Hmm. I respectfully disagree with you.
Way to ruin what Greenlight could have been. Was nice because it gave talented people a chance to show what they are made of.. you know, the people passionate about making games who work all week and have a day or 2 to work on their game. They don't have the $ to gamble hoping that it'll get picked up by the people. Way to kill it before it got off the ground Valve.
I would argue that this is better for the talented, passionate people who submit their games to Steam. Now they're not going to be shown next to Johnny's first flash game. The only games that will go on Greenlight will serious games, games that have developers confident enough to spend 100 dollars for the chance at being on Steam.
This means that when you submit a game to greenlight, the chance of someone seeing the game and voting on it will be much higher, because it won't drown in a sea of 400 unfinished and terrible minecraft clones. 99.9% of games that were on greenlight had no chance of being sold on Steam, because the quality of the games weren't high enough. Those developers knew that their game had no chance, and now hopefully they won't waste anyone's time.
Thanks to this barrier of entry, perhaps now rating games won't be such a chore.
EDIT: As a matter of fact, 2 comments on the greenlight page itself address the issue perfectly
Sysgen: "So a poor developer of a great candidate has to pay $100 but a rich idot with too much time on his hands can put up anything he wants. What crap. Valve is the only one that can put items up on greenlight without it becoming a farce."
SpellSword: "Paying money to post a game on Greenlight, which may or may not
actually be sold on steam, may discourage some Devs from using it. (And
100$ is kind of high...)
100 dollars is absolutely a lot of money, but it's reasonable if you think your game has a chance of getting onto Steam. Keep in mind that greenlight also serves as a form of advertising. You will be getting thousands of people to view your game, and again, thanks to the 100 dollar barrier to entry, now more people will view your game because they're not going to spend time viewing Johnny's first flash game.
The name of it is Greenlight not Redlight. -_-
Instead, what I would recommend is that all games submitted to
greenlight go into a queue where a quick check is made. If the project
meets the requirements for being on Greenlight, then it is added to the
publicly viewed database.
People won't spam Greenlight with fakes/jokes/etc if the public can't
see it.
The entire reason for Greenlight's existence is to offload the burden of deciding what games go on Steam from Valve to the community. I think Valve was being overwhelmed with the quantity and quality of games being submitted, so much so that good indie games were actually slipping through the cracks and not getting accepted to Steam (Space pirates and zombies comes to mind). Greenlight would be made irrelevant and the system would be no different than it was before if there was a screening process to decide what games are good enough to even make it onto Greenlight.
EDIT 2: Also, if they are going to insist on this stupid idea, they need to make it so that "no" votes do NOT cancel out the "yes" votes.. cause now not only will people (developers who have a solid product, but can't afford the $100 because maybe they want to eat for those 2/3 weeks) have to deal with a silly fee, but they ALSO have to contend with people who are trolling the "No" button.
I don't think that negative votes have any effect on whether a game fills up the bar to 100%. The language on Greenlight pages heavily suggests that they're not taken into consideration.
