Steam's Greenlight service could be on the way out according to Valve's managing director, Gabe Newell.
Newell was speaking at the developer-only Steam Dev Days event and, according to Dave Oshry of Hot Blooded Games, said: "our goal is to make Greenlight go away. Not because it's not useful, but because we're evolving."
Greenlight is a contentious project and has been the subject of heated debate among developers since it was announced in July 2012.
The idea is that Valve sources feedback from Steam users as to which games they are interested in seeing added to the platform.
It's supposed to help gauge consumer enthusiasm and create a dialogue between developer and player. Valve then uses the feedback as a way of prioritising games to add to Steam.
The flaws quickly become obvious when you realise it's set up to be a digital popularity contest that can be gamed and manipulated accordingly. It also leaves newer developers in small or single-person studios with an ongoing extra demand on their time and resources. More established developers can bypass Greenlight and have their games added to Steam regardless of community verdicts on quality. There have also been criticisms regarding the transparency of the process and how directly the voting system is connected with whether the game is Greenlit.
Going back to Newell's statement, it looks like Valve is unwilling to publicly dismiss Greenlight as a failure. Further details on how Steam and its submission process will evolve are yet to be announced but nearly a year and a half into Greenlight there should be plenty of usage statistics and feedback for the company to mull over.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
