For indie designers, getting a game on Steam is like authors being selected for Oprah's book club. It can make the difference between languishing in obscurity and making millions.
“There are just so many players out there that only look to Steam for their games these days," Offspring Fling creator Kyle Pulver told the Penny Arcade Report in May. "If the game isn’t on Steam, it just doesn’t exist to them.”
The digital game shop started by Half-Life publisher Valve, which launched in 2003, has quickly become the ultimate place for gamers to buy downloadable software from triple-A blockbusters to 99-cent indie darlings. Innovative features such as a built-in social network and regular discounts on popular games make Steam more than just an app store. It's a community, and player satisfaction with the service keeps them spending. Today, the service claims to have over 54 million active users.
There's just one little problem. Steam is so popular in part because it is fastidiously curated. Valve handpicks each game for quality. It would love to add more, but it doesn't have the bandwidth to make the judgment calls. That's where Greenlight comes in.
"Who has the time and energy to run through every single game and vote for or against them?"Last week, Valve launched its Steam Greenlight initiative, which lets developers submit project proposals and allows Steam users to vote to decide which of them will get added to the store. Any game in any stage of development can be added to Greenlight for consideration, and the process of adding a project is easy.
Once a game is on Greenlight, Steam's users can vote in favor of – or against – games that catch their eye. If enough users vote in favor of a game, Valve will consider adding it to Steam.
It looks like a system with great potential, but developers expressed some pressing concerns when it launched.
Greenlight has a "discovery problem," says Randy Smith, creative director of Waking Mars, an "action-gardening simulator" on the red planet that was a hit on iPad and is now up for consideration on the Steam service. "Who has the time and energy to run through every single game and vote for or against them?"
There isn't a way to sort the items in the list by "most popular" or "highest rated," so even if a game gets a lot of initial attention, it could get buried by the avalanche of submitted titles before reaching the necessary number of votes. As of now, there are over 500 games on Greenlight, all jumbled together with few ways of making sense of the chaos.
Valve allows users to create "collections," curated lists that allow reputable sources to make Spotify-style playlists of worthwhile Greenlight games. The IndieGames.com collection is currently the most popular.
"Those games and developers that have already gathered huge followings, such as Project Zomboid, are now pretty much going to be guaranteed a place on Steam," says Mike Rose, editor of IndieGames.com.
But, he says, "if you don't already have a following for your game, then you're probably not going to get anywhere on Greenlight."
Even Waking Mars, with its preexisting following, is having trouble getting attention. The Greenlight page for Waking Mars has been viewed over 4,000 times as of this writing, and hundreds of Steam users have added it to their favorites list. But Greenlight's stats are showing that it's received barely a fraction of the necessary positive ratings to get accepted onto the Steam service.
Alden Kroll, a user interface designer with Valve, says the company is working to address these concerns. It will add algorithms that recommend other Greenlight games to users based on their previous votes, for example. And it may tweak the number of positive votes that a game needs to be accepted onto Steam.
"We set the ‘goal’ number of positive ratings to be pretty high," Kroll said, because Valve didn't know how much participation Greenlight was going to get from Steam's membership. Valve will adjust these metrics over time to more closely match its community's participation, he says.
On Tuesday, after our interview, Kroll said in a Steam Community blog post that users would now see a "smaller, manageable list of games that you haven’t rated... a mix of popular games and new games to Greenlight."
The Dislike Button
Another one of Greenlight's features is raising red flags with developers: The "thumbs down" button that lets users vote against games.
"It's not the best idea," says Phil Tibiotski, creator of Octodad: Dadliest Catch, a goofy game about an octopus trying to live among humans that got Kickstarter funding in early August and is now up on Greenlight.
"You can see 4Chan or Reddit getting upset about a game for whatever reason and saying, 'hey, let's all go downvote it,'" Tibitoski says.
"Viewing somebody's page and not giving it a thumbs up is kind of an implicit thumbs down."In other words, creators of games on Greenlight might see their Steam dreams shattered for reasons unrelated to the quality of the game itself, if they somehow offend the anonymous masses of the internet. Tibiotski correctly notes that some online gaming communities have a reputation for getting worked up over insignificant issues.
A thumbs-down button just isn't necessary to achieve Greenlight's goals, says Waking Mars designer Smith: "Viewing somebody's page and not giving it a thumbs up is kind of an implicit thumbs down."
Greenlight's open submission system has, of course, caused it to become flooded with fake game projects. Valve is actively working to get rid of the fake entries, which Eurogamer reports have included everything from Half-Life 3 to Best WTC Plane Simulator.
As a safety measure against additional fraud, Valve's Kroll says the company "reserves the right to to deny games" even if they get the necessary amount of votes. This, he says, would happen in any case where Valve feels that the developers have misrepresented their games, or if the games are "obviously offensive."
In the Tuesday community update, Valve said it would henceforth require a $100 donation to the charity Child's Play to enable one's Steam account to add games to Greenlight, in an attempt to cut down on frivolous submissions.
This might swing the pendulum too far in the other direction, Tibitoski said after the decision was announced: "I think that $100 is too high, but I also think that there needs to be some sort of barrier that makes it extremely inconvenient or annoying to submit something you aren't serious about."
"However," he said, "I also believe that if [developers] have a good game they will be able to find someone else to foot the bill for them."
Update: The original version of this story misstated the nature of the $100 submission fee. The story has been corrected.
