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Anyone who logged into Steam today would have struggled to miss the big Greenlight banner. If you're unfamiliar with it, it's a new avenue for indie developers to submit their games to Steam. Users vote for what they'd like to see become available and the popular ones are then judged by Valve. Here's more info.

I'm all in favour of this idea in theory. I'm looking forward to more indie games on Steam. In practice however, there's a clear problem; there are so many games submitted that it's impossible to be able to look through them all to judge them on their own merits. So I thought it would be good to have a thread where we can come to find interesting games people have highlighted. I have a couple to start with.

Towns - A fun game I bought around six months ago. It's still in alpha, but more in the 'being improved all the time' than the 'this isn't even a game yet' category. You start with a group of townsfolk who you have no direct control over, you just set tasks and watch them scurry around to complete them. You build houses and roads, make sure they have enough food, and tool them up with weapons and armour to explore the underground dungeons. It's unlikely to make a huge impression on the gaming world, but it deserves the wider audience Steam might give it. Worth an upvote.

Receiver - An experimental FPS from Wolfire Games - the guys behind the Humble Bundles, Lugaru and Overgrowth. It's was created for the 7-day FPS challenge, so it doesn't have a huge amount of content, but rather focuses on showing a different perspective of the genre. The player possesses a single pistol which is a seemingly fully realised version of it's real life counterpart (the gun, magazine and rounds can all be manipulated independently of one another). The architecture of the level itself is constant, but your spawn point, as well as the enemies, ammo and collectables are all randomly placed, so no two play-throughs will go exactly the same. There have been several updates to the game since the 7 day competition ended, but I'm not really sure how much Wolfire plan to work on the game. I think their focus will still be on Overgrowth. I'm not sure how Valve will feel about a bare-bones game like this, but I'm hoping the unique aspects of it will win over in the end.

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There is quite a few mspaint inspired thumbnails, which scares me a bit.

Fortunately, it's up to you* whether or not the game ends up on Steam!

*For large values of you.

I perused the listing when it first went live. Some neat stuff in there. http://www.thegreenlightbundle.com/ This bundle's entire purpose is to get the games upvoted on Steam. Try 'em out for cheap if you want. To be honest, though, most of them look kinda lame, at least on the surface. BUT significantly less lame than SOME of the trash on Steam, so... U:

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The profusion of outright terrible shit/things that shouldn't even be there because they aren't even playable yet is incredible. Not surprising in any way, but disgusting.

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Steam really needs to fix Greenlight.

The interface is horrible. The list is unsorted, and it's impossible to browse the list because things you saw on page 1 might also be shown on page 2 and 4. It's a mess.

And then there are of course those gamers that use Greenlight as their wishlist and add games that are not theirs.

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Orv: They said before it launched that it would be a place for games in all stages: just started, in progress, finished, etc.

They should do a better job of separating them, though.

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I voted up McPixel, because I really want that in my steam library. Otherwise, I don't really know anything about most games on the list and feel disingenuous voting for them one way or the other. Demos or something would be nice, but I suppose that's a lot to ask.

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The list is unsorted, and it's impossible to browse the list because things you saw on page 1 might also be shown on page 2 and 4. It's a mess.

Yeah this. I'll have another look when this is sorted, but it's completely stupid the way it is now. You click into an entry to read more about it, then hit "back" and the contents of the page are different. Paging only makes sense if returning to the same page number means you see more or less same stuff.

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I released my first for-sale game last year and IT IS NOW ON STEAM GREENLIGHT!

So far we have 90% of people like us, 10% of people don't, and we are 1% of the way to an "auto-approval", which right now seems like an absolute miracle. Most games are at 0% or 1%, and the only games I've seen higher are Project Giana at 3% and Project Zomboid at 5%.

The interface is kind of difficult, yeah. There's almost 500 games on there and flicking through the pages isn't useful any more. The search box blended into the background for me, I couldn't find it.

BOY, reading through every comment on internet dudes deciding whether or not your game is FIT TO BE SOLD sure is a painful experience!

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Oh shit, you made that? I totally bought and played that. I think it's charming as hell and super promising, but the controls continue to frustrate me. Any tips for making my guy not fall to his death all the time due to a poor understanding of the way my gun propels me?

