After just over a day of being live, we’ve seen an astonishing level of interest and participation in Steam Greenlight, along with some great feedback from the community and developers. As of this posting, there are 622 games posted to Steam Greenlight, including everything from early concepts to high quality and polished gaming experiences. Members of the Steam Community have jumped in and voted over 2.3 Million times for games of all kinds, indicating their preferences for what they are interested in seeing made available on Steam.
As we expected, we’ve received a ton of feedback from customers and developers, and we plan to keep working on Greenlight to add features toward making it as useful, inviting, and rewarding as possible. We wanted to take a moment to post this blog entry to discuss a few topics that have been at the top of people’s minds.
Discoverability has been mentioned as a problem more than a few times, and we have plans to address this. A first step in that direction has been the addition of “Friends’ Favorites” view, which you can find in the right column of the main page. If you have friends that are participating and marking items as favorites, you’ll be able to see what it is that they’re finding interesting and also influence them by marking items yourself. And we have more updates like this in the works, in an effort to improve discoverability of games that you’re more likely to be interested in. We expect to do more as we learn more.
We also need your help in policing Greenlight. The community has already been active in reporting fraudulent or gag items. To help keep control on this volume of bad submissions, please us the ‘report’ function to call out games that you think are fraudulent, offensive, or otherwise inappropriate.
Lots of people wonder about the progress bar that appears on each game in Greenlight. When we announced a month ago, we talked publicly about the fact that we had no idea how many people would come, or how the community’s behavior might impact the overall votes on items. With that in mind, we set the ‘goal’ number of positive ratings to be pretty high, which has resulted in it appearing that only a small amount of progress has resulted from all the voting of the community so far. But we’re adjusting this number downward (we’ve done it twice so far) as we get a better feel for traffic volume, and as a result we’re seeing games rising in progress. We’ll continue adjusting this number over the next few days, so you may occasionally see everyone’s progress bar jump up in percentage.
This is just beginning. We plan to work hard to make this an area that developers and fans are excited to come and connect and where everyone feels rewarded for having had a hand in discovering and highlighting the games that should be made available on Steam.
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Getting this well balanced is undoubtedly a big undertaking and I'm very pleased to see you go about it in such a community driven approach. The huge influx of games is causing discoverability issues as you mention.
Suggestions:
- Forward / Backward nav buttons. Can bypass already voted on games.
- Easy to show games already voted on and the ability to filter that.
- Require a playable build. A great feature would be to give developers access to your API and actually allow publishing builds to a Greenlight Demo Area. More demanding on your servers yes, but I think it would effectively limit submissions to projects more likely to actually get done.
- Not to happy about Friends' Favorites system. I believe this would lead to who could muster up more support and polarize to fewer games getting more votes, and not mimic the opinion of gamers if assessed independently by each individual.