Valve: Kickstarter Ensures New Kinds of Games, Greenlight Needs a Bunch of Work

In a video capturing a community visit to Valve’s Seattle HQ, co-founder and manging director Gabe Newell revealed his thoughts on Kickstarter, along with improvements that could be made to Steam Greenlight. “The Kickstarter thing is great. If you think of what a publisher’s doing, all they’re doing is holding onto gamers’ money for a little while and then attaching a bunch of strings. You guys should take a seat at a publisher’s meeting. It’s pretty grim.

“So that’s one of the things I think the whole games industry will benefit from, gamers having more control over where money is going in terms of funding projects. There’ll still be a bunch of projects that fail, but at least they’ll be more interesting failures. And you won’t just get the same damn game over and over and over.”

Speaking on Greenlight, Newell admitted that “we have a bunch of work to do.

“First of all, there’s way too much between a game developer and getting something on Steam. It’s really because we’ve been kind of stupid about the amount of work we have to do, so just to process everyone applying on Steam is 20 or 30 peoples’ work. We need to make that process a lot more efficient.”

Check out the full video below.