Steam Greenlight, the community-focussed approval system for indie games on Valve's Steam platform, is today celebrating its one year anniversary.
Valve's Gabe Newell spoke to Gamasutra about the system, its workings, and the future: "The immediate goal [of Greenlight] was to give us more data in the selection process as we ramp up the tools needed to get us to our longer term goal of improving the overall throughput of the system."
"Before Greenlight, folks would send mail to us mail or fill out the posted submission form, hope that someone saw it and liked it, and waited in the dark for a reply. While it is not perfect, Greenlight helped us pull that process out of the dark and help with the selection process."
Once the service started, it quickly descended into a popularity contest, and now Valve gets involved in the decisions regarding which games get added to Steam: "Votes on Greenlight provide a useful point of data in gauging community interest, but we're aware that votes alone may be an inexact form of gauging customer interest. So we also try to incorporate additional information we have about factors such as press reviews, crowd-funding successes, performance on other similar platforms, and awards and contests to help form a more complete picture of community interest in each title."
Newell finished up by saying: "Much of the evolution of Steam and Greenlight is driven by what the community of gamers and developers tell us they want to see made possible. Right now, we're focused on expanding the depth and breadth of our catalog. That expansion and addition of content is going to come with a need to innovate and iterate on how customers browse for games and evaluate potential purchases."
"Evolving our tools to allow us to publish more titles more frequently is the solution for the bottleneck. We're working on it, and the 100 [Greenlighted games batch] was a big step towards the long term goal. This latest batch is both a celebration and a stress test of our systems. Future batches may not be as large but, if everything goes smoothly, we should be able to continue increasing the throughput of games from Greenlight to the store."
100 games were greenlighted in one go yesterday, and another 50 are currently available at a discount in the celebratory sale. Head this way to see what games are available.