Steam Greenlight: Crowd-Sourcing the Slush Pile

Posted by Rampant Coyote on July 10, 2012

Valve just announced a game-changer for indies that will go live in a few weeks. Entitled Steam Greenlight, it appears to be an answer to the overwhelming number of indie games being submitted regularly for Steam release:

Steam Greenlight

So basically, we’re talking Valve crowd-sourcing their growing slush-pile. The theory is that the most popular games rise to the top of the heap where they eventually cross some threshold to get noticed by the folks in charge of adding titles to the service. And then they make the final selection.

This seems to be a better approach than having the whole thing be fully automated, and it’s a step in the right direction for Steam in relation to indies. They’ve obviously not been able to keep up, and this should help solve the problem. In theory, this program enlists the aid of the community to help them discover promising new indie games. And in many ways, it will effectively open up a new place for indies to get their games listed and hopefully noticed – whether they are on Steam or not.

So all-in-all, I count this as a reasonably good thing.

But is it a huge thing? A game-changer? The dawn of a new golden age for indies? I’m not so sure. Here are my reservations about the system, based on what limited information we currently have:

First off – I used to work for a pretty successful “Network Marketing” company, AKA multi-level marketing company.  One of the facts of life about that environment is that when you are talking about the kind of money the top distributors made – which was probably in-line with what many of the more successful indie games make on Steam – well, let’s just say people didn’t necessarily conform to what we at the company considered fair practices. They would game the ever-living crap out of whatever system was in place.  And as the company, we had to walk a fine line between protecting the system from abuse, and not pissing off our top distributors. We didn’t always err on the side of fairness.

When you are talking about the kind of revenue a game on Steam can bring versus other distribution sources, it’s a pretty big deal. Sure, you might have to sell your game for half as much on Steam, but you’ll probably sell 10x as many copies, for a net improvement of 5x revenue. Think to yourself: What would YOU do in order to win a contest that would quintuple your salary?

Now think what people with fewer scruples than you might do.

So yeah, I expect to see the system abused and exploited in all kinds of lovely ways. Policing it will be a major job for Valve, because the stakes are high. I don’t know that they are up to it. Hopefully they’ll grow into it.

Besides the personal-gain exploitation, you other kinds of community issues that will function to distort rankings. I have heard tales of XBLIG community issues where games (allegedly) get downvoted because of the developer’s failure to behave the way the community leaders want them to behave. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? I don’t know – I’m not there – but things can get political when you have community control over things like this. Then you have some self-appointed vigilantes on places like Desura who will down-rate a game in protest of its price. As if all games should be knock-it-out-in-a-month platform shooters. I don’t know if a “down-vote” counts for anything (there’s a thumbs-down button in the screenshot at the above link), but it’s another potential vulnerability of the system.

Another concern is that this kind of popularity contest may hinder the more niche titles – like RPGs. Could this turn Steam into just-another-publisher churning out nothing but the low-hanging fruit of the indie scene? Nothing but FPS titles and platform-action games from now on? One of the best things about the indie scene for me has been its willingness to explore dormant game styles and experiment with new ideas that defy easy categorization. I’d hate to see the biggest platforms for indie games once again turn into a narrow genre ghetto. (I say “once again,” because it happened before with the portals that once offered a broad variery of games that eventually became “casual game portals.”)

Hopefully, Valve will protect against this problem as well. After all, if you’ve already released four platform-puzzle action games this month, the folks who really love this kind of game may be feeling a bit saturated, while the fans of sports management simulators are still waiting around with money in their pocket for something to buy. But considering the dearth of sports management simulators on Steam already, I’m not going to hold my breath for Valve to entertain the really narrow niches.  But hopefully they – and the community – will break up games by categories and look at games on a per-category basis. The very fact that they bother with indies at all speaks to their willingness to give the “little guys” a shot, so I don’t think it’s unreasonable to hope this new system won’t overly penalize the niche titles.

So there may still be a number of barriers preventing some great games from being available on Steam. And we will all have questions regarding implementation details. But while I have some serious concerns that prevent me from declaring this a major victory for indie gaming, it still looks like a positive development. We’ll find out in a few weeks, I guess. And then keep finding out as Valve deals with the inevitable bugs and policy problems and refine the Greenlight system to something which will hopefully end up as fair as can be reasonably expected.

A lot of things won’t change. Indies will still be in charge of their own marketing, to have to try and drum up support for their games in the community.  Making a great game and doing great marketing will still be requirements.

I still worry about Steam monopolizing the indie games scene for computers. I’d like to see more / better competitors shaking things up and keeping Steam honest & hungry.

 

Filed Under: Biz, Indie Evangelism - Comments: 12 Comments to Read



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