Valve ‘fully aware’ of Steam Greenlight issues

Valve has openly admitted that there are a number of problems with its community voting platform Steam Greenlight.

Developer Tom Bui said Valve was failing to ship enough games on its digital distribution service through the initiative, and stated it was “not perfect by any stretch of the imagination”.

He added that the company realised it had a responsibility to make more games available for release, regardless of the reasons why there wasn’t, and claimed the firm was working on ways to streamline and automate parts of the submission and release process.

“We realise that we are failing in this regard and are working to fix it,” said Bui, as spotted by IndieStatik.

“We’ve made some good progress, but we aren’t where we want to be yet. However, because of this progress, we have been Greenlighting more titles within the past couple of months (with a small pause for the Summer sale), but it’s still not enough and we are fully aware of that.

“A lot of the changes we’ve been making are not that visible to those outside the system, but what we’re basically trying to do is automate a lot of our processes (if you can believe it, our old process for on-boarding new partners actually involved fax machines) and putting tools into the hands of the developers, instead of having to have a team of people on our side do things.

"We’ve also made the Steamworks SDK available so that developers can take a look and begin their integration before getting on Steam.”

Bui concluded by saying that until Valve could ship everything it wanted, even though it had been speeding up the process recently, Greenlight was serving the purpose of helping it prioritise what it can ship.

“It is not perfect by any stretch of the imagination and has a bunch of downsides (even with all its failing, it is much better than our old, opaque system). We are making improvements to Greenlight where we can, but right now we are focusing on what we can do to ship more games."