Is Steam Greenlight feeling the pressure?

This week, Steam removed a game from sale from their Greenlight service — a system that enlists the community’s help in picking some of the new games to be released on Steam. Earth: Year 2066 was quoted, by its creator, to be a “first person sci-fi apocalyptic open-world RPG game inspired by such video games as Fallout and Half-Life 2.”.

Steam’s overall quality is only as high as the lowest entry barrier they put up. Greenlight has the potential to allow truly great ideas come to fruition but stories like this, and how easily it occurred, sour what can be a great resource for young aspiring game makers. Instead, atrocities like Earth: Year 2066 can trick their way to receiving funds, and well meaning games like Towns try to run before they can walk.

Even update posts about games that have gone through to possible world wide distribution refer to them as “batches”, seemingly taking away anything special about the fact someones work is now up for sale – almost as if the head Greenlighter is bored of his job. This can only weaken the concentration of great games Steam offers, and weakens Steam itself.