[Dragon]

My point was, not being on Steam does not prevent good freeware games (or mods so huge that they could very well be standalone games) from being made. It does not prevent them from being developed nor from having a dedicated following. It limits their userbase, so what? They're free games, they do not need sales to stay afloat. Being prevented from getting on Steam will not prevent such projects from appearing. There would be no harm to the project from not being able to put it on Steam. Barring truly freeware games from Steam won't stop people from making them.

Dedicated fans of the genre will find those games, like they always did. Non-fans won't be exposed, true, and a fair bit of casual fans might end up missing out, but this does not kill projects like that off, as far as I've seen.

[Mongoose]

Did I ever claim that it would?  You're basically making a non-argument here.  Modding and freeware games existed long before Steam, and they'll presumably exist long after it, but there isn't a developer out there who doesn't want more people to be exposed to their work.  Greenlight gave numerous Source mods and freeware games far more exposure than they would have otherwise, and that's only a good thing in my book.  Hopefully this new system will still have a reasonable way for them to get distributed.

[Blue Lion]

Well my big concern is I never saw any of these because they were buried under piles of shovelware and cheap crap.

I guess it's up to which one you prefer, a cleaned up shop missing some gems or all the jems surrounded by junk and normal games.

[Snarks]

Well my big concern is I never saw any of these because they were buried under piles of shovelware and cheap crap.

I guess it's up to which one you prefer, a cleaned up shop missing some gems or all the jems surrounded by junk and normal games.

I don't think it's that straight forward, especially with the emphasis on the Discovery queue. If done properly (and I'm not saying it's easy), you can have more games with similar exposure as a "cleaned up" shop by tailoring what gets shown to the right people. Some games that are considered "gems" will never be bought by certain people, and having those games be advertised to those certain people is essentially a waste of advertising/shelf space. Thankfully we're not talking about a supermarket shelf, and we can use algorithms to refine the digital shelf.

I was listening to an interview with the Steam team, and in some ways, Steam Direct isn't just about removing junk. In fact, they argued it's hard to actually define what is junk or shovelware. One of the stated objective was to make the procedure for getting your game on to Steam as clearcut as possible, as to avoid uncertainty. They might actually be less concerned about shovelware, and more focused on making it easier for developers to reliably get their games on Steam. Combined with the focus on the Discovery queue functionalities, I don't think the intent is to make Steam a premium marketplace for a few elite games. I think Steam is trying to make the whole Steam Greenlight marketing/advertising blitz less important and let developers focus their resources on making games.

Interview here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=atwE-K8y-ws

[Mongoose]

Between the discovery queue (especially incentivizing people to use it with card drops during big sale events) and the redesigned store front, Steam has made some decent steps towards making content more discoverable.  I know I've wound up tossing a number of titles onto my wishlist that I'd never so much as heard of beforehand.

[Dragon]

Hopefully it'll at least end the despicable practice of "designers" giving away their crap games for Greenlight votes and outright buying them order to get accepted. I can't say anything about the discovery queue because my dad keeps throwing shovelware on our shared account in order to farm it for cards, so the algorithms don't really get a lot to work with there.

Did I ever claim that it would?

You didn't, but someone else did.

This paywall will prevent projects like this one to happen.. Which is really sad for me.
Unless they add an exception for projects that swear to be completely free (no merchandise whatsoever). But that's not going to happen. The proportion of affected games is too small, no one will care about them. Especially not Valve.

That's the point I was refuting. I never claimed closing Steam off to free games would be completely harmless. I was claiming they could survive that.

[Klaustrophobia]

I poked at Greenlight exactly once, for some kind of perk or achievement or something, I don't remember really.  I didn't see one thing the slightest bit interesting looking.  I don't know to what degree Greenlight is responsible for the untold piles of **** on Steam (and we only need look to FS2 for proof that it's not just indie games, Valve itself is a part of the problem), but I won't shed a tear over its demise.  I'd love to return to a time when there was an expectation of quality from what was hosted on Steam.