Steam Greenlight, for everything that it’s done, has been much maligned throughout its existence. It was too hard to get games on! Great games were being forgotten because literally nobody ever plays a game that’s not on Steam. Then, they made it too easy to get games on—any unscrupulous developer who promised free keys for Greenlight votes could get their garbage game approved. For every smash hit, there were ten trash games that made it and ten great games that were missed.
Valve has recognized these issues, and that’s why they’ve decided to abandon Greenlight in favor of a new format: Steam Live Indie Games!
Steam Live Indie Games is an all-new concept that’s sure to be a success. It’s a great balance between the traditional model requiring official approval, as seen on sites like Steam and Desura, and the completely free model of 100% approval seen on places like itch.io and the Android app store. Everything on SLIG will be user-driven, which is something we’ve definitely not seen in previous indie game publishing services.
Only quality games will be approved, as every submission is guaranteed to be thoroughly tested. We’re sure that everyone on the service will follow the guidelines, and any abuse or neglect will be properly reported. Approval wait times will also be sped up in comparison to the old Greenlight way, as games won’t need thousands of votes like before. Instead, they’ll only need a few dozen approvals by dedicated and caring fellow developers who surely won’t mind if they find a game-breaking bug during the final boss fight and have to test the entire game again a week later.
Valve’s innovation and ingenuity in the videogame publishing scene is really shining through with Steam Live Indie Games, and we’re looking forward to the flood of high-quality titles that we’ll be seeing from the new service. We here at GameCola, for one, are excited to enter this new era of indie game publishing.
