Tag: Steam Greenlight

My original intention for this article was going to be a "best of the bunch" summary to cover the seventy-five games recently Greenlit on Steam. However, as I sorted through the list I discovered that a good chunk of those games were pretty...unimpressive, to put it politely. Hardly any of the games jumped out at me as looking particularly fun, let alone something I'd spend money on. A few of the games are so debatably bad looking that it makes me think that Valve didn't even look these games over before they gave them the greenlight.For awhile now, Valve has been approving batches of seventy-five games, every two weeks. That's 300 games in two months. That's 300 games that will be released through Steam on top of the triple-A publisher-supported games that are lucky enough to bypass the Steam Greenlight toll booth.Recent batches have yielded some really great games, and there are a few really great looking games sprinkled within this latest batch. But for the first time in Greenlight's history, this time around I felt like the unimpressive outweighed the impressive.

Well you know what they say about all good things, right? They always come to an end eventually. And so seems to be the plan for Steam's beloved Greenlight program, which sought to help small-name developers get their games onto Steam through a community voting process. But during today's opening remarks at the Steam Dev Days - a conference held exclusively for developers - Valve's Gabe Newell has been reported as saying the company hopes to move away from Greenlight in the near future.While there's been no official reason given for Valve's eventual removal of the Steam Greenlight program just yet, Games Industry International has been compiling the tweets from game developers on the ground floor of the conference, like Dave Oshry of Hot Blooded Games, who quoted Newell in a tweet as saying: "Our goal is to make Greenlight go away. Not because it's not useful, but because we're evolving.""That statement certainly gives us a lot of food for thought. Steam Greenlight was first incorporated into the popular gaming client in August 2012, after which Valve had to quickly refine its rules and regulations due to an immense amount of "shovelware" titles popping up on the program. So in a way, Valve choosing to drop Greenlight might be a good way to keep their game catalogue both concise and focused on the very best gaming experiences around. But at the same time, it also opened up the doors for gamers to learn about amazing new titles that they may have never heard about before if not for Greenlight.This news also comes on the heels of Valve's recent announcement that the total number of Steam users had risen 15% over the holidays to a whopping 75 million, so you almost have to trust that Valve knows what they're doing. We'll be sure to keep you posted on any updates we hear regarding the final days of Greenlight as soon as we learn them. In the meantime, be sure to hit the comments and let us know what you think about this surprising decision!