Will Steam Direct Publishing be Better than Greenlight?

Steam is without a doubt the largest and most popular digital distribution system on the PC.  Gamers love Steam, but the new Steam Direct publishing system has lead to quite a lot of heated debate on the internet. Will it be better and save Steam from it’s biggest problem?

Garbage Collection

“What problem?” did you say? Steam has a shovelware problem and so far nothing seems to have helped stave off the flood of terrible video games that end up on its virtual shelves.

Greenlight was meant to be a way for the community to provide quality control for new games, but it’s clear now that this has utterly failed. It was inevitable that Valve would try something to stem the tide of filth.

Steam Direct publishing is being released as a replacement for Steam Greenlight. It represents a different approach to evaluating games before they go on sale. To understand why this is happening and why Greenlight is a problem, you need to know how games make it onto Steam.

Getting the Green Light

Just like any other retailer, Steam has to decide if it will stock a particular item or not. When you’re dealing with a big publisher like Square Enix or Ubisoft, this isn’t a problem. AAA or otherwise big-name developers are obvious choices. If other major retailers are selling a game, it’s likely Steam will too.

But PC gaming is far more than just AAA studio releases. There is a massive and thriving indie game scene and there has to be some way to decide if these games should be on Steam or not.

The problem is that there are thousand and thousands of these small indie games being released every month. It would take more people than Valve could ever employ to evaluate each one. Which is where Greenlight comes in as a community-powered quality assurance system.

How Greenlight Works

Greenlight is pretty simple to understand. Indie developers who have a finished game submit it to the Greenlight process. All they have to do is provide several media items (like screenshots) and pay a small fee of $100.

The game then goes on Greenlight and users can see all the info that made up part of the submission. Based on that, each user gets to vote on whether they want to see that game or not. It sounds like a great idea, right?

Well, for a small indie getting their game on Steam is like Walmart deciding they’re going