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Steam Greenlight has seen 2m voters since launch

Valve chats to indie developers about its service

Valve's Steam Greenlight initiative for indie developers has seen "roughly" 2 million voters since its launch and Valve is "actively looking into" making its API available to devs before they get Greenlit, although it wouldn't commit to a timeframe

The information was revealed as part of a chat hosted by Valve's Greenlight developer group, a transcript for which was published by indie developers Crunching Koalas.

The discussion is worth checking out, as it shows developers highlighting to Valve some of the issues they would like to see addressed with the initiative. Intravenous Software, a UK based developer, suggested that getting views on the service was a problem.

"I know a number of devs, and each get about 15k visitors in the first week. Then it falls off a cliff. That tells me you have 15k people who come look at Greenlight on a weekly basis, and about 5k who check it once a month. Considering you have millions of members, don't you think those numbers are very low. Only games that get media attention get any more visitors than that."

During the chat Valve's Chet Faliszek addressed questions about why more recently smaller number of games had been Greenlit.

"We have decided to Greenlight a smaller batch this time, so we can move more quickly. There are lots of titles getting attention, so we are likely to continue Greenlighting titles in this quicker, but smaller batch fashion."

Meanwhile Alden Kroll, also from Valve, explained that infrastructure was a major limiting factor in how many games could be Greenlit at once.

"We would like to Greenlight more items, but can't at this moment as a result of hard technical limits in how our tools and systems are currently set up. We're really trying to do this, and we're actively working on it, but it hard and is a lot of work."

Steam Greenlight officially launched in August 2012, and the first wave of winners in September included Project Zomboid, Black Mesa and Heroes & Generals. In total so far 56 titles have been Greenlit, and 31 released on Steam.