Greenlight is not a crowd-sourcing platform, it's a market research tool. There doesn't need to be any finished product for Greenlight, it's just developers sticking ideas up and seeing if people like them or not. No money changes hands. No resources are gathered for development. Valve just takes Greenlight approval as de facto evidence that a game has enough appeal to add to their platform.PG said:No it isn't, that's the point of Greenlight, a completely separate system. And people want to throw shit at old ladies for a laugh, doesn't mean we should let them.
Early Access, OTOH, collects money for gamers on an unfinished product, presumably to fund further improvements to the unfinished work. It's similar to Kickstarter or IndieGoGo, except the bar is...let's say it's in a different place than those Crowdfunding services.
To me, the point of Early Access is to get crowdsourced funding and crowdsourced testing, giving it funding and criticism to make a better product.
Fundamentally, for crowdsourcing any resources given to the developer come as a result of broad support. It's not up to Steam to decide how broad that support is going to be ahead of time--the crowd needs to have final say in crowdsourcing. If a game is a POS, then it won't get any money, never get any better quality, and stay at the bottom of the shit heap like it deserves.
And there's a world of difference between letting people spend money on whatever they bloody want (no matter how stupid) and letting people throw shit at old ladies.