Valve 'fully aware' of Steam Greenlight problems
Valve's Tom Bui explained the shortcomings of its Steam Greenlight program, and said it is actively working to fix them by making the processes more automated.
Steam Greenlight kicked off with the noble cause of making it easier for indie developers to publish games on the service. However, the overall experience has been far from perfect. Valve has acknowledged some of the shortcomings of the service, and said it is working on improving that process.
"We realize that we are failing in this regard and are working to fix it. We've made some good progress, but we aren't where we want to be yet," Valve's Tom Bui said. "However, because of this progress, we have been Greenlighting more titles within the past couple months (with a small pause for the Summer Sale), but it's still not enough and we are fully aware of that."
The full response by Bui can be seen on IndieStatik (via RPS).
According to Bui, Valve has been making a lot of changes to the back-end systems to automate the process, pointing out that its old system of bringing on partners actually involved fax machines. "Until we can ship everything we want, Greenlight is serving the purpose of helping us prioritize what we ship," he said. "It is not perfect by any stretch of the imagination and has a bunch of downsides (even with all its failing, it is much better than our old, opaque system). We are making improvements to Greenlight where we can, but right now we are focusing on what we can do to ship more games."
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replySteve Watts posted a new article, Valve 'fully aware' of Steam Greenlight problems.
Valve's Tom Bui explained the shortcomings of its Steam Greenlight program, and said it is actively working to fix them by making the processes more automated.-
The odd truth is that Valve is a victim of its success. It made itself to be THE destination for digital distribution. 'If you build it, they will come.' And they did. Too many. So, they tried to develop a system to manage the flood of indie or even just smaller games. They'll get it sorted out. It's a new business model, so there's going to be kinks to work out for a while.
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There are much bigger digital distribution platforms like the App Store. Companies like Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, etc, hire more people to deal with those sorts of things and scale up those departments as demand increases. The volume of iOS applications that need to be vetted for bugs, malware, and compliant UI, is astronomical, and manage this volume while maintaining very strict standards. As much crap as EA gets for Origin, the one thing I cannot fault them on is customer service. My account was hijacked on a Sunday and a customer service rep resolved the issue in less than an hour. While I haven't had to deal with issues on Steam, horror stories abound re: the time it takes for support tickets to get resolved.
The thing with Valve is that they want to maintain high standards for employee hires, which means hiring people who are too overqualified to do grunt work like vetting games for Steam.
Vetting apps is grunt work that requires lots of bodies. Valve's solution seems to try and automate systems as much as possible. Just look at VAC, the reporting system for DOTA, and the security system for Steam. All of those processes take working man-hours out of the equation. They generally do an excellent job of this. I especially like Steam's security. The downside is when you get into things like more focused customer support issues and vetting applications. That's where more bodies would be helpful given the volume of case-by-case issues that come at them.
Perhaps ways to better automate those sorts of more individualized tasks will come around someday. I don't see Valve throwing more people at Steam to fix the problem, not without them either outsourcing those tasks or changing their hiring standards (the latter is never gonna happen).-
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Gabe has a beanbag full of one hundred dollar bills.
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DIVE KICK!
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I always read that in the announcers voice
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It's amazing how shitty Greenlight is if Dive Kick didn't get approved.
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You know, there is a real fighting game coming to Steam, right? Skullgirls is going to be on in August.
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It has more than two buttons.
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Then you're part of the problem.
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If you don't think it's a problem that games get excluded for any reason other than them being bad games then yes, you're part of the problem. I didn't say you had to vote for it, but you should at least recognize when a problem exists regardless of whether it affects the games you care about or not.
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What you said is that you don't see it as a failure. What you're not seeing as a failure is a game being excluded for a reason other than being genuinely bad.
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This is a problem they need to throw bodies at but seem entirely unwilling to do so. This probably is related not to a financial issue but to their unwillingness to hire large numbers of people or anyone who doesn't fit into their "culture" (this was mentioned by that woman who worked in their former hardware department). The end result being they have no body to do any grunt work such as reviewing hundreds of games to weed out the crap.
