Frauds Plague Steam's Greenlight

Karloff

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Oct 19, 2009
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Frauds Plague Steam's Greenlight



Steam's Greenlight service has deleted five versions of Half Life 3.

The problem with opening up a service to the internet community is that the internet is large and full of trolls. Steam knew that its Greenlight service [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/118354-Help-Choose-Which-Indie-Games-Get-on-Steam] - intended to help choose the games that will get a Steam release - would be manipulated by the less-than-altruistic as soon as it launched. It didn't take long before games that existed in name only or were obvious attempts to troll - Half Life 3, Left 4 Dead 3, Best WTC Plane Simulator - turned up on the Greenlight submissions list, and Steam has been deleting them as soon as they pop up.

One Steam Greenlight user commented that "I've already seen just in the last HOUR two entries for Mass Effect 3, five various entries for Half Life 3 ... That's not including patently offensive games," like the 9/11 plane simulator. Steam has already asked for the community's help in policing Greenlight. "The community has already been active in reporting fraudulent or gag items. To help keep control on this volume of bad submissions, please us the 'report' function to call out games that you think are fraudulent, offensive, or otherwise inappropriate."

At time of writing Greenlight has over 740 games in its queue, including pretty much anything you can think of. Old West games, fantasy RPGs, strategy, horror, racing games, train games; if you want to jump platforms through the underworld [http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=92948236&searchtext=] or help something altogether different get distributed, Greenlight is there to meet your needs. Just no Half Life 3. Sorry 'bout that.

Source: Joystiq [http://steamcommunity.com/workshop/browse/?appid=765&ExtraParams[0]=&method=browse&controller=sharedfiles&section=items&p=21]


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Coffinshaker

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Feb 16, 2011
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Did a comic and article about this very thing! Click image for my review of greenlight.


[img_inline caption="" align='center' src='http://coffin-comics.jesterbrand.com/comics/2012-09-03-Greenlighting.jpg'] [http://coffin-comics.jesterbrand.com/2012/09/03/greenlighting/]

(cliffnotes version): great idea to get great games that might fall through the cracks into steam... but it's abused by clones, copyright infringements, mods, wishlisted items, and bad student projects. also, not a fan of them letting in pre-alpha state games, it should be polished, finished, ready to publish games only!
 

Prof.Beany

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Apr 22, 2011
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Yeah its a joke at this point.
Ive seen Battlefield 3 on there a good dozen times, all sadly posted by Russians who thought they would actually somehow magically bring BF3 to Steam.
 

Treblaine

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Jul 25, 2008
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This is getting ridiculous with Half Life 3, we've been waiting 8 years now, 5 since Episode 2 and we have not seen or heard a peep of anything, we don't even know if it is still in production.

But it's not like Valve hasn't been doing anything, Portal, Left 4 Dead (and SOOO many maps), Team Fortress 2's endless updates including huge stuff like Mann vs Machine and even time for Counterstrike GO.

Greenlight is great, but it only serves to highlight the elephant in the room of Valve's most anticipated game that they are so silent on.

Coffinshaker said:
Did a comic and article about this very thing! Click image for my review of greenlight.


http://coffin-comics.jesterbrand.com/2012/09/03/greenlighting/
Cutting a little-close to self-promotion, even if it is relevant. It's OK to link to someone else, but I'd fear moderation linking to your own stuff.

At the very least you need to write an opinion or add to discussion before you link to your stuff... discretely.
 

draythefingerless

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This Greenlight thing is a huge pile of shit. It went just as i predicted. filled to the brim with generic uninteresting games, lazily made, 50% of wich are blatant ripoffs of other games, without any imagination or effort to differentiate and add interesting thigns to them.
 

CardinalPiggles

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Jun 24, 2010
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Trolls will be trolls, just flag them and move on.

Also I love the multiple choice Captcha questions, I laugh almost everytime.
 

teqrevisited

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Mar 17, 2010
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I expected nothing less. It's like giving a ballot box and a ton of papers to a monkey enclosure at the zoo. If you leave them to it the box will be shredded and the papers, if they don't eat them first, will all be covered in faeces and strewn about the place with no order or intent.

I think it does have potential though and I can definitely see Valve and their Steam-powered army putting the effort in to regulate it. Eventually.
 
Apr 28, 2008
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Heh, and to think, Valve has been dealing with this for years now.

Wouldn't be surprised if that's why they put Greenlight up. So they wouldn't have to deal with these fakes and whatnot.

It's what I'd do, at least.
 

Drop_D-Bombshell

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Apr 17, 2010
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Well what do you expect, this was bound to happen one way or another (Mountain Dew anyone?). At least Valve is doing its best to remove the offensive ones as soon as it can. Give it a week and this'll blow over.
 

