Gabe Newell says Steam Greenlight a “bottleneck”
By Alice Lynton on February 9, 2013 at 10:55 am
Steam staff struggle to cope with the enormous number of submissions for publication they receive, and Steam Greenlight, a process which allows users to preview and vote on possible releases, was one solution to this issue. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to be working; speaking at DICE Summit 2013, Valve founder Gabe Newell expressed his doubts about the service.
“Right now we have inside of Steam we have a dictatorship. It’s probably bad for the Steam community, in the long run, not to move to a different way of thinking about that. In other words, we should stop being a dictator and move towards much more participatory, peer-based methods of sanctioning player behavior,” he said, according to Gamasutra.
“Greenlight is a bad example of an election process. We came to the conclusion pretty quickly that we could just do away with Greenlight completely, because it was a bottleneck rather than a way for people to communicate choice.”
Newell’s proposed solution seems to be user-curated stores, something he began championing at the Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show in January.
“I don’t know about you, but I think the store is really boring. It’s like this super middle-ground marketing thing. Like, oh, here’s a list of features in our game,” he said. “The stores instead should become user-generated content. Other companies can take advantage of this as well, but if a user can create his own store – essentially add an editorial perspective and content on top of the purchase process – then we’ve created a mechanism where everybody, in the same way we’ve seen a huge upsurge of user-generated content with hats, we think that there’s a lot of aggregate value that can be created by allowing people to create stores.
“I’d buy stuff from Yahtzee. I would buy everything from Old Man Murray.”
Source: GameSpy
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It sounds like he is planing to make STEAM Open Source, or at least, mod able in some way…
Called it.
Also:
“Newell’s proposed solution seems to be user-curated stores, something he began championing at the Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show in January.”
So… you’re that greedy for money you’d prefer to just make the community do literally everything? ISPs already host the content, the community creates it for f2p titles, the community helps each other with Valve’s somewhat malicious pricing model (e.g. store sale, if it’s not on daily/flash sale then don’t buy it right now! How the hell is a regular person supposed to know this?), they allow publishers to charge us more because they can, and now you want to literally pass off everything to the community so you can make money from it?
This sounds suspiciously like Socialism as well (depending what your definition is).
Once again he sounds totally nuts, but he seems to do a lot of things right. I appreciate him trying to innovate, either way…
I don’t understand.
I wonder if Gabe had a quick look and noticed all the rubbish flash games that were posted in greenlight and he wonders why nothing is getting approved to the store
*waits for him to start praising windows 8*
If Gabe is willing to offer 2-5% of net sale profit to users that sell the game then yes a good idea and in the users interest to spend the time managing their store; but it’s unlikely that’s his angle.
I’m interested to see the direction he takes with this.
I hate to say I told you so…
The majority of greenlight game submissions use ‘box art’ instead of a gameplay screenshot when viewing the list. No idea what you are looking at until you have clicked on the game, which takes too long when they are 1000′s of them to look through.
Perhaps a small gameplay gif would work too. Or a mouse-over function of some sort.
what? why do you have an issue with that?
this has been a long time coming. starting with the concept of steam itself, to TF2 item creation. he’s creating a marketplace where lots of people can sell their content, instead of just the mega-publishers. there is little negative to this. indie games have rocketed in popularity, and anyone who provides an easy outlet to content that the people want deserve to be given lots of money.
and why is everyone being smug about calling greenlight a failure? welcome to business, where not everything is a success. it’s great they tried it, and it’s great they recognise it’s not going well.
“Socialism refers to an economic system characterised by social ownership of the means of production and co-operative management of the economy.”
not even close.
if anything it’s more capitalist. create an open marketplace where anyone can create and sell content, as opposed to a store front that sells goods regulated by the store owner.
the model already exists in TF2 content generation doesn’t it? people are getting rich from making cosmetic items that other people want.
the good thing about this is that it looks like it could expand much further than only games. content creators that are already famous could shift their content to the steam store for an easier selling experience as well as a larger audience. it’s a great idea and I hope it works. it’s not the first time he’s spoken on something like this, so it doesn’t seem to be random musings.
Waiting for steam to sell movies/music.
I’d love to pay $8 for a movie in 1080p bluray the day it comes out in cinemas.
and it would be totally possible if their vision is to be believed. all the big production studios have their own shopfront within steam, and you can rent or buy movies. you could have renting, buying, weekends where it’s free to watch a particular movie, and everything is tied to an account so you can take your movies anywhere. you can have reviews and trailers attached to each movie page. they would need to implement some sort of media-rich tools that would allow streaming as well as downloading, but they all exist and would be within valve’s reach.
then you could support more indie development. let single users make a shopfront and sell their own goods.
obviously the biggest hurdle is getting the publishers on board, but after that it would be an amazing service. together with steambox valve could become the absolute leaders in combined media services. it would be crazy if everything came together well.