With the raging success of indie video game devs raising cash on Kickstarter, it was expected that Valve would move quickly to fire up its crowd-sourced Steam Greenlight platform.
The problem? Greenlight was quickly flooded with junk submissions.
According to Gamespy, Greenlight was so packed with inappropriate projects and outright fakes during the first week of operation that it was almost impossible for users to track down real game projects from indie developers.
One reason there were so many fakes was that Steam Greenlight lacked a project submission fee, and therefore, a viable deterrent to discourage inappropriate entries.
Fortunately, Valve recently removed the junk entries and instituted a $100 submission fee. While the new policy will certainly help reduce the number of crap submissions, $100 is pretty steep amount in terms of submitting a game concept that has no guarantee of going anywhere.
Interestingly, Valve says the revenue generated by the $100 submission fees will be donated to a charity known as Child’s Play, which provides games and toys to children in over 70 hospitals around the country.
“In the end, we’re very interested in maintaining an environment that is fair and beneficial to everyone involved, and one that fun and rewarding to join,” an official Valve rep explained. “And, of course, we’re going to keep iterating on this system and updating as we learn more about how the community and developers want to utilize it.”
Valve also reiterated that it intends to make Greenlight easier to navigate by creating smaller and more manageable project lists. However, the changes Valve is implementing may not be enough. As Gamespy points out, even with the new changes, Greenlight still has no way of listing what games are most popular among voters and how close the popular games are in terms of being chosen for production.
