Steam Greenlight is being killed by Valve.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

"Greenlight" was Valve's way of, man, I really don't want to be sarcastic here.

"Greenlight" was a way for Valve - creator of the video game platform "Steam" - to set potential game authors in front of some of the stupidest, least capable and biggest goddamn losers in the history of the world, as those losers spouted their worthless opinions about your work in progress, and clutched pearls if you called them on it.

No, that's not it.

"Greenlight" was the process (some!) authors had to go through to sell their games on Steam. Not everybody, if you're big enough then of course you don't have to go through the process. It cost $100 to submit your first game to Greenlight, at which point regular Steam users... the same people that were too fucking stupid to understand Tharsis... acted as if their "votes" were something to be slobbered over.

That's not it either, but I don't have all night.

And to be honest, there was a ton of cool gamers expressing encouragement as well.

Anyway, they are getting rid of it.

The entire process was pretty stupid. It was basically a social currency checker. Valve floated two numbers for Steam Direct, the service that is replacing Greenlight: $100 and $5,000. It's complicated, but I guess my take is that it is very silly to take a percentage of proceeds for having the game on Steam while also requiring an application fee in the range of $100 to $5,000. At the same time, in Valve's defense, having regular people be gatekeepers is a terrible idea as well, because the great majority of people have no idea what an even passable game is. (Again, see Tharsis.) Apple's app store is probably the worst way to go about this sort of thing, as it's overrun with garbage AND there's arbitrary dickheads that will kick games out for shitty reasons.

Maybe there's no good way to do it. At any rate, Valve is changing things up.

[Flack]

In the summer of 1994 I was unemployed and broke. When our air conditioner gave out and we had no money to fix it, my future wife and I started hanging out at the mall simply because it was cooler there than in our house.

During one mall visit we were approached by a "clipboard-carrier" and asked to answer a few questions. After that, we were invited to participate in a 30 minute focus group. My knee jerk reaction is to always say no to those people, but the words "drinks and snacks will be provided" caught my ears and so we agreed to go with them. The only thing we had planned was to sit in the food court and hope some kid left a half-eaten corndog behind.

For thirty minutes, the two of us sat with 4 other people watching a large screen. On the screen they flashed pictures of soda cans with the names blurred out for 1 second and asked us which ones we remembered. Sometimes the cans were in a grid, other times they were on shelves at a grocery store. After that, they showed us multiple styles of Pepsi cans with slightly different logos and asked us which ones we liked better. Which was easier to recognize when the pictures were small? Which made us feel better about ourselves and our lives?

The snacks were Oreos and little paper cups of Pepsi, not even big enough to hold a single ice cube.

Anyway, it always stuck with me that Pepsi would place the value of their brand into the hands of people who go to the mall and could be coaxed into going with strangers for 30-45 minutes by offering them a small stack of Oreos and 4oz of lukewarm Pepsi.

Come to think of it, that describes most jurors.

And, apparently, most of the people voting on Greenlight. Not game creators. Not game experts. Hell, not even people with good taste in games. Just bored armchair quarterbacks, sitting in the comfort of their own home eating Oreos and drinking Pepsi.

This post was brought to you by the delicious, refreshing taste of Pepsi-Cola.

[RealNC]

If you go to Greenlight, you're willfully submitting your game to be judged by random people.

You really can't complain about it, since you went there knowing this beforehand.

[pinback]

I will miss the opportunity to harass Robb on his own game's Greenlight page. :(

[Tdarcos]

I will miss the opportunity to harass Robb on his own game's Greenlight page. :(

I'm sure this will in no way reduce your further opportunities to do so.

[Jizaboz]

I always thought the Greenlight thing was kind of stupid if anything considering all the garbage already "passed" on Steam.

Also, cool story Flack.

[Ice Cream Jonsey]

If you go to Greenlight, you're willfully submitting your game to be judged by random people.

You really can't complain about it, since you went there knowing this beforehand.

Well:

1. I didn't just wake up one day and decide to go to Greenlight, I was forced to by Steam at the cost of $100.

2. I wasn't submitting my game to be "judged by random people," I was jumping through whatever hoops Valve put up to avoid curation themselves. Would have taken them two seconds to look up my name and go, oh, he's well-known in IF, let him in. But that's not their goal. It would require hiring someone to do that, which they don't want, plus on some level they love the fanfare.

3. The "judging" doesn't even make any sense because it goes off votes. All it does is test social currency. If you have a Kickstarter and got 800 people to pledge and head over to Greenlight, then great! You're in! You could scam them all, as most video game Kickstarters do. But you'd be in. There's no demo to play or game snippet to try out, so nobody is judging gameplay. It comes down to how many people you can funnel over there and how good your video presentation skills are. In fact, I would say that paying someone to make a good video is the most important part of the Greenlight process.

4. I can complain because, again, I didn't ask for the douchebags to spout their worthless opinions on the forum. If you want to say there needs to be voting, then great, but why are there comments?

5. I can complain because the snowflakes that are over there are incredible babies. Pinback was making fun of them from day one and they never caught it. Someone drops by and tells you your stuff is shit. THIS IS GOOD. I love it. There's nothing I love more than fighting with people on the Internet. So I destroy the original voter and then 5 other douchebags clutch pearls because they can't belieeeeeeeeeeeeeve someone dare speak to a fuckhead that way. I don't need to pay $100 for an Internet fight, I am completely capable of seeking those out on my own.

6. This might be a generational thing or a nationality thing or whatever else, but yes, you can complain if someone monopolizes a market and then makes you jump through stupid hoops to be a part of that market. I mean, come on, man.

In the meantime there's two other avenues that exist that didn't before, indiegamestand.com and itch.io. So that's good, nobody is forced to go through Steam's nonsense. Rock Paper Shotgun has a fairly good article fixing the problem that John Walker posted today.

[RealNC]

"Forced" is too strong a word for this. Although I get what you're saying. It's the most important PC game online store. But if Valve was gonna let people without a publishing deal into their Store, they had to come up with some form of curation. It was a broken curation system due to vote manipulation. However, your issues with it were the non-broken part of Greenlight. It's how it was supposed to work.

Comments are there for feedback. If people don't like a Greenlight entry, many developers want to know why. Ignorant or troll posts can be skipped. No need to get aggravated over them.

Your game got into Steam by using Greenlight as intended. You didn't abuse it in any way (at least as far as I can tell) by bribing voters.

Sure, Valve should have hired staff that curates entries. But dude, Greenlight WORKED for you. It was used correctly and your game got approved. I would have assumed you'd be less critical of it.

[ICJ]

I was in a bad mood when I wrote that. You are correct about all of that, absolutely.

NEW RULE: I am not going to post on the BBS when I am in a bad mood.

Thank you for your reply, my friend.