At any rate, voted for it to be on Steam, 'cause I am fond of the game.

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Yeah- we had a really rough launch, so if you're one o the people who got it when it first came out then I personally apologize.

Shoot downwards before holding Jump to jump as high as possible.

Always be beaming slightly downward, don't beam completely to the left or right, unless only for a split second.

If you're flying forward too fast, shoot forwards to slow down.

The second half of the game (into Season 2 especially) is way better than the first, playing through it before Greenlight hit was really annoying me because the quality of the first 30 or so levels just does not match the other end

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I really hope the guy that posted Need For Speed: Most Wanted gets it on there. I know I upvoted that one. I then downvoted everything else so they wont be able to compete.

I then downvoted Reciever again because its a douchy game and I dont like it.

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For some reason I keep thinking about the game Space Pirates and Zombies, SPAZ. I remember it wasn't available on steam at first and it seems like after it picked up momentum it was available within a week or two. In contrast the guy that made DLC Quest had a sort of crushing video about his steam rejection even though he had momentum already on xbox live.

I feel like greenlight was designed to smooth over issues like this but i'm not going to click through 20 pages of stuff to vote on games I've never heard of. Seems like your game still needs to have momentum outside of steam for greenlight to work for you.

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YEP! The response to me was "It's not our policy to give you any feedback, but maybe if you got the game out there we could change our minds."

We've sold a few thousand of this game through our site, but to get the game out there means more than that, it means being Binding of Isaac or Closure or FTL, something people have heard of... OR just be a really great game.

So I guess Steam Greenlight is a "Show us that people are ready to start buying this, cos right now we don't believe you" test.

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So I guess Steam Greenlight is a "Show us that people are ready to start buying this, cos right now we don't believe you" test.

Yeah I think you hit the nail on the head.

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Greenlight seems to me like an idea that won't work well unless it somehow ends up with it's own embedded user base. Steam could incentify being a Greenlight user through achievements/leveling/etc similar to how Newgrounds handles content upvoting/downvoting, but I don't know if that would work with such a large number of games to be judged.

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Just how many votes do you need to get "accepted"? Even the most popular games there haven't more than 8% of the votes necessary to be accepted into Steam.

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Comeone guys, you expect every Steam user to immediately rush in there and start voting? How long has the feature even been open?

The downvoting needs to go, though.

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Yeah, downvoting is stupid, these aren't YouTube comments people actually put some effort in these!

I could swear it's been active for about 24 hours and look at, for example, Project Giana, it has over 4000 favorites, which means it's got at least 4000 votes, which is only 4%, so does this mean you need 100,000 votes to be admitted into Steam? Isn't that ridiculous for an indie game? If you had 100,000 fans, you'd probably already be on Steam anyway, right?

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I think Valve will change it. Like they change everything. It's an experiment, so shit will get better as time goes on.

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Yeah, downvoting is stupid, these aren't YouTube comments people actually put some effort in these!

I could swear it's been active for about 24 hours and look at, for example, Project Giana, it has over 4000 favorites, which means it's got at least 4000 votes, which is only 4%, so does this mean you need 100,000 votes to be admitted into Steam? Isn't that ridiculous for an indie game? If you had 100,000 fans, you'd probably already be on Steam anyway, right?

Well this is a service for games that did not get on Steam.

If you're saying a game that has 100,000 upvotes should already be on Steam and the judging team must've made a mistake- then yes, that's what Greenlight is.

Although yeah maybe they should actually drop the cieling by half, cos if Project Zomboid can't get there, then what's the point in this service, right?

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I don't really get how this is supposed to be exciting for me. There are already hundreds of games on Steam that are probably worth my time that I will never get to, why would I care to vote other games I'll likely never play into the store? Maybe that's cynical, but it's hard to get interested in something that provides me essentially no benefit.

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Maybe you have a favourite game / a game you are watching among those that want to be on Steam and that you want to be on Steam (to make it easier to buy/access the game). It's as simple as that.

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The thing is only the developer has the right to put it on Steam Greenlight, as a fan all you do is tell the developer about it and vote.

It seems people are downvoting just because Steam Greenlight keeps telling you how many games you haven't voted for. A silly excuse, but that's what it seems like from the Steam forums.

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