Steam Greenlight

» see steamcommunity.com/greenlight as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Greenlight was a door, and it was aimed at the people trying to get through it rather than at anyone standing on the other side. I was never one of them. This one is written from a distance, watching an argument in an adjacent industry the way you follow a story in your own field without having anything riding on it.

By 2012 Steam had a problem that looked like success. It was where PC games got sold, and Valve was deciding by hand which ones were allowed in. The queue of developers waiting on that decision had grown longer than the company had any appetite for reading. On 30 August 2012 Valve handed the reading to the customers.

The mechanism was a vote. A developer posted a page with screenshots and a description, Steam users clicked yes or no, and Valve periodically took a batch off the top and put those games on the store. The first ten came through on 11 September 2012, less than two weeks in: Black Mesa, Cry of Fear, Dream, Heroes and Generals, Kenshi, McPixel, No More Room in Hell, Project Zomboid, Routine and Towns.

The hundred dollar submission fee arrived during the first week, immediately after the first wave of joke listings did. It went to Child's Play, the charity that puts games into children's hospitals, which made it slightly harder to be angry about and did not stop anybody being angry about it.

The shape of the thing was recognizable from anywhere, including Ankara. A company had built a gate and the gate had turned into the bottleneck, and rather than widen it they asked the crowd to come and operate it for free.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what the vote actually measured ~

A vote measures attention before it measures anything else. Games with a following already attached went through quickly. Games without one sat in the list regardless of what they were, because nobody clicking through Greenlight was working from a full picture of what was in there. Developers learned to campaign, and the ones who could not campaign learned that the store had moved the gate rather than opened it.

Valve knew. Gabe Newell said publicly in early 2013 that Greenlight had become a bottleneck instead of a way for people to express a choice, and that where this was going was a Steam anyone could publish to. That is an unusual thing for a company to say about a system it had launched a few months earlier, and it was accurate.

~ the decline ~

Vote trading turned up almost immediately, with developers agreeing to upvote each other's pages. Asset flips turned up next, games assembled out of purchased Unity packages and pushed through on volume. The fee meant to keep the junk out was a hundred dollars, which stops a teenager posting a joke and does not stop anyone running this as a business.

Approval was slow and got slower as the backlog grew. Some games waited a year or more with no explanation available, because there was nobody to explain it. The decision was a number, and the number came from strangers who had scrolled past.

~ what replaced it ~

Valve closed Greenlight on 6 June 2017 and waved through roughly 3,400 games that were still sitting in the queue, which is a fairly blunt statement about how much the voting had ever meant. Steam Direct opened a week later on 13 June. The same hundred dollars, refundable once a game had made a thousand back. No vote of any kind.

What replaced curation was the recommendation system, and that argument is still running nine years on. Greenlight lasted four years and nine months and put a real list of games onto Steam that would not otherwise have got there. It also proved that asking a crowd to guard a door does not get you a better door. It gets you a popularity contest with a queue behind it.

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