Steam recently announced Greenlight, a platform that allows developers to submit their game to be voted on publicly, rather than debated in private by Valve’s selection team. The move has been received positively by developers as a way to expand exposure to their games, though a few worries still surround it—will Greenlight become a simple popularity contest? Will independent developers have to become marketers as well? Here are five ways that the industry will expand from Greenlight—and some of them already address the minor concerns that are cropping up around the program.
1. Allows Game Concepts to be Tested
One of the major features that the Greenlight program has is allowing game concepts to be tested, before development even begins. This allows developers to know what will be successful before they dip their resources into it for a few months for that working demo. This saves developers time and money that can be spent on making another game that is guaranteed to be successful. While it’s true that this might limit creativity to only things which are considered popular or successful, larger and more popular companies won’t have that kind of problem, and smaller ones with limited resources can avoid wasting them.
2. Saves Valve Work
Probably what made Greenlight a possibility in the first place, Valve doesn’t have to turn over huge amounts of games or spend days debating whether something can be accepted to the store. They’ve turned all of this work over to the users who will actually be purchasing the game instead—allowing them to know for certain which game will sell the most successfully and saving them that trouble.
3. Anyone Can Become a Publisher
Anyone will be able to submit to Greenlight—whether they are working for a major company, small dev team, or individually. As long as they have a video, a couple screenshots, and a working concept, anyone can become a publisher on Greenlight and start the voting process. Along with that, larger or more popular companies will not be favored on the front page or elsewhere; An indie game made by a single person which receives little to no attention can still make it to the front page alongside AAA titles.
4. Involves Users in Development
One of the most exciting features about Greenlight is that it involves users in the development, all the way from the concept stage. It allows users to follow their favorite games from beginning to end and support them through the whole process, all with the simple click of a button. They can spread the word about their favorite game and give it a significant boost in votes, directly affecting its probability of getting published and landing them a playable copy.
5. Steam Still Gets the Final Say
The main concern surrounding Greenlight is that this might turn the Steam acceptance policy into a popularity contest. There are several measures in the initial announcement and subsequent information that refutes this. An algorithm will keep games which obtain less votes from getting shoved to unseen pages in their system. They will not always accept the first or second place in terms of votes, but might instead go for tenth or twelfth. Even if they aren’t the most popular, they are successfully enough to sell, and unique enough that Steam would want to support them. Steam ultimately gets the final say, and games that make it to first place in the rankings may never get published at all. It is ultimately just a filtering system that allows them to gauge how successful a game will be—not a system that gets popular developers a free ticket to publication.
0 Comments