinished game. That game has a lot more things to do than probably every other early access game out there right now.
Releasing unfinished games is a natural extension of something the industry has been doing for years, that is, crowd sourcing QA / balancing (using patches.) Why not also crowd source play testing? Why iterate the design based on feedback from a focus group, when you can iterate the design based on feedback from your actual users?
If the game is popular enough, it will eventually be finished (or at least feature complete), and then maybe I’ll buy it. If the early adopters want to jump on board before then and make the game that much better by the time it gets to me, great.
Static is right, Steam will get a ton more unfinished games, and many of them will never be finished because they’re just not that popular. This is also a good thing – at least devs will realize early that the game isn’t worth finishing. Instead of wasting any more time and resources, they can move on and make another, potentially better game. Knowing they can get this kind of early verdict and cut their loses if they have to, they’ll be more likely to take risks and invest in new ideas – also good.
Overall, I think this will result in more good games, but admittedly, even more unfinished games. If they annoy you, just ignore them until they reach 1.0. :p
I think greenlight was already great as it is. I wonder how their new idea with it is going to envelop. I’m all positive though.