Daverson

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Nov 17, 2009
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Greenlight drinking game:

1. Pick a random page
2. Take a predetermined unit (ie, a finger, a "sup", a shot, or whatever) for each of the following: (take 3 for any that are a combination of 2, 5 for any combination of 3, 7 for 4 and so on)
A. Steampunk
B. Zombies
C. Obvious Rip-off of existing popular game. (Double up if it's a free game)
D. A survival horror where the "twist" is that it's first person but not a shooter.
E. [Job] simulator. (You'll know these when you see them)
F. Stolen assets/Copyright infringement.
3. Repeat until all but one player is unconscious and/or dead.
 

Kargathia

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Jul 16, 2009
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Treblaine said:
This is getting ridiculous with Half Life 3, we've been waiting 8 years now, 5 since Episode 2 and we have not seen or heard a peep of anything, we don't even know if it is still in production.

But it's not like Valve hasn't been doing anything, Portal, Left 4 Dead (and SOOO many maps), Team Fortress 2's endless updates including huge stuff like Mann vs Machine and even time for Counterstrike GO.

Greenlight is great, but it only serves to highlight the elephant in the room of Valve's most anticipated game that they are so silent on.
It indeed is getting ridiculous with Half Life 3, but only due to the continuous and unrelenting squealing of fanboys every time they find another way to tell themselves that Valve maybe is secretly working on it after all.

Edit: factual correctness.
 

Vivi22

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Aug 22, 2010
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Can we honestly just stop mentioning HL3 in every thread relating to Valve? It gets a bit tiresome when some people can't even talk about the subject at hand without twisting it back around to that one game they keep saying they want more than a wish granting genie which isn't being made yet.

As for Greenlight, yeah, big surprise there are issues when it just came out. It's something no company has ever done before and Valve are literally striking new ground with it. Kind of like they did when they originally released Steam. Getting all doom and gloom about it is a bit silly before they've had the chance to work on ironing out the problems. I've no doubt that it will run much more smoothly in the future.

Hell, if it's doing a decent job of weeding out the fakes and the thieves already then in time it may work as disincentive to their trying to get past the crowd if it's not working.
 

iniudan

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Apr 27, 2011
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You even receive a thank for reporting them.

Was odd to receive an email from valve that was not a receipt. =p
 

IamLEAM1983

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Aug 22, 2011
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draythefingerless said:
This Greenlight thing is a huge pile of shit. It went just as i predicted. filled to the brim with generic uninteresting games, lazily made, 50% of wich are blatant ripoffs of other games, without any imagination or effort to differentiate and add interesting thigns to them.
I dunno, I think sifting through the cruft is worth it. It reminds me a bit of the App Store and its jailbroken equivalents, Cydia and Installous. All three services are fraught with knock-offs of actually popular games with a quick reskin and a name swap.

I think these are made to fool the same kind of person who gets gypped by mockbusters.

Kid: "Grandpa, I wanna see Sherlock Holmes!" *kid points to the Robert Downey Jr. movie*
Grandpa: *eventually ends up buying The Asylum's Sherlock Holmes flick, thinking it's the right thing*

Between Cut the Rope and Feed the Monster, the only difference is the critter's design and the overall colour palette. I'm terribly sorry for what I'm about to say and I know it sounds unbelievably racist - but these knock-off apps usually are recognizable by the name of their publisher.

Chillingo? Yeah, sure, sounds legit. Chen-Zui Rong? And the app description is filled with Engrish? Yeah, no. Not gonna buy.

There's one very important point in that article, which is that people need to grow some basic Internet street smarts. Having an antivirus and some sort of anti-spyware solution won't cut it anymore. The way I see things, casual surfing never really existed. No single program will ever be able to filter the 'net thoroughly, so you're better off learning to do it yourself.
 

Waaghpowa

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Apr 13, 2010
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I get the feeling that Valve had to deal with kind of crap even before they started Greenlight.
 

scienceguy8

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Sep 1, 2008
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Despite the problems seen thus far, Greenlight is fairly promising, if only for getting glimpses of potential gems like Bleed [http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=92919970] or No Time To Explain [http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=92922559] or Melody's Escape [http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=92913194]. Survival horror isn't really my thing, but Routine [http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=92985806] looks promising as well. You just gotta shift your way through a fair amount of crud to find neat things. Also, it looks like it takes a lot of votes to get a game published, so if you guys could vote for Bleed and NTTE so I could eventually play them, I would really appreciate it, as would the developers and fellow Steam players, I'm sure.
 

zidine100

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actually i think this is going to be bloody good service, once they manage to sort out the issues.

I look forward to seeing how it goes.

on a side note bleed looks awesome sciencedude.