Steam recently launched an indie haven, called Steam Greenlight where people can vote on what games want to be put on Steam. Well, it's finally out and it sucks. First of all, it has a horrible system. It takes far too long for a game to actually get on Steam, which means only already known games(McPixel, Project Zomboid) will actually get upvoted. Second of all, there is now a 100 dollar fee to put the game up on Greenlight because of trolls. And last, buried treasures are common. It is very hard for a game to get to the front page of greenlight, even if it is the next Elder Scrolls. What do you think?

Great idea, horrible implementation. I expected better from Valve. I do think they should have had a fee from the very beginning to ward off the spam. They should have fully expected that to happen.

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Valve should've anticipated this kindof behaviour and put measures(the $100 thing) in place to prevent it before launch. That's not to say their heart isn't in the right place, Greenlight IS a good idea just executed poorly. Maybe they'l do some 'housecleaning' with the current inventory of submissions, who knows. Hopefully the whole thing works itself out in time and the legitemately quality submissions get the votes they deserve and the BS submissions get pushed to the wayside/deleted.

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You can assume that they will improve the platform as time goes on. It's current state is pretty atrocious from what i hear.

Although, what you mentioned about already known titles, that will always be the issue, and has always been with indie games. Most devs don't know how to do proper marketing, or don't have a title outstanding enough to strike the audience, but still a solid gaming experience. They will always suffer from lack of exposure due to the nature of the game not filling any gaps in desires of the people but being merely just another game in a long line of games. Obviously those games deserve to be looked at, but they stand in the shadow of the popular titles and cannot compete on even ground, and that will always be the case.

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TotalBiscuit had an interesting commentary on the question of GreenLight.

you can watch it on YouTube here, its the first question (starts at 0:28)
The Mailbox : September 6th, 2012

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