Gabe Newell Admits Steam Greenlight Needs Work

Gabe Newell, the leader of Valve, has admitted that the company has much work to do on its Greenlight service for Steam in order to create a better link between the players and the video game projects they want to support.

Speaking to visitors from 4chan, the executive said, “I don’t think we did a super good job. 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 – just to process everything applying on Steam is 20 or 30 peoples’ work. We need to make that process much more efficient,” he continued.

Valve is interested in making sure that there are more ways for developers to promote their games and to ask fans for feedback and Newell also wants to make it easier for studios to submit their projects as soon as they are completed.

He also talked about the Kickstarter crowd funding service, saying, “the Kickstarter thing is great. Gamers are funding the money anyhow. If you think of what a publisher’s doing, all they’re doing is holding onto gamers’ money for a little while and attaching a bunch of strings.”

The system will be a great tool of the video game industry because it gives players more control over how they spend their money, while also showing developers what kind of games can get funding.

Since it was launched, earlier this year, Greenlight has received a number of updates and Valve is moving quickly, listening to feedback from users and developers and implementing requested changes.

It will be interesting to see whether projects that have received money via Kickstarter will also apply for Steam Greenlight in order to get more exposure and gain a wider player base.