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I'm curious what it really hurts them to just let crap through. I guess eventually it makes it more difficult to find titles with a ton of shit out there, but they could solve that any number of ways.
They don't really have a reputation riding on it since they are just a service, I would think all they need to do is just make sure the code doesn't contain viruses or blow up the user's computer-
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If you think this somehow keeps crappy games off Steam, I'd like to invite you to go play Ride to Hell: Retribution.
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But the problem isn't quality. Steam has tons of terrible shit, but those publishers can pay for it. Greenlight is for people who can't, and yeah, if they just let the floodgates open it would be pretty bad. So I see that.
They should just turn Greenlight into a separate marketplace. Change the rules and let it all be governed by the market. If your game is popular or whatever, then let it be promoted to Steam (Greenlit). If not then it stays there in that walled off marketplace. If devs price their shitty game too high then nobody buys. It just needs to be separated and walled off from Steam. I don't think it's that hard.
I don't see why they wouldn't. They created a market for fucking trading cards where Valve takes a piece of the 15cent action. Why not this?-
I like this idea from my standpoint as a user and potential developer but I would imagine that from Valve's standpoint there's a nontrivial cost in terms of hosting to just let absolutely anything in.
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Don't they have to pay to to be put on Greenlight? It's a trivial amount in the grand scheme of things, but use that money to host. Setup quotas and if the quotas aren't hit at they get delisted (and have to pay again). Valve could have different pay scales, I would think. Pay the minimum and you're in Greenlight - you can sell your game etc. Pay more and you get access to <feature> (e.g., Steamworks).
As it is, Steamworks is a raw deal with Greenlight anyway since you have to get Greenlit to have that available.
I'm just floating all this. I don't really know the ins and outs of what all it would take. But it seems to me that everyone is just overthinking this. The walled off marketplace seems like the easiest solution.
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"but those publishers can pay for it"
No one pays to be on Steam.
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Also bare in mind that when my game was went live on steam we got a week on the front page. That is a huge huge thing. I'm buying a brand new car just from my share of the money of that month. That is not something that can just be done for every game out there. There has to be a selection process.
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Probably because no one they hire chooses to work on it.
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Valve's who?!
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Ba Ba Bui
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haha
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I'm posting with a throwaway for obvious reasons, but from a developer standpoint, there are huge issues with Greenlight that aren't even touched upon in that response.
First, everything goes through one single person: Alden Kroll. It's all the problems of the old system of being subject to the whims of an individual, but with the addition of a popularity contest that forces us to compete for even the possibility of being subject to his whims.
Second, games that get released are NOT removed from the Greenlight charts! So I have to compete with games that are already out for the coveted high rankings.
Third, Valve doesn't even curate Greenlight beyond the initial fee. There are games on Greenlight being pushed by people who do NOT own the rights, yet Valve does nothing despite being contacted with proof! Example: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=95919297
I'm fed up. Greenlight is where games die. It does more harm than good.-
Seems like that company does own the localization rights for that game, from reading the comments?
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Hi AnonGL,
Copyright infringement is a serious legal matter, and we address any cases that are brought to our attention. However, we need to follow formal process for such complaints. If you are the copyright holder of the game you are suggesting is falsely posted, please use our DMCA-compliant form to file a formal Notice of Copyright Infringement so that we may proceed in a formal manner with addressing the issue: https://steamcommunity.com/dmca/create/
Also, there is a whole group here at Valve that is deeply involved in the design and development of Steam and Greenlight, and in the selection and Greenlighting of titles. I just happen to be the guy posting many of the blog posts. We all look at a bunch of data in selecting titles to be Greenlit and try to make the best decisions with the information we have.
Any game that has been Greenlit is no longer competing for votes.
-Alden-
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