Valve Wants Steam to be More Open, Plans to Remove Steam Greenlight Election Process

Fearing that heavy company involvement is causing a dictatorship, Gabe Newell hopes to create a more user-driven Steam.


As if the news of upcoming films based popular franchises Half Life and Portal weren’t enough, Gabe Newell recently spoke to Gamasutra about making massive changes to their current Steam service.

These changes would mean putting more power into the hands of Steam users, removing the current approval system to create something akin to, say, Reddit.

“One of the worst characteristics of the current Steam system is that we’ve become a bottleneck. There’s so much content coming at us that we just don’t have enough time to turn the crank on the production process of getting something up on Steam. So whether we want to or not, we’re creating artificial shelf space scarcity.

“Right now we have inside of Steam we have a dictatorship. It’s probably bad for the Steam community, in the long run, not to move to a different way of thinking about that. In other words, we should stop being a dictator and move towards much more participatory, peer-based methods of sanctioning player behavior.”

Newell also mentioned that Greenlight is “a bad example of an election process” and Valve has plans to “do away with Greenlight completely.

Source: GIBiz

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