Valve announces Steam Greenlight, help decide what games are released through Steam
Valve's version of crowd-support for indie games is... interesting
Valve has come out of the woodwork with a new announcement regarding their Steam service. They've revealed Steam Greenlight, a system through which developers can submit profiles for their games into Steam and allow the greater community to decide which games get released on the platform. A simple summary for a complex idea, but it's really that simple. It's not exactly crowd-funding, but another community-driven initiative -- which is always great.
The process is actually relatively simple. The first step is that a developer submits a video, four screenshots, a logo banner and a written description for their game. Now the community takes over, lending their support to games they approve and, well, not to the ones they aren't exciting about. Depending on how much support a game gets relative to other titles, Valve will then accept the finished product and allow it to be sold on their service. In this way, Valve replaces their small evaluation team with the greater community.
The question is, of course, what this means for what games will be released. Will this new system increase the availability of great games on Steam, will it increase the variety of games on Steam, or could it possibly mean the opposite -- a majority rules style of system that hurts the minority. How will an indie game made for $50,000 with a 2 person dev team compete against, say, EA's next big title? The concept sounds great, let's hope it remains as positive in practice.
Anna Sweet, part of the Business Development team at Valve, contributed this final thought:
"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 will be introduced on August 30, for all to use.
Section: PC Games
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1) Not-so-popualr games won't stand a chance anymore. Just because someone isn't a fan of the game, they'll likely say it shouldn't be released on Steam.
2) Haters gonna hate. What if 50,000 COD Fanboys say Battlefield 4 shouldn't come to Steam?
This is a bad idea. It would be much better if say, only members who have been a active over the last 6 months to a year can vote. Or maybe Categories. Full titles have their own catergorie, AAA titles have their own category etc. This would ensure that Indie games do get a chance, even thugh i'm not a fan of them myself.
Instead of stuff like this, Steam should push developers to get better release dates compared to consoles.
I like this idea. What it will actually be used for is not what gets published but how much focus titles are given. They just want to know what's popular so they can sell more copies.
As usual Valve show some highly intelligent business accumen.
There's also no system implied that will allow you to "downvote" a game. You either lend your support or you move on. You can probably troll comments, but in the end that doesn't directly effect a game's acceptability.
We probably won't see an issue where a game gets 40,000 down-votes as it won't happen, what we will see is every game getting a ton of up-votes and Valve having to green light everything which is fine by me. If the game falls through in the contract talks then fine but I think this will just mean more games on Steam. Whether the games get bought or not is another issue but more choice is good and sensible gamers will vote for that.
They will probably have tiers too, so it takes less votes to approve the smaller games, and more for bigger games.
I do agree that only people active in the community should get a vote. I'm not saying that they have to have over 9000 games or alternatively, have to have tons of posts or reputation on the forums, but just excluding people who only just registered or otherwise have no activity would be great for discouraging troll accounts and cheaters.
This system should be used more for suggestion purposes, letting Valve know about games they might otherwise not pay much attention to (not necessarily not approve of, but be really slow to add to their system because it's low priority).
I'd imagine that they would have to segregate titles according to size and genre. I don't presume that valve would have indie games competing against major titles (since they will most likely pertain to a publishers prior arrangements with Valve and not need community approval).
As @4 Aces said though, there may be alot of people down voting on games they are not interested/unnecessarily critical of as opposed to genuine disapproval. This issue is pretty easily resolved though as long as valve limit user inputs to 'im expressing interest' without a critical alternative (its not fair to criticise a game based on a couple of screenshots and a description anyway).
Overall I'm happy, I reckon the crux of this system will largely be in the UI and the the mechanism it uses to display a variety of games and its ability to effectively allow users to browse through separate genres and make recommendations based on user behavior.
It could be any 2 games.
Chances are the marjority of you are right, and there will be no down-voting. But do you think maybe a game with lots of support would cost a bomb, whereas a game with only enough support to get it on Steam would cost alot less?
Like, in the case of a cheaper tier indie game it might cause some fluctuation in prices +/- $1, and bigger releases by maybe a few bucks either way. The largest might have a $5 margin either way.
Either that, or the prices will be set before the game is released (perhaps part of the profile, whether visible or not).