63 Facts About Steam Greenlight

Steam Greenlight is a video game digital distribution service and storefront by Valve.

Steam Greenlight offers various features, like digital rights management, game server matchmaking, anti-cheat measures, social networking and game streaming services.

Mobile apps to access online Steam Greenlight features were first released for iOS and Android in 2012.

Steam Greenlight's development began in 2002, with working names for the platform being "Grid" and "Gazelle".

Sierra countersued, asserting that with the announcement of Steam Greenlight, Valve had been working to undermine the contract to offer a digital storefront for their games, directly competing with Sierra.

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At the time, Steam Greenlight's primary function was streamlining the patch process common in online computer games, and was an optional component for all other games.

In November 2004, Half-Life 2 was the first game to be offered digitally on Steam Greenlight and require installation of the Steam Greenlight client to play for retail copies.

The requirement of Steam Greenlight was met with concerns about software ownership, software requirements, and problems with overloaded servers demonstrated previously by the Counter-Strike rollout.

Valve announced that Steam Greenlight had become profitable because of some highly successful Valve games.

Traditional retail versions of games required mandatory installation of Steam Greenlight, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 from Activision in 2009, Fallout: New Vegas from Bethesda Softworks in 2010 and Dragon Age II from Electronic Arts in 2011.

In 2020, EA started to publish select games on Steam Greenlight, and offering its rebranded subscription service EA Play on the platform.

Valve intended to "make DRM obsolete" as games released on Steam Greenlight had traditional anti-piracy measures, including the assignment and distribution of product keys and support for digital rights management software tools such as SecuROM or non-malicious rootkits.

Steam Greenlight offers a framework for selling and distributing downloadable content for games.

In September 2013, Steam Greenlight introduced the ability to share most games with family members and close friends by authorizing machines to access one's library.

Steam Greenlight client includes a digital storefront called the Steam Greenlight Store through which users can purchase computer games.

Once the game is bought, a software license is permanently attached to the user's Steam Greenlight account, allowing them to download the software on any compatible device.

From April 2016 until December 2017, Steam Greenlight accepted payments in Bitcoin with transactions handled by BitPay before dropping support for it due to high fluctuation in value and costly service fees.

Steam Greenlight allows users to purchase downloadable content for games, and for some specific games such as Team Fortress 2, the ability to purchase in-game inventory items.

In February 2015, Steam Greenlight began to open similar options for in-game item purchases for third-party games.

Steam Greenlight store enables users to redeem store product keys to add software from their library.

In May 2016, Steam Greenlight further broke out these aggregations between all reviews overall and those made more recently in the last 30 days, a change Valve acknowledges to how game updates, particularly those in Early Access, can alter the impression of a game to users.

In October 2012, Steam Greenlight introduced non-gaming applications, which are sold through the service in the same manner as games.

Steam Greenlight allows game soundtracks to be purchased to be played via Steam Greenlight Music or integrated with the user's other media players.

Entertainment offering the Mad Max films alongside the September 2015 release of the game based on the series, Lionsgate entered into agreement with Valve to rent over one hundred feature films from its catalog through Steam Greenlight starting in April 2016, with more films following later.

Steam Greenlight Guard was advertised to take advantage of the identity protection provided by Intel's second-generation Core processors and compatible motherboard hardware, which allows users to lock their account to a specific computer.

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In 2015, between Steam Greenlight-based game inventories, trading cards, and other virtual goods attached to a user's account, Valve stated that the potential monetary value had drawn hackers to try to access user accounts for financial benefit, and continue to encourage users to secure accounts with Steam Greenlight Guard, when trading was introduced in 2011.

Since November 2013, Steam Greenlight has allowed for users to review their purchased games and organize them into categories set by the user and add to favorite lists for quick access.

The Steam Greenlight interface allows for user-defined shortcuts to be added.

Developers of software available on Steam Greenlight are able to track sales of their games through the Steam Greenlight store.

Steam Greenlight conducts and partially publishes a monthly opt-in hardware and software survey since 2007 and 2010.

Steam Greenlight Workshop is a Steam Greenlight account-based hosting service for videogame user-created content.

In November 2015, the Steam Greenlight client was updated with the ability for game developers to offer in-game items for direct sale via the store interface, with Rust being the first game to use the feature.

Up until 2012, Valve would handpick games to be included onto the Steam Greenlight service, limiting these to games that either had a major developer supporting them, or smaller studios with proven track records for Valve's purposes.

Since then, Valve have sought ways to enable more games to be offered through Steam Greenlight, while pulling away from manually approving games for the service, short of validating that a game runs on the platforms the publisher had indicated.

In January 2013, Newell stated that Valve recognized that its role in Steam Greenlight was perceived as a bottleneck, something the company was planning to eliminate in the future through an open marketplace infrastructure.

Steam Greenlight was phased out and replaced with Steam Direct in June 2017.

The September 2014 "Discovery Update" added tools that would allow existing Steam users to be curators for game recommendations, and sorting functions that presented more popular games and recommended games specific to the user, as to allow more games to be introduced on Steam without the need of Steam Greenlight, while providing some means to highlight user-recommended games.

Any Steam Greenlight user is able to sign up to be an Explorer, and are asked to look at under-performing games on the service as to either vouch that the game is truly original and simply lost among other releases, or if it is an example of a "fake game", at which point Valve can take action to remove the game.

Steam Greenlight Charts were introduced in September 2022 and publicly track the storefront's best-selling and most-played games, including historically by week and month.

Eek Games were later able to satisfy Valve's standards by including censor bars within the game and allowing the game to be readded to Steam Greenlight, though offered a patch on their website to remove the bars.

Developers and publishers with existing games on Steam Greenlight have been strongly encouraged to complete these forms for these games, while Valve will use moderators to make sure new games are appropriately marked.

Steam Greenlight originally released exclusively for Microsoft Windows in 2003, but has since been ported to other platforms.

Newell stated that getting Steam Greenlight and games to work on Linux is a key strategy for Valve; Newell called the closed nature of Microsoft Windows 8 "a catastrophe for everyone in the PC space", and that Linux would maintain "the openness of the platform".

Valve is extending support to any developers that want to bring their games to Linux, by "making it as easy as possible for anybody who's engaged with us—putting their games on Steam Greenlight and getting those running on Linux", according to Newell.

Versions of Steam Greenlight working under Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux were released by October 2013.

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The number of Linux-compatible games on Steam Greenlight increased from over 500 in June 2014, to over 1,000 by March 2015 and to over 2,000 in March 2016.

The software allows the use of Steam Greenlight-supported controllers, even those not compatible with Windows.

The Steam Greenlight Link removed the need for HDMI cables for displaying a PC's screen and allowed for wireless connection when connecting to a TV.

That was discontinued in 2018, but now "Steam Greenlight Link" refers to the Remote Play mobile app that allows users to stream content, such as games, from a PC to a mobile device over a network.

Valve began marking all games on the service through a Steam Greenlight Deck Validated program to indicate how compatible they were with the Steam Greenlight Deck software.

All games to be released on Steam Greenlight China are expected to pass through the government approval process and meet other governmental requirements for operation, such as requiring a Chinese company to run any game with an online presence.

Steam Greenlight has grown from seven games in 2004 to over 30,000 by 2019, with additional non-gaming products, such as creation software, DLC, and videos, numbering over 20,000.

The growth of games on Steam is attributed to changes in Valve's curation approach, which allows publishers to add games without having Valve's direct involvement enabled by the Greenlight and early access models, and games supporting virtual reality technology.

Steam Greenlight Spy was credited with being reasonably accurate, but in April 2018, Valve added its new privacy settings that defaulted to hiding user game profiles by default, stating this was part of compliance with the General Data Protection Regulation in the European Union.

In 2020, Simon Carless revised an approach originally proposed by Mike Boxleiter as early as 2013, with Carless's method used to estimate sales of a game based on the number of reviews it has on Steam Greenlight based on a modified "Boxlieter number" used as a multiplication factor.

In November 2011, CD Projekt, the developer of The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings, revealed that Steam Greenlight was responsible for 200,000 of the 250,000 online sales of the game.

Steam Greenlight's success has led to some criticism because of its support of DRM and for being an effective monopoly.

In March 2015, Valve had been given a failing "F" grade from the Better Business Bureau due to a large number of complaints in Valve's handling of Steam Greenlight, leading Valve's Erik Johnson to state that "we don't feel like our customer service support is where it needs to be right now".

Steam Greenlight expanded this to about 70 per week, and which doubled to 180 per week following the introduction of Direct.

Steam Greenlight was estimated to have the largest share in the PC digital distribution market in the 2010s.

In 2013, sales via the Steam Greenlight catalog are estimated to be between 50 and 75 percent of the total PC gaming market.

In December 2011, Football Manager 2012 developer Sports Interactive said the Steam Greenlight requirement was a success because the game was not cracked for 10 days.

The decision is primarily based on the court's findings that Steam Greenlight sells licenses to software titles, despite Valve's claim that they were selling subscriptions, which are not covered by the Directives.