Valve Programmer Responds to Steam Greenlight Criticisms
Steam Greenlight isn't perfect, but Valve is working on it.
Valve's current direction for Steam is community involvement. As a result, it launched Steam Workshop and Steam Greenlight, hoping to energize the community with user-generated content and a voice in the content going up on the distribution service's virtual shelves.
Of course, Greenlight is not perfect. There's been plenty of criticism leveled against it by developers. Though Greenlight has brought many indie greats to the storefront, indie developers criticize the lack of transparency in the decision process. And while indies can self-publish using Greenlight, plenty of indie developers who have publishers are turned away from bringing their game directly onto Steam and must go through the Greenlight process.
Destructoid pointed out one of the key examples of such criticisms. Developer Poe, the individual behind Six Sided Sanctuary, wrote a document outlining some of his grievances with Greenlight. He criticizes the fact that Valve clearly favors some games and how niche games are often left out in the cold. He also points out that Valve "encourages" new developers to submit their games through Greenlight, yet "we see new developers and publishers get pushed on through."
"If you establish a set of rules and they suck it sucks," states Poe. "But if you establish rules and break them all the time it’s bullshit. You’re marginalizing indie developers for no reason.
"TRANSPARENCY IS KEY IN THE INDIE COMMUNITY. Sony has done exactly this, and they are getting great indies on their platform left and right. Can you see the correlation?"
Valve programmer Tom Bui responded to the criticisms levied against Greenlight, acknowledging that "It is not perfect by any stretch of the imagination" and that Valve's "primary problem right now is that we simply cannot ship as many games as we'd like." Unfortunately, he was loathe to go into the nature of these problems, brushing them off as things that "don't really matter to you, the developers... What matters is that we give customers the chance to buy your games and vote with their dollar."
He went on to explain that Valve was working on the transparency issue and automates a huge portion of the Greenlighting process. "[W]e're basically trying to... automate a lot of our processes... and putting tools into the hands of the developers," he stated. "We've also made the Steamworks SDK available so that developers can take a look and begin their integration before getting Steam."
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Unfortunately, Tom Bui is only one individual at Valve. There's yet to be an official response from the company as a whole.
Catherine Cai was a freelance news writer for Tom's Hardware. She covered a variety of tech industry news, ranging from PC components to PC and console gaming.
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codo Steam is just a horrible piece of software all over, valve has seldom done any better than that anyway. Obviously (and unfortunately) its the backbone of our scene, but as a piece of software its just horribly, horribly inefficient.Reply -
the1kingbob I liked the old steam, before they released for mac and completely changed the interface. The old one wasn't great, but it was leaps and bounds better than the current one. They need to spend more time getting the basics working and spend less time on that full screen thing.Reply -
IndignantSkeptic It doesn't matter how crap Steam is, it will always win simply because it was first and, for convenience purposes, people simply do not want to fragment their game collection and have to remember which game gets accessed from which delivery program. It's called vendor lock-in. Valve is a new Microsoft.Reply -
IndignantSkeptic I don't have a problem with the quality of Steam. It's just that it should not belong to Valve; it should belong to a consortium and should include not just games but everything.Reply -
happyballz You can like Steam all you want...just remember if it goes down or they "caught" you cheating then so will all of your shit that you bought and "own".Reply
For me...I had decent experience with Steam and have probably 35-40 games but I know once you have an issue with Valve or their no-arbitration policies you get screwed royally and will receive zero help or consideration. -
smeezekitty I have steam installed for two reasons:Reply
One is to play Dirt 3: Showdown that I received with my Radeon card for free
The second is so I can play some of the old cdrom games that I can enter the key code for without finding the disk
I did some research and steam "greenlight" seems like an inherently lousy idea.
I also agree with "happyballz" (LOL)
It is a serious problem that you can lose games that you bought because of a dispute. That is a very dodgy business practice IMO -
Mike Friesen I don't care about a lot of those Indie games (although I did buy FEZ and FTL, but you could almost consider them mainstream), but steam is awesome because of one thing: the Steam summer sale. Every game is half off pretty much. And it's convenient.Reply
Also: That's the reason why people complain when microsoft pushes their DRM, and they say "well, were just copying steam", because there is no way that microsoft will sell games as cheaply. -
John Bauer-1363825 Reply11224978 said:Am I the only one that really loves Steam?..... Apparently so.
I don't-not like it, I use it because it's a really great way of organizing my games. Steam DRM gets on my nerves though. -
John Bauer-1363825 Reply11225097 said:I don't have a problem with the quality of Steam. It's just that it should not belong to Valve; it should belong to a consortium and should include not just games but everything.
Even Gabe Newell has come out and said this