It's weird to hear that Greenlight has a delete comment button. As a community based webpage I figured Valve would at most allow a developer to report a comment, but deleting comments is a dangerous power to have.

I imagine a company like EA would not use that power wisely.

Great article, so enlightening. I read this article, because I have interest in the game and want to play through it. It just keeps slipping my mind. I support the Greenlight process, but I'll likely just go ahead and buy the game through Desura. I am amassing quite a collection there of great indies.

Firewater - Green Light (in Stereo)

you pretty much made a game that't 5 minutes longer then the trailer. Are you amazed people don't want to pay for it? It comes down to principle really a) I want to pay 2 bucks to support an indie developer in the hope he's make something else. b) I would never pay a dime for a game that doesn't live up to my standards.  That's how it goes for me at least

Very interesting story. I wonder if a game like this might do better if packaged w/ a few like-minded titles in a bundle. It seems like for very small developers some pooling of resources could be beneficial in terms of trying to attract notice.

Greenlight is a terrible system. It's a shame that Steam has such a monopoly that you have to be almost forced to use it.

Mr Gallant, 

It is clear you care about the products you release. I think you are on to something with the game you designed. Sometimes it just takes repackaging to really sell! Just a long shot here.. perhaps you can team up with some developers considering you are getting a lot of exposure thanks to Gamespot and release a sequel to your game with more polished graphical design and overall production value. Best of luck! (ps: I would love your game on a mobile platform)

Well, interesting article, but it just shows that either there is no interest in game or there is no promotion. Our game Legends of Eisenwald made to top 100 in 6 days: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=113108799 and we now are in top 30. So, our experience is quite different from what is expressed in this article.

Good article. The article definitely gives a decent insight on being an independent person trying to setup a way to get your game to the masses. It can be pretty rough. A lot of these green-light games however really don't deserve to be on there.

I find all these greenlight games pretty lame, but hey, go for it.

Thanks you for the article Kevin, I will go have a look at the game and see if Mr. Gallant's game persuades me enough to buy  a copy! Thanks a bunch !

How about getting back to work on AAA titles like an actual game company instead of diddling around other people's work? I am a gamer for life and 99% of this "greenlighted" silliness fails to pique my interest. I want a Valve game, not some kid's school project. It's like the airline industry; if they aren't competent enough to stand on their own, let them fall.

Great time to post this, Kevin. I was just considering using Greenlight to publish my first game in the future (my goal is to finish it by the end of the year, but I doubt it).

I'm making it in C++, I started it a month ago, but I practiced the last six months creating small games and man, its a painfully long and tiresome process, it's ridiculous! I deeply respect anyone who actually finished a game, even if the game looks awful to everyone else.

Sadly, it's hard to find motivation to continue with the creation of any project knowing that the gaming community in general is extremely hard to please. Just go to the Greenlight forums and read all the negativity: it's extremely demotivating reading people that say that "the game sucks", "the graphics sucks", "the game is not worth 10 bucks", stuff like that, and don't get me started on games that charge whatever the buyer wants to pay and they pay the minimum or just pirate the game anyway.

I'm not demotivated by the comments per sé (I think most developers can handle criticism), I'm demotivated by the lack of maturity and empathy of the community in general, and every day that I start writing code, I say to myself: "is it worth it?", without having a clear answer.

Either way, thanks for posting this.

Wow. Thanks Kevin for posting this story.

As a game maker in the same struggling position as Mr. Gallant it is pretty eye-opening to hear the perspective about Steam's Greenlight from someone in a more average Joe position. It reveals a lot of flaws that I hadn't considered before. For our studio's next project we had considered using Steam, but hearing this story and knowing we are in the similar situation I wonder if we will just be repeating Mr. Gallant's history. It sounds very similar to our Kickstarter campaign in terms of how much info and how much support you actually get if you don't bring a lot to the table yourself immediately.

It's terrible how some ignorant people comment on these games. You'll never imagine how hard and tiresome to program and design even an indie game. I've learned some programming so I know how hard these amazing developers can do with their effort. Thank you to all of you indie developers out there, keep your great games coming, we love them and we appreciate your time creating such great experiences.

Only reason i love Gamespot is the articles of the editors. They're quite a read. Last week, i adored an article about Interactive Fiction and the tool "Twine". You can find game reviews and previews on anywhere but not these articles. It's sad actually there's not an archive for the articles in the web site. I wish there's a menu item for articles which you can examine by the author. I could dig such thing whole day.

I wish this developer luck with this and any other projects they are working on, but frankly I play games to get away from these kinds of customers and not to remind myself of the pain I feel each and every work day.

I too work in a customer service job and I have to deal with folks like this all the time, I keep it professional and courteous and after my shift I let loose on games.

I can see where some would find this a great way to release the tensions of the work day but I will pass.

I don't think anybody would be terribly surprised if this game doesn't get greenlit, including the developer.  It looks cool, and I like the concept, but it's not an extremely marketable game, just like working in a call center is not an extremely desirable job.  That's what he meant when he said "I knew that reaching a wider audience would mean compromising aspects of the game that gave it meaning."  So the outcome isn't necessarily surprising, but still it was interesting to see an inside perspective on how PGL functions.  Knowing Valve, a lot of what the users and developers see and vote on is probably fairly inconsequential in deciding which games are greenlit.  That's not to say the users and devs are ignored, I just think Valve observes all of those things and makes their own assessment in the end of which games they want to pick, based on their own set of criteria.  If anything, they should make the process a bit more transparent for the devs. 

Nice article! 

...way to put yourself out there, hope it works out!!

This was an amazing read, very interesting and informative. Thanks 4 sharing

So basically to sum it up all services offered to indie devs suck and they are better off doing it the Minecraft way.. make a website and market it yourself.

?????????

Ya know what Kevin is pretty cute. Ya know i'm a guy and think we're all here mature enough to know what is it to do.

This was a great read!