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

Speaking at a panel at Fantastic Arcade, Valve revealed some interesting statistics regarding community games approval system Greenlight. At time of presentation, the service had attracted 3,195 games, of which 1,110 had been banned. There are apparently just 800 submissions visible to the public at present.

949,156 users have participated in Greenlight, casting 9.9 million votes. Ten games have been Greenlit – including Black Mesa, McPixel and Project Zomboid – and a further ten will be revealed in October.

Source: Joystiq

The first handful of Steam Greenlight titles to earn enough critical mass for Valve to take notice and pick up officially have been… well, officially picked up.

Thanks to your voting, the first ten titles to be released on Steam (in no particular order and with no firm release dates) will be:

• Black Mesa
• Cry of Fear
• Dream
• Heroes & Generals
• Kenshi
• McPixel
• No More Room in Hell
• Project Zomboid
• Routine
• Towns

It’s not surprising to see Black Mesa at the top of the list, but there’s a few oddballs in there. What do you think?

Source: Press Release

The launch of Steam’s Greenlight service left many people wondering why Valve didn’t realise that it would immediately become a cesspool of jokey games, shouting members of the public, and nonsense submissions. Valve hasn’t been blind to this, and has just announced the institution of a $100 submission fee — which will be given to Child’s Play in full.

“The proceeds will be donated to Child’s Play,” Valve’s Alden Kroll announced overnight. “We have no interest in making money from this, but we do need to cut down the noise in the system.”

Alden also announced a raft of changes to the way the system’s discoverability works. “The second part of this update is to improve your window into Greenlight and help you find ‘your kind’ of games,” he says. “The next time you visit Steam Greenlight you’ll be shown a smaller, manageable list of games that you haven’t rated. This view is a mix of popular games and new games to Greenlight.”

Greenlight has receieved over 700 submissions already in the last five days.

Source: Steam

Steam’s ‘Greenlight’ service, designed by Valve to allow players and users to help decide which content should be released on the Steam platform, has now gone live. Available right here, Greenlight is built around the Steam Workshop system that currently powers mods and community-developed items in some of Valve’s most popular games, as well as third-party titles like Skyrim.

A number of games are already available on Greenlight for you to vote and comment on, so if you’re interested in seeing your favourite games on Steam — or submitting your own game! — it would seem there’s no better time.

Source: Press Release

Steam are set to deploy a new service that will enable players to use the Steam Workshop’s voting and rating technology in order to help Valve choose which games to release and host. Currently, developers may submit their games to Steam and then cross their fingers and hope for the best – but soon, those developers will be able to provide players with a ‘Greenlight’ link that players can then use to vote for the game on, and speed up the hosting process. As exposure on Steam is a huge benefit to developers, this should hopefully help to democratize the process for the games that people really want. You can find out more info at the Steam Greenlight page.

Source: Steam