Goodbye Steam Greenlight

[Greybriar]

It's official. No more Steam Greenlight.

I don't know whether to be glad or sad. :-\

[Martok]

Huh.  I'll admit I'm surprised -- and in hindsight, surprised that I'm surprised.  After all, nothing lasts forever, and Greenlight wasn't a perfect system in any case.  It did have its good points, though. 

I don't know whether to be glad or sad. :-\

I suspect that may greatly depend on the efficacy of its successor, Steam Direct (and how it compares to Greenlight)... 

[SirAndrewD]

This was pretty inevitable.   The Greenlight system was abused to the point of becoming an joke by developers like Digital Homicide.

[Tpek]

It was a joke.

People kept putting jokes on it rather than games, and I do mean literal jokes (not just crappy games).

And not to mention all those countless greenlit games that never got released.

[Destraex]

What a shame.

[bbmike]

Doesn't sound like it's gone, just replaced with something called Steam Direct.

[JasonPratt]

From the rebrand, that sounds like there will be less oversight and fewer barriers to release. 

[SirAndrewD]

From the rebrand, that sounds like there will be less oversight and fewer barriers to release. 

From what I understand it's a larger monetary barrier done on a per game basis.  Steam hasn't decided on the number yet, but it could be between $100 to $5000 per title. 

With Greenlight the fee was $100 for the developer, and then they could release anything that passed the Greenlight system.  This led to developers like Digital Homicide paying their entry fee and then spamming Steam with games that in some cases likely only took a few hours to program. 

The new system is going to be a careful balance for Steam.  The paywall is going to have to be high enough to discourage unscrupulous developer spam, but low enough not to kill actual dedicated Indy devs. 

We'll see if it works, but one thing that was for very apparently is that Greenlight had become hopelessly untenable.

[JasonPratt]

You knew this was coming!