End of Steam Greenlight?-

It has been over a year since Gabe Newell, the founder of Valve, first began expressing his desire to phase out the Steam Greenlight system, and now it might be happening.

At the time of this writing, the latest batch of games to be Greenlit was on August 1; 53 days ago, and only consisted of a total of 50 games. This is in contrast to several consecutive batches of 75 games which had been being Greenlit, a few times a month.

At least 100 games where Greenlit during each month, from December 2013 to June 2014. And yet since July 12, only those 50 games have been allowed through Greenlight. This sharp decline in games being allowed through that system could imply that the Greenlight method of allowing games onto the Steam distribution service, may finally be over.

This seems to be even more likely as today Steam launched its Discovery Update, providing new features for the service that would seem to be designed to help users to better navigate its large numbers of game titles. The reason that this would seem to indicate the death of the Greenlight system, is that the replacement for Greenlight (which essentially lets users vote on which games they would like to see on the Steam platform) might very well be no significant barriers to entry to Steam at all.

Based on things that Newell and others have said previously, it would seem that Valve has been leaning increasingly towards opening up access to Steam to as many games as possible. But with such an influx of new games and no real "gatekeeper", there will predictably be a massive sea of inferior products flooding Steam. And so we can surmise that many of the changes introduced in this latest Discovery Update are being implemented in order to help the cream rise to the surface, and to assist users in finding the types of games that they want.

Without such measures, users of the Steam service would be completely overwhelmed by the massive influx of games of all varying types of quality that would inevitably end up on the site. But the question is will these measures actually work and will these changes be sufficient enough to allow users to effectively navigate the massive swell of new games on the platform? Steam users already complained earlier this year about the increased number of games being Greenlit, and so it will be interesting to see what happens if Valve completely opens the floodgates to any and all games that might want to be on the platform.

While these recent events, and their possible outcomes should be of definite concern to Steam users, as an indie developer, I have some concerns of my own. Steam is by far the largest distribution platform for PC games and that's much of its value. But what happens to the value of getting on Steam if it becomes completely saturated with so many different titles that users cannot properly navigate it to find the quality games that they're looking for? The more games that get on the platform, the more difficult it is to be successful on it and at a certain point of mass saturation, the platform itself becomes increasingly worthless to an indie dev. As it is, Steam has become much more competitive than it once was and it is more difficult to make money on there than it was a year ago.

But more problematic is the fact that there is no real alternative. Although just getting on Steam is no guarantee of success, being on Steam is still almost necessary for any type of success; there really is no substitute for it. And if the value of being on that platform decreases, there really isn't another good alternative. As someone who is planning on releasing their next game within the next year (that would be Reptile Zoo: The Sinister Mutation), this is something that I'm personally concerned about.

Of course despite the fact that nothing has been Greenlit in over a month, Greenlight has not been officially discontinued yet and therefore much of this is just speculation. Both users and developers will still have to wait and see what Valve has planned, exactly. But it is apparent that something is in the works.

With the new "Curators" feature included with this latest update, it is hard to predict exactly what will happen. It will be interesting to see how this will affect things and which collections will gain popularity. I suspect that the Curators feature may even give rise to some new stars in this sphere of gaming popularity. Whether that and other features which were introduced in this new Discovery Update will sufficiently help users to filter through the platform's extensive list of games, has yet to be seen. Much of this would seem to be somewhat experimental.

All I can say is that both from a user and developer standpoint, I sincerely hope that Valve knows what they're doing.

- False Prophet