(Opinion post)
For the uninformed, Steam Greenlight is a platform for distributing independently developed video games on the PC. For a $100 fee, you can put your game - no matter how awesome or, more likely, sucky, it is - up for review by the internet, and potentially up for sale on Steam.
Problems
Mainly, it's caused an insane market saturation problem. Standing out among thousands of other games is hard, even if lots of them are either horribly unfinished... or suck. Worse, many of these unfinished/crappy games have trailers that look good, or descriptions and "vision" that sounds great, but no gameplay footage to back it up.
It also wrecks the consumer experience even if the game does get voted in. Too many early access games are too unfinished to be worth playing, yet get voted in. Some of these have dedicated developers that finish their games on time and really do involve the customers in their development process, but some other games do not, and it's an unfortunate gamble to have to take. "Involving people in the development process" has become a token excuse for releasing something that isn't worth the money people pay for it.
Worse, some people say that customers are responsible for researching a product before they buy it, and that customers vote with their wallets; if it sells/is popular, it's good. What this ignores is the fact that game companies have become downright dishonest lately. Jim Sterling goes into more depth on this issue, and while his focus has been more on the AAA studios, I can say from personal experience that a few recommendations on Steam, some good screenshots and a pretty trailer can make a game out to be something that it's not.
People simply don't have the time to spend playing the hundreds of knock-offs and unfinished games, poorly made platformers done in GameMaker or Unity, stupid casual games and point-and-click adventure games. I do like retro graphics occasionally, and I like the convenience of game engines as much as the next person. Only, now anyone and their cat can make a game and throw it out there to saturate the marketplace. Sometimes democracy is good, but sometimes it's really lousy.
Solution?
So, I've been thinking about how they could fix it. I feel like the absolute #1 way to fix it is simple: increase the cost. $100 isn't nothing, but it's a low enough barrier to entry that some highschooler who makes a tetris remake in computer class can probably afford to give it a spin. A sufficiently talented highschooler who makes a really cool tetris remake that's worthy of being on Steam should be able to get someone to front him, oh, $5000. But most people won't throw five grand away if they feel like their game seriously needs work. And since most game projects get thrown out halfway through, that will reduce the spam by a huge amount.
The second thing to do would be add quality control besides just the community. Whether via community approved moderators, paid staff at Valve, or some other approach, having a human look at every game proposal and ensure that it has a trailer with gameplay, some evidence of being complete or nearly complete, and to apply general quality controls would continue to cut down on the spam for those few remaining people who are willing to pay $5000 to submit a crappy game, or those who have a rich uncle.
The price point wouldn't deter developers. Putting a game on steam is a ludicrously profitable event for any developer, and right now, though the odds of success are slim, many developers do it with half finished games as a sort of lottery ticket approach to distribution. Raising the price would make them really mean it.
More than $5000 might even be acceptable. I know that I personally don't have 5 Gs to blow, but if I had a game that was Steam-worthy, I would definitely ask around for some startup money. You might be excluding a few gems, but for the price of eliminating an awful lot of garbage games, I think a few gems lost would be more than worth it.
Problem with the Solution
Some people's immediate first reaction when I propose this is that five grand is "a lot of money". A) no, it's really not, and B) if some people can't afford it and can't find any money at all, even if their game is solid gold (which I doubt, if those are the circumstances), so be it. They can find a following through other means if their game is worthy, or not; not every game deserves to be sold, even if it's good. That's just how market saturation works. Sorry.
No, the real issue is that this doesn't solve the problem on the store itself. Even if it reduced the number of games on Greenlight by 90%, that's still a lot of games, most of which are now good; the next "top 50 to get Greenlit" will happen the same as always, and players will be suddenly hit by a flood of games, most of which they aren't interested in or don't have the time for.
The most dictatorial solution would be to relegate all indie games to the indie games section: keep them out of the main store page and the genre pages. This would probably make some players and big studios happy, but would ultimately be, I suspect, very very bad for indie gaming, Valve's press, and Greenlight.
I'm also not particularly enthralled by what I've heard Valve is already planning on doing to fix the issue, which sounds like a minor variation on the theme above.
At the end of the day, I don't really know what a better solution would be. Maybe a dictatorial solution to a democratic problem is the best thing. Oh sweet irony.
