Re: Steam Greenlight - Give us a Helping Hand
Hey TB!
On the first weekend in September we witnessed the launch of Valve's new Steam-Community platform Greenlight.
As you probably are aware, the launch was a less than flawless undertaking. The massive response along with a seemingly
endless stream of games pouring onto the platform was rather overwhelming for both users and the choking servers.
What is astonishing, in my opinion, is the embarrassing average quality of entries. Don't get me wrong, there are a few
excellent, unique, polished and well-presented games put up for display and voting. On the other hand for every good
entry that deserves its place on Greenlight, I count 3 clones of successful indie platformers, 2 shoddily assembled zombie-
shooters, some survival horror game and two random kiddie-programmer entries that will stay on the last few pages of
Greenlight forever, a place that shall be known as "indie purgatory". Oh, I forgot the AAA EA titles being put up by random
Russians missing the point of the platform entirely... hell, even TF2 was on there a few minutes before it got deleted.
In my opinion the current situation defeats the purpose of having the platform, as it mainly wastes peoples' time - in a bad
way. I can't stop wondering: what did Valve expect? To me it looks like they were trying to have a good share of the trendy
indie-cakefest that is Kickstarter & Co, but wanting it for "free", with only minimal moderation effort/manpower put into it.
A bit more moderation probably would have helped the start of the platform immensely.
As a developer having a rather successful entry on there ourselves, it doubly pains me to see some of the utterly putrid
things getting uploaded. It is giving people a frustrating experience instead of the possibility to quickly discover what the
platform seemingly was intended for (superficially at least): innovative, quality content which doesn't get any attention in
mainstream gaming media yet.
I'd very much appreciate hearing your opinions on the whole situation and a bit of discussion around the topic in general.
/Killrob