While Greenlight is a faint memory for some (myself included), the gateway to Valve’s almighty Steam service still exists, though it isn’t quite the impenetrable guardian it once was. Due to the way Greenlight’s admission fee is collected, it actually comes up as a product on Steam, if you search for it.
The page itself is unremarkable — the $US100 “game” exists purely so budding developers can easily purchase access to Greenlight, without Steam having to set up a special system for it. In fact, if you log into an account that’s bought the fee, you can attempt to install it:
Of course, pressing Next just throws out an error.
Currently, “SGSF” has 19 positive reviews… and a single negative one. What does that review say?:
The entire service is a mess. Next to nothing good has come out of this.
Greenlight isn’t a barrier its a mild inconvenience. Good indie games used to do really well on steam, but now they just get buried under an avalanche of terrible. Steam needs to go back to curating their service before it ends up like Android and Apple’s app store.
On the bright side it gives money to charity.
I think what gets me is the popular user-defined tags — among “Game Development”, “Open World” and “Funny” is “Illuminati”. Half-Life 3 confirmed?
Steam Greenlight Submission Fee [Steam]
Comments
5 responses to “Steam’s Greenlight Submission Fee Has 19 Positive Reviews (And 1 Negative One)”
Add an extra 0 to the submission fee. should reduce the quantity of shovelware by a fair bit.
That can also deter people who have made an excellent game but have a very low budget.
It could, and I honestly feel bad for those people, but go take a look at the state of Greenlight right now. Seriously, go watch the latest submissions. The majority are people submitting their very first attempt at programming a game, the sort of stuff that would even look cheap on itch.io. Hey, I just finished te first chapter of a Unity tutorial, to Greenlight!
I think anyone who’s genuinely made an excellent game shouldn’t have trouble raising a bit of money to get it on Greenlight, and if upping the fee stops “games” like Blackscreen Simulator 2016 from being voted for (not making that up), it can only benefit Steam overall.
Seems like a legit complaint to be honest.
There is allot of early access junk on steam, and games that go straight from Alpha build to final without much change but the community generally gives the review ratings so people should be able to spot the bad from the good.
If you’re buying stuff without checking the review rating and feedback then its your own damn fault for being daft!