For all its major successes, few will deny that Valve’s Greenlight scheme has hardly been the success the company hoped it might be. After multiple controversies born from a lack of policing, Valve itself announced that it would be killing off the system and replacing it with a better alternative. In order to achieve this goal, the company has approached two of Greenlight’s greatest critics, Jim Sterling and John “Totalbiscuit” Bain.
This was announced earlier today on each video game commentator’s Twitter feeds, posting images from Valve’s HQ. This was followed up several hours later by several responses from Sterling stating the following:
Wrapped with Valve. Seen and consulted on future Steam plans. I believe valuable ideas were exchanged. pic.twitter.com/s7JD6Z7W84— Jim RESISTerling (@JimSterling) March 30, 2017
No but we discussed studios like that and I'm pleased with what I heard.— Jim RESISTerling (@JimSterling) March 30, 2017
Quite pleased indeed. https://t.co/LMx8bHrfAV
I was very surprised. They asked me and @Totalbiscuit both here and really did listen.— Jim RESISTerling (@JimSterling) March 30, 2017
I have a bit of hope, but all remains to be seen. https://t.co/ozgumQGrqQ
Over the past several years both Sterling and Bain have repeatedly cited multiple failings of the system, with the former even creating a long running Youtube series focusing upon the more problematic releases. Often focusing upon the issues behind the system itself rather than merely the games which have been uploaded, this is their chance to hopefully change things for the better.
While I appreciate the thought of improving Greenlight, or removing it for something better, I don't really agree with the way Valve's apparently going about it.
ReplyDeleteForcing dev's to pay hundreds just to advertise on their site is a terrible idea, as is making people pre-buy the game before they even put it up. Removing the user reviews will have terrible consequences and will just turn steam into a sight where nobody will be able to tell what's good and what's not.
This is before acknowledging them putting Half Life 2: Episode 3 on this new system and claiming that if it gets 10 million copies sold, that they'll finally make it for real. What a terrible business practice.
For the record Bellarius, if you're curious about anything I said in that previous comment, it was just an April Fool's day joke.
ReplyDeleteI really don't know what Valve's planning on doing with the replacement for Greenlight but I really hope it's something better than what essentially amounts to an easy service for shovelware to get on their system.
Please, I honestly picked up on that quite quickly. Given our previous discussions and how much thought you tend to put into your statements, it seemed like an odd thing to say to be sure. Though, as for Greenlight's replacement, there are a few basic decent ideas that they've been thinking up. Most of them involve giving more power to curators and pushing to block asset flips or games bereft of launch.exe files. So, we'll likely still see some crap on there, but it will at least count as an actual game.
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