You know when I first entered the forums I was full of things I put my own thoughts, but now I'm burnt out of what to say.

Honestly I think it's more an issue with Indy games in general rather than with Greenlight in particular.

People often complains on how unoriginal AAA games are but often Indies are not that much better, if you remove the gazillions of gimmicky puzzle platformers, tower defense, reverse tower defense, physic based puzzles, etc... there is not that many really original game left. And even among those, being original doesn't necessarily mean good. (And of course being unoriginal doesn't necessarily means bad either.)

I think that's in part why so many AAAs follow the same formula. They see what sells and try to mimic it. Braid was a hit, so people started making puzzle platformers. Minecraft became a major hit so clones of it popped up. Anything with zombies in it is the current thing for AAA and indies. I'd expect we will start to see a wave of Hotline Miami clones soon after the success it has had.

Nope, it's a problem with popularity contests, and strategies that are based on popularity contests - AAA games, those of the indies who are looking for a quick buck, and Greenlight. I don't read Critical Miss because the writer is a racist fuck, but that particular comic is spot-on. As in, exactly what I've been saying since Greenlight went live.

Years ago, the Russian government-owned TV channel held a much-publicized web poll, which resulted in all sorts of interesting factoids and observations, one of them being "it's harder to rig a web poll than elections". And here's the thing: people pissed off with the rigging of the official poll decided to hold their own. And that one was overwhelmingly won by trash rock musicians.

Great now I feel guilty reading these comics.

Even though he did made fun of white supremacists:

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/comics/critical-miss/9493-Journey


Also trash rock musicians?

Ultimately, the majority of the collective videogame industry is derivative and formulaic. Because the majority of every art is derivative and formulaic. People who imply that every indie game is somehow artistic gold, or that every AAA game is a soulless piece of commercialism are just fooling themselves. Many indie games are just as unoriginal as any given Call of Duty title, although disguised with graphical or gameplay gimmