Post
Valve's 2012-2017 community-voted curation system that opened Steam to indie games but also flooded it with shovelware.
Before Greenlight, Steam was curated by Valve itself. Greenlight let developers pitch games that the community then voted up. It cracked the door open for indies — breakthrough titles like Hotline Miami, Stanley Parable, and Risk of Rain got in through it — but also let through asset flips, memes, and outright scams. Valve replaced it with Steam Direct in 2017, a $100-per-game fee model that shifted the economics again.
Example
Hotline Miami, The Stanley Parable, and McPixel all launched via Greenlight. The 'Greenlight era' was peak chaos for Steam's store, with bundles of low-quality games clogging discovery. Steam Direct succeeded Greenlight in mid-2017.
Why it matters
Greenlight was the first mass-scale experiment in democratizing game publishing, and its failures shaped every subsequent discussion about curation versus openness. The store-quality problem it exposed still defines Steam's algorithm priorities today.
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