"Our goal is to make Greenlight go away," Oshry quoted Newell as saying. "Not because it's not useful, but because we're evolving."

So, Valve's been doing a lot lately, but I admit I'm having trouble really sussing out the core strategy driving it. Greenlight certainly had it's issues, but it at least tried to address the problem of QC on the platform. What do you think will replace it? Will it be kinda like before? That had the issue of a small group of people at Valve being single-handedly in control of access to arguably the most important platform in existence for indies, and things fell through the cracks because of it. Greenlight was supposed to help fix that- whether it did any good or not is debatable. I guess we'll see whether this leads to a more open or less open steam (the article speculates more open).

Greenlight is mostly garbage, so that's ok.

That makes sense though: In a perfect world, there really shouldn't be a "Greenlight" or any "special section" for indie games. In the ideal situation, image "kickstarter games" would show up just like other pre-orders in the store.

That's cool. I mean it's a nice idea, to be able to look through potential games and choose the ones you'd like to play. But when you consider what it means to downvote a game or when you see folks campaigning to get an already fairly established game through Greenlight, or even when there are nonsense controveries when certain games try to get through, it just sucks.

hmmmmm greenlight is an odd thing, it's not really what it's set out to do instead it's a social element in steam. And considering how Octodad and Contrast were one of the first greenlight games then got help from Sony to be PS4 launch games..... yeah, it's not that helpful.

Greenlight was a failure. It was slow, nonsensical and had a terrible bottle necking issue. It says a lot the Steam, the only platform to attempt to crowdsource releases, became the hardest platform to get on post greenlight. Good riddance.

I hope so. It was an interesting experiment, but I think it's reached the end and we can all draw conclusions from the experiment.

Democracy just doesn't work.

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I agree with ya'll that Greenlight is broken, but I'd like to see whatever they do next be better than the pre-Greenlight system as well. I mean, it was better than Greenlight, but it still kinda sucked.

I think a faster, better designed Steam could really be the simple solution to this problem. Make it easier to review games (which they've actually already done, but many might not even notice as the reviews all fall below the relevant game info), easier to search for similar things, and maybe even employ an iTunes genius type system of recommendations based on your library, wishlist and reviews (except better than that iTunes thing, of course).

Crowdsourcing what gets featured is totally irrelevant if a user can just more efficiently be exposed to what they might like.

I think their goal is to host pretty much all games on Steam and have the system automatically weed out the ones which are clearly not up to par. Greenlight wasn't horrible like everyone lets on, it just isn't really necessary anymore.

They're probably worried that Steam would turn into something like the Android Play Store, where good apps sit on top of a mountain of crap. Try visiting the Play Store's Trending section and find me a few things on there worth downloading. You won't.

With the introduction and rapid growth of Early Access, I think they pretty much cannibalized Greenlight. I just hope they come up with a better way to manage it, like have a separate tab or something that's specifically just Early Access games instead of polluting the New Releases tab with all of them.

Good. Give the lesser indies more of a chance.

hmmmmm?

My feelings on this really depend on how exactly they're going to go about dissolving it. I think Greenlight provides a valuable service, but from what they say it sounds like they want to integrate the kind of indie dev support that Greenlight has provided into Steam as a whole, so this could actually work out going pretty well.

Semantically wouldn't smaller studios be more indy? And where is the "more" metric gauged exactly? Do two guys with 25 years of combined industry experience, trump 10 dudes with no released games at all?

NOOO IKARUGA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Yes, Greenlight is kind of a hot mess, and has caused more problems than it's solved. Still, it seems rather un-Valve-like to just get rid of something instead of trying to fix it. I'd be interested to see how they plan to "evolve" post-Greenlight.

The problem with getting rid of greenlight is this - what do they replace it with? Greenlight has flaws. Big, glaring flaws. But it has succeeded in one important way - it has let hundreds of games onto Steam that wouldn't have had a chance to get through Valve's old approval process. If you get rid of it, it needs to be replaced by a system that will continue to let those games onto the service. Going back to the old, restrictive, secretive process would be bad for everyone - developers, gamers and Valve.

Greenlight had it's moments, but it's mostly responsible for flooding Steam with a bunch of terrible games that people said yes to based upon looking at a screenshot or two and barely reading anything about the game.

Greenlight wasn't really as great as it once seemed. I think its better to just lower the barrier of entry overall, let all the games on. Its up to the consumer to decide what to buy.

I hope all previously green-lit games will continue to show up on the store. I need my SUPER HOT.

SUPER.

HOT.

SUPER.

HOT.

I doubt this means that games that were greenlight are suddenly forbidden on the store.

There are some gems hidden among the incredible amount of tosh on Greenlight. Greenlight could disappear and I honestly don't think anyone would even notice.

Greenlight is crap. A free visual novel (Naricissus) got passed, for what point? It's like a 50mb download off the translator's website...

Also segregate software and early release garbage.

Greenlight is kinda broken, but it's at least better than what Valve had in place before. If they remove Greenlight, I hope they don't just go back to the old system (which I doubt, there's a reason they implemented Greenlight). It's a difficult balancing act between letting in too few indie games, and flooding Steam with garbage like what happened on the 360.

360 was fine. MS only promoted the good games. Valve just needs more staff to screen the crap.

Yeah, you had to seach for the crap, but it was still there. If they're gonna screen this stuff in-house they'll at least need to be more open about what they're looking for etc. than they were before Greenlight. One of the big problems with Steam pre Greenlight was how closed that system was.

The way 360 did their indie stuff isn't desirable either because of the whole "slot allocation thing" meant that "indie developers" had to suck up to "big developers" for access or Microsoft directly which defies the definition of "indie developer". To suggest Steam do it like Microsoft did is definitely not the solution.

Going forward, early access/kickstart/greenlight should be rolled into the store. To donate to a prospective game, the process should be as easy as buying a game.

But how are they going to do it? I'd have said a gun would be too obvious, but they DID announce their intention to kill Greenlight.

Yay one less popularity contest based releasing scheme.

Why not just let anything go up on Steam, but keep the front page catered by a group of people? That way anything remotely looking like a real game can get on the front page and when fools make stupid junk like that pop drinker pro game then that stuff can stay hidden in some background catch all junk tab for crazy people to look at. Then if something in that junk section sells over X number of copies then it can move up to being on the front page. That way everyone has their fair chance of getting on steam, but only games worth playing will get seen. Maybe have a small one time buy in fee to get listed on the service just as a means to weed out the obvious trolls.

I would very much suggest you all follow @greenlightgold on twitter it's essentially scraping the underside of the bottom of the barrel on greenlight and has made me realize that opening it up to the general public was the worst thing they could have done.

Greenlight was an interesting idea, but it more or less failed in what it tried to do. It's time to move onto something better.

Hopefully Valve has a good idea of what comes next.

My bet is that Source 2 will go toe to toe with Unity in ease of access, It will be free to use and developers who build on Source 2 can sell their games through their Steam Workshop. Popular selection will then be featured on the Steam front page.

Well, after following that twitter I am convinced that Greenlight needs to continue to exist so I can read broken english descriptions of games that don't actually exist.

I thought Valve was infallible and never made mistakes.

That's fine by me. Hopefully they can further streamline the process for developers to get their games on steam without sacrificing a certain level quality throughout steam.