Steam Greenlight Review

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Review of Steam Greenlight powered by the Slant community.

Steam Greenlight is a system that enlists the community's help in picking some of the new games to be released on Steam. Developers post information, screenshots, and video for their game and seek a critical mass of community support in order to get selected for distribution. Steam Greenlight also helps developers get feedback from potential customers and start creating an active community around their game during the development process.

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Pros

Pro
Greenlight Concepts section can help get early feedback

The Concepts section of Greenlight allows incomplete projects to be put on display and receive feedback, including mock-voting as if they were full Greenlight submissions. This can be a valuable tool for refining design, presentation and marketing techniques.

Pro
The largest and best-known PC distribution service

Steam's user base is over ten times that of the next nearest competitor, making it by far the largest single marketplace.

Cons

Con
Registration costs $100

In order to submit games to Greenlight at all, you must first purchase a $100 activation for your Steam account. Note that this does not represent profit for Valve: all proceeds are donated to charity. It is strictly a barrier to entry.

Con
Approval process is a competitive market

The Greenlight submissions with the most votes are approved in arbitrary batches, generally 50 to 100 per month. No metric is used other than raw quantity of positive votes.