Steam Greenlight sees over 2 million votes

Steam's peer-moderated indie game submission service Greenlight has received over 2 million votes since its launch last August, Valve has said.

Hosting a chat for indie developers earlier in the week--with a summary provided by indie developer Crunching Koalas--Valve said it was also "actively looking into" publishing the Steamworks API so that developers could prepare their games for full Steam support ahead of when they are officially greenlit. No time frame for when this might be implemented was given.

The publisher also said that it would like to greenlight more games on Steam, but that it was unable to do so at present. "Unfortunately, we have limited resources at the moment," said Valve, "so we cannot ship every game that we want. We're working toward having an open platform that Gabe [Newell] has talked about, but we're not there yet."

Greenlight currently has "hard technical limits" as to why more games cannot be published using the service, but a "bunch of people" at Valve are said to be working on making the process easier. Valve recently said it would greenlight indie games in smaller, more regular batches.

Some developers challenged Valve on the amount of interest the Greenlight service brought to their games, saying that submitted projects are seen by a base level of roughly 15,000 people unless they are linked to from external media.

"We cannot force people to vote if they don't want to," said Valve in response.

Tom Tomaszewski, co-founder of Crunching Koalas, applauded Valve's intentions with the chat but criticised the publisher's willingness to engage with indie developers. "It was a good idea to gather for such a meeting, and it's definitely a step in the right direction," he said, "but the execution was really bad. No hard feelings for guys at Valve, but the first official Valve Greenlight Chat was a complete waste of time."