Greenlight itself still has problems but Valve has already shown they are quick to respond to issues so I expect it to continue to improve.

Where do you get your information about the internal income source for the reviewer salaries?

The indie games community in particular is an example where lots of 'outsiders' with very limited access to resources are able to build interesting games that speak loudly and provide experiences people have never seen before. Many of those people cannot afford even an extra $100 to submit a game to a service like Greenlight just for a chance to share it with people (the same complaint has often been lodged against competitions like the IGF), and end up having to beg fans to help them handle it.

For someone earning minimum wage, a $100 donation - which seems tiny to me, used to Silicon Valley salaries - is over a day's worth of take-home pay.

A fee this large skews the effort involved in a Greenlight submission such that it is dramatically in favor of people for whom money does not mean much, and has the unfortunate effect of excluding developers who are perfectly willing to invest TIME into their games but do not have extra money to give away just to get into a public voting competition. The games are not worse just because the authors are poor.

Note that services like Apple and Microsoft's marketplaces at least provide some value for your $99: They host your game, they perform basic quality certification, etc. In this case you aren't getting as much for the expense.

EDIT: Some additional thoughts:

Offloading the fees directly onto charity means that the impact of a potential chargeback (most likely to come from a jerk who is looking to put fake entries up for laughs) is more dramatic than it would be otherwise. Now the bill for a chargeback is potentially being sent to the charity (though I'm sure in this case Valve would choose to eat the fees.)

If the goal is merely to filter out joke submissions, the fee does not need to be remotely as high as $100. SomethingAwful uses a much lower cost for forum registrations which does help to filter out noise.

On the other hand, SomethingAwful is proof that a fee is not sufficient to keep trolls, unkind individuals, stupid people and all-around jerks away from your community. Valve can set the fee as high as they want and bad things will still happen.

The problems that currently afflict Greenlight require a serious approach to moderation and a serious approach to content discovery. Right now their approach to both is lackluster at best: The only way to discourage poor behavior on the part of a game creator is the Report button, while poor behavior on the part of commenters generates zero retribution (the most a creator can do is ban them from their game page). Game discovery is nonexistent as there is a single randomly-sorted list of games that reshuffles itself as you page through, making it impossible to simply browse. Even something as simple as 'people who upvoted this game also liked' is not present here.

At present Greenlight is basically a popularity contest, with a group of around ~15 games currently boasting visitor counts in the hundreds of thousands with the rest of the games on the service sitting around 5 to 10 thousand. If Valve's goal was a popularity contest, it makes the idea of paying money to participate all the more ridiculous.

If you have a solid game, you should be able to sell enough copies off of greenlight to pay for the fee.

I don't think there will be much issue with chargebacks. People might make them, but unless the credit card companies are completely off-the-ball they will treat a donation to charity as a donation to charity. But maybe I'm too optimistic there.

Greenlight is supposed to be a popularity contest. All the games get thousands of views which means good games are not easily missed. Then people take the good ones and share them to friends and friends of friends and blogs and news sites etc.

Again, for someone like you or me, that money probably doesn't matter, but I know a few devs who have spent time homeless. It's not exactly a profitable line of work to be in.

Re: Chargebacks:

For Valve to know that you donated, the payment will probably have to be processed by Valve.

This makes it more likely that CC companies will honor a chargeback, because Valve has an abysmal customer service record that includes explicitly telling customers that chargebacks are illegal (when they're not only legal, but appropriate in cases where Valve refuses to refund customers for nonfunctional products).

I do agree that it is unlikely to be a big issue.

Regarding the sales I have to say: The increase in traffic is absolutely astounding. We made more at $3.50 in one day than we made at $20 over many, many, months. It was essentially four months of income in a night. If it wasn't super-profitable for everyone else, why in the world would they keep doing it sale after sale?

We're a tiny little niche game, so there's that as well. I don't know what you mean about it not being profitable. If your game is unappealing and you don't market it at all, sure, I can see that. We spent $10 total on our marketing for the game and that mainly went to registering a SA account.

If they're really hard pressed for money and they've got a great idea, how hard could it possibly be to get a $100 kickstarter done in a month?

$100 may be a lot to someone who is homeless but if they've got a solid idea, then I'm sure there's enough people out there to punch you up to $100 and beyond.

Not at all true. $100 will get your game (and the URL to your homepage) in front of thousands of potential customers who have shown an expressed interest in the type of game you're making and whom are willing to pay for that sort of game. I've downloaded several demos/betas of games I only learnt about from browsing Greenlight. A couple of those betas show enough promise that I'll be following their development and probably buying a copy no matter what distribution platform they end up on.

Yes the $100 doesn't pay for anything directly but it does serve it's purpose and it does result in a lower operational cost for the system overall, so it's incorrect to say that it buys you nothing.

Consider an alternate scenario, for example. A company has a program which provides matching funds for charitable donations by employees. Is that money buying "literally nothing"? No, it's buying greater employee happiness and strengthening the bond with the employer in exactly the same way that a salary bonus would.

The way I see this particular position, is this: if you don't have $100 worth of friends and people locally to you who can at least donate towards your entry to the -potentially- $million-dollar making Greenlight effort, then ... maybe your game actually is crap. Go away, get $100 of your own donations with your game, from your direct immediate users, first, and then you can play.

It sort of will act as a filter, yes. But I believe if there are poor people out there who want to enter this competition, they can get the help needed. (I volunteer, of course, PM me if you have a great game but need ~$100 .. "gamedeetsplz" ..)

Anyone who is working a minimum wage job and has the ability to develop a game has very much more serious problems than the Greenlight barrier to entry. That's a bullshit scenario. And if you lower the barrier significantly down to $20 or less then you erode the protections because then it becomes just low enough so that wasting that amount of money for a prank is not a big deal. It needs to be a non-trivial amount of money (to encourage seriousness) without being a significant amount of money, and I think $100 is in that range. Look, if you can't afford even $100 how the fuck are you going to manage to acquire the tools such as a computer or an internet connection to be able to support game dev?

Ultimately, this is not a perfect solution, it's just a noise filter. And the trick is making it light enough so that it doesn't squelch legitimate signal but heavy enough so that the remaining noise is easy to handle using other tools, and I think the $100 fee fits that pretty dang well.

For one thing, a physically taxing job that's not mentally taxing gives you exercise but doesn't rob you of your will to think. When I come home from my programming job, I often want to do just about anything else. When I used to come home from stocking shelves, programming was something I did avidly.

I'm sure that's not even the only reason, either.

It's also not the only relevant scenario. I reckon there are plenty of people who are capable of developing games and are unemployed, at school or living somewhere $100 is a significant amount of money.

In the US federal minimum wage is 7.25. Try 2-3 days of take home pay.

> Note that services like Apple and Microsoft's marketplaces at least provide some value for your $99: They host your game, they perform basic quality certification, etc. In this case you aren't getting as much for the expense.

Steam hosts the games for you and provides basic quality certification. How are the services different?

Getting any of the perks Valve offers as part of a Steam release would come later, once you sign a deal, and would probably involve you giving up other things, like a cut of your revenues or paying them up front fees for whatever cert they do. Hard to know since their terms are very secret.

How many legitimate and good game developers are there that both cannot afford 100USD and can afford to burn hours doing non-work?

Now how many trolls are there out there willing to burn hours of their time?

I think if you already have a good-selling game on Steam, the second game would be a lot easier to get through normal channels.

In that respect, it's working marvelously well.

And it's working even better with the $100 fee, since developers are already stepping up to the plate and offering to individually (!) vet submissions to loan them the $100: http://www.dejobaan.com/greenlight100/