Steam Greenlight, what do you think?

[Mr Robville]

I'm sure you are all familliar with Steam's Greenlight service that allows indie developers to publish their (work in progress) games a lot easier.

The concept is great, however, in reality it turns out to be the toilet of the gaming industry as far as I'm concerned. Basically anyone that needs a quick cash grab can download some assets, smack them together in Unity, and submit their "game" as early access with some fancy description involving the words "survival" "next gen" "realistic" "procedurally generated" "simulation" and "immersion".
People are even allowed to upload stuff like "Rock simulator" "Grass Simulator" and "Air Control", as if there is absolutely no quality control at Steam whatsoever.

And this is absolutely a great shame I think. Because loads of people including me have not a bit of faith left in any early access or Greenlight game- resulting in true developers with actual good games having trouble earning any credibility or money.
It also seems that early access is just an excuse to deliver an unfinished and buggy product without having to ever fix it since about 95% of all early access games never get completed.

I am actually thinking about trying to exploit this.
Let's say I would open up Unity3D, and immediately export the project without ever adding any content and then releasing it under the name "Silence Simulator" with a fancy description written like "Silence Simulator is the new generation of psychological survival simulation. Explore the immersive world of silence with realistic graphics and procedurally generated worlds. etc. etc."

When players would open up the game they get nothing but a black screen. It actually wouldn't surprise me if Steam allows me to upload something like that.
Only the $90,- license fee is what is holding me back at the moment.

I have a feeling that if Steam refuses to take any quality control and the flood of crappy "indie games" together with the mediocre AAA games *Cough* The Order 1886 *Cough* Evolve *Cough* COD *Cough* Sims *Cough* it could actually cause a new video game crash like back in 1983, which was also caused by the vast amount of poor quality video games which made every consumer lose faith in the entire gaming industry. Exactly the same thing is happening now.

What do you guys think about this?
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[AsaSK]

I'm fairly sure Steam Greenlight's only form of quality-control is double clicking the .exe to see if it starts.. beyond that is anyone's guess.

Mack has a fantastic little rant about it in this video review of a simply terrible Greenlight game..

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The official Mafioso Mod thread

[Hunter]

Beats me, I'm not exactly sure when the last time I bought a game was. Might have been Mount & Blade in 2009? I thought I bought one after that, but I can't remember what that would be.

Steam I just don't like. I don't like downloading stuff I paid for, I don't like proprietary formats. If you need any explanation, look at what happened to GameSpy.

So basically I download stuff I'm interested in whether it's free or not. A few commercial games I liked and intend to pay for at some point like Psychonauts, others I thought were mediocre and I won't waste my money. But I tend to play more free games now. Doing Heroine's quest...I don't really like adventure games too much, but it's a beautiful game.

Wow, that was a tangent you probably didn't want to read...

Um, so my point was that even the commercial stuff you mentioned, the "AAA" games, whatever the hell that means, isn't necessarily any good. Sophisticated, yea, large, yea, popular, perhaps. Good? Meh. Sequels are usually not a good thing in terms of quality or gameplay. Once they might have been, because of how technology was changing, but these days one knows if a game was great, it won't be matched by some derivitave work.

blah blah blah