Valve Stepping Up

While I have had criticism of Greenlight and how it has been handled thus far, I continue to have respect for Valve. When announced Greenlight felt as if would change the lives of independent developers forever, it offered hope of reaching a larger audience and keeping the lights on. And while the cold reality of it is far from the truth, Valve has stepped up to address concerns from the community and press.

This morning that added a pay wall, it now costs $100 to submit your game. Thank goodness, this will hopefully drastically reduce the number of fake submissions that all the actual games had to fight against for the user’s attention.

And yesterday they launched a new UI skin for Greenlight which removed a key piece that drove the negative feedback loop, the Yes/No rating system.

Instead it has been replaced by similar buttons, yes I would buy this game on Steam, or No/Not interested. And while that may not seem like a major change, it also hides how well a game is doing from the user view!

From our perspective looking at how Loc has been treated, along with several other games, this is a great move. The amenity granted by the internet allowed Steam Users to act as bullies, beating up on some of the more casual games. If a user saw that something already had a low score, they were pressured into rating it lower than it necessarily deserved.

And I am not only talking about our experience, the number of negative comments is still frustratingly large and out of a misplaced sense of respect I have not deleted them, but when I looked at the other games we added into the Puzzle collection we had created, there were games that frankly looked far more professional than ours, but had a lower rating and some really destructive comments.

While the system very much needs work, like being able to share ownership of a submitted game, easier navigation though submitted entries, additional genre’s, and being able to link users from steam to the developers homepage, this is one small step towards a greenlight that could really be worth something.