What better way to benefit both a distributor and its customers than to let the customers vote on games to be added to the service? Theoretically, gamers choose the most deserving games that they want to pay money for and the distributors put up the most likely to be purchased titles. It's a perfect idea. At heart. In practice, it's shaky.
There are over 1300 Greenlight games. 1300. Why? Because there is almost no filter (other than against troll posts and the most crappy of crap submissions). Of that, 56 have been greenlit and only 31 released.
My first complaint goes to some of the titles greenlit. Not that they're bad games at all; but the absurdity of them going through the greenlight process is painful. For starters; Postal 2. Postal mother slapping 2. Why would that need to go through the greenlight process? Postal 3 already has a place on Steam...why does P2 need to go through Greenlight? As an established piece, it should have gone through the professional channels and kept from drawing attention to real up and coming indie titles. Throw in ports of successful XBL games, other developers that don't exactly need charity in trying to get their games out, and games that are only getting attention because some internet celebrity featured it once or 80 times, and you have a good chunk of the titles coming from the sort of developers that Greenlight was NOT intended for.
Another issue is that there are so many "atmosphere" games. One of them says that it "isn't just a game; it's an experience that will change your life!"....no wait, that's what exactly all of them say. "The Light" even tries to make up its mandatory 3 bulletpoints, and the first two are "relaxing atmosphere" and "beautiful environment." As if a relaxing atmosphere is going to look like a bowl of turds. Some of these titles don't even offer up a shred of suggestion as to what the "interactive story" is even about; from what's shown, they just look like 3D art projects and by the descriptions are simply made by people that don't have any idea what to do with it but let you run around.
Gamers don't know what's good for them. These "atmosphere games" don't offer up anything but some pretty pictures of atmosphere and promise "uhhhh....some sorta interactive story thing" and it gets lit. Why? Because people scream "GROOO TAKE DAT CAL UV DOOTY! STORIZ AND STUF!" People see something going against the grain (lol, right, going against the grain by following the sea of upcoming atmosphere "games") with pretty graphics and they assume it will be great, approving it over unique titles (that promise actual gameplay and specific stories) and throwing money at it via kickstarter.
And finally, there is just so much repetition. How many people are going to vote/preview 1300 games, of which so many are basically the same as the last, other than pretentious people like myself? The previously mentioned blind "GROOO TAKE DAT CAL UV DOOTY!" crowd, people who want more Minecraft knockoffs, and people looking to vote for the most AAA looking games offered. Steam should have been more involved in filtering what went in to the greenlight candidacy.
The result is something full of well intention but riddled with logical flaws.
The friendly folks over at Razer recently sent us their full size Kishi Ultra mobile gaming controller, and this thing didn't disappoint.
VGChartz's Mark Nielsen: "Upon finally finishing Devil May Cry 5 recently - after it spent several years on my “I’ll play that soon” list - I considered giving it a fittingly-named Late Look article. However, considering that this was indeed the final piece I was missing in the DMC puzzle, I decided to instead take this opportunity to take a look back at the entirety of this genre-defining series and rank the entries. What also made this a particularly tempting notion was that while most high-profile series have developed fairly evenly over time, with a few bumps on the road, the history of Devil May Cry has, at least in my eyes, been an absolute roller coaster, with everything from total disasters to action game gold."
Me leaving it out should be telling of my thoughts on it. Better than 2 as a DMC game.
Still a good game though.
3,1,4,5 to me, never played 2. 5 gameplay is amazing but level design was really disappointing to me, just a bunch of plain arenas, the story felt like a worse written rehash of the 3rd and the charater models looked weird ( specially the ladies ). Another problem with 5 was that there was not enough content for 3 charaters so I could never really familiarize with any of them
2.
Dmc.
4.
5.
1.
3.
God DMC2 was an awful game.
And in case this isn't obvious it goes worst to best
Order changes depending on your focus. I tend to focus on gameplay/fun factor, so...
5, 3, 1, 4, 2.
I really didn't like 4 but commend Dante's weapon diversity. The retreading of old ground was pretty unacceptable to me.
But even then... Still more enjoyable than 2 for me
TSA go hands on with the beta for Inazuma Eleven: Victory Road, but how is the game transitioning to the post-stylus era?
Seriously, "The Light" page is a laughing riot.
It's basically this:
'[video of him walking around one single building]
[video of him looking at writing and videos on the wall, pushing a cabinet, a switch, and a door open]
[a bunch of pictures of the one single building he made]
It's not just a game! It's an interactive philosophical blah blah blah blah.
Travel to a world without humans! Because I don't know how to create AI anyway!
Key features:
-Atmosphere
-Really, really good atmosphere
-interactive story of some kind'
.....It's like a substance VACUUM. And THAT was greenlit.
Steam rushed Greenlight out in an attempt to curb indies going to Kickstarter and (I imagine) to cut down on the indies flocking to Nintendo and Sony.
But yeah, your blog is spot on. Greenlight is pointless. It's just a way for Steam to put indie talent in the limelight, and one thing indie devs love more than a profitable business model is a spotlight for their ego to shine.
While I do see the point you're trying to make here, I have some counterpoints.
1. While I agree that Postal 2 is definitely not a great choice for an indie-centric part of Steam, Steam itself is apparently not necessarily exclusive to indie devs or indie type games. Black Mesa Source as well as a remake of Portal using the Portal 2 engine are also part of greenlight (the former of which has already received a greenlight). WayForward has Shantae currently part of the system but frustratingly has not received enough votes.
It's less about indies and more about what the community wants.
2. "Gamers don't know what's good for them." Hey, it's their money. If they want to greenlight something and waste money on it, that's their choice at the end of the day. It's no different than kickstarter.
I'm not particularly fond of greenlight either. It has some good ideas and can be improved upon, similarly to when Steam initially launched.
Greenlight is horrible right now but I think Valve can improve it
Oh my goodness, green light is not perfect I get that since it lacks a transparency of how games get closer to getting green light, the demos of certain games are not linked to green light, lack of release date for green light games meaning is hard to tell when a green light game gets released. What I do like is how realistic is set up meaning gamers get all kinds of games from classics, ios games, indies, and first time game proyects from game developers and publishers. From hidden gems, to utter rubbish. Guess what gamers get to create their own pool of games and showing Valve this pool of games is worthy of being in your service or I will play this pool of games on Linux or Windows not on my steam account. This is what the console corporations go through. They select which games are worthy to be on their console and yes they too go through garbage titles to get to those hidden gems. So while not perfect it shows how much control Valve gives to its customers something that corporations like Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo would never do :-P