Valve Alters The Greenlight Project Hoping To Prevent Abuse

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September 4th, 2012 | By

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It is no surprise that the community project Steam Greenlight has gotten a lot of press and an ever growing collection of hopeful games waiting for the greenlight. Valve say the number of titles has reached over 700 submissions so far and still climbing, sadly within this collection there is a significant number of titles that are of the shovelware variety with many being submitted for a joke and thus obscuring the actual legitimate titles they are trying to promote.

Valve therefore have decided to change the way posts will be placed on the Greenlight project with the first update imposing a fee of $100 to post a title on the Greenlight, however don’t worry about Valve being out for money because all proceeds from this will go straight to the charity Child’s Play. The only purpose Valve want to fulfill with this is to reduce the noise and illegitimate titles currently being posted whilst not trying to alienate the vast majority of legitimate titles and don’t worry if you already have titles posted as they will not be affected.

The second change Valve are going to be making with regards to Greenlight is to try and tailor the titles you see when you open the Greenlight project by showing “your kind” of games. In the hopes you will have a much smaller list more accurately tailored at you which is easier see potential titles you personally would be interested in.

It is an interesting change to the system which did have problems from the start with it was very open to abuse, hopefully this will help to create a more fair system for the better of the community as a whole. This is no doubt only the first step to better tailor the Greenlight project so be sure to check back to The Indie Game Magazine for all the latest new as and when it develops.

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About the author

(542 posts)

Full time gamer part time writer and a Graduate of King College London I have been playing computer games ever since the days of the much loved Amiga. Playing a broad spectrum of games over as many platforms as possible with a distinct obsession with RTS games even though lacking in much of the micro ability. Tweet me @alexwilkinson

  • http://profiles.google.com/jonathonwisnoski jonathon wisnoski

    $100 is a lot for some developers. Personally, I think the issue could of been fixed differently.
    One thing always confused me about Greenlight. What is Steam’s quality supposed to be? They already have a bunch of very crappy games on Steam, so if we are judging by simply as good or better then what is already available everything would pass.

  • http://twitter.com/adammcdonald Adam McDonald

    If you’re serious about releasing a game, you will find $100. I think it’s very reasonable.

  • Dominic Tarason

    If you have a great game that you believe would get on Steam easily, but don’t have $100 to spare, then just release it direct on your own site, the Humble Store, Desura, Indievania or any of a dozen other routes.

    If all your marketing efforts can’t raise $100 via all of those, then you really wouldn’t have survived on Greenlight. Keep in mind that once you’re on there, you’re being voted on, and most of your votes will come from an existing audience that you’ve already marketed to.

    If you can’t sell 10 copies at $10 each, then nobody would have voted for you to begin with.

  • http://www.indiegamemag.com The Indie Game Magazine

    Very True, but I think the fee could have been lower and still achieved the same thing. At least it goes to charity.

  • Onionman

    The charity is just something for steam to hide behind so they don’t take too much backlash for this. And I agree that something less like $10 would have had the same effect here.

  • Jake Brown

    I totally agree, the charity play was so obvious I laughed when I saw it. If the purpose of a fee at all was just to weed out trolls, about 10 dollars would probably be enough to disuade most people, but something more like 45 would have been better to keep just the most serious players in the picture without penalizing the one-man-team doing awesome things with a loan from his parents.

    I also think this sort of thing should have been instituted from the beginning. Valve HAD to know that if they stacked no barriers to entry that anyone with a copy of Runtime Revolution and 45 minutes would be throwing games onto Greenlight — nothing to lose, everything to gain.

  • Onionman

    Right right, this shouldn’t have been a surprise to them. I don’t know if they are just trying to generate more news or what. Indiedb is not to dissimilar from this, and they operate quite well by just having a moderator check the game off before it gets listed on the site.