Valve: Hold tight, we're not done with Greenlight yet

As both compliments and criticisms of Valve's new Steam Greenlight indie game submission service come pouring in from forums and social media all over the net, Valve is finally managing to dig itself out from underneath the ruckus, dust itself off and get to work making the system exactly what it needs to be. "The sheer volume of submissions was the biggest challenge, both from legitimate submissions as well as junk," says Valve's UI designer Alden Kroll, one of the people at the helm of the Greenlight initiative which launched last week. He adds, "As evidenced from the first major updates, pulling in those issues and making discoverability easier and more intuitive were the first things we wanted to address." Greenlight has been available to utilize by indie developers for nearly a week now, and it has had a good portion of the games industry in a tizzy. On the whole, developers appear to be happy about the system, although search for Greenlight on Twitter and you'll no doubt get to witness a whole other side to the story. Kroll says that we can expect many more changes to Greenlight over the coming weeks and months. "We always try to build quick iteration into our process for development of new features, and Greenlight will be no different," he explains to Gamasutra. "We have a huge list of suggestions from customers and the lessons we've learned from shipping, so Greenlight will definitely continue to evolve over the next weeks and months as we tune the system and add valuable features." While he told us that Valve isn't yet ready to discuss the actual process of moving a Greenlight game from the voting stages to actually being injected into the Steam store, he noted that it won't be long before we hear the first news of a successly Greenlighted title. "We don't expect this to be a super long process," he noted, adding, "and we always try to make Steam launches non-stealthy." Gamasutra asked Kroll exactly what developers can do if they don't already have a community or fanbase for their game. Is there any point in submitting to Greenlight if you've not already got a huge amount of legwork behind you? "Steam Greenlight is as much about building community for your games as it is about getting your game on Steam," he answers. "We're hoping this can be the foundation and/or amplification for bringing visibility to new development projects, and help developers build a fan base that continues wherever they sell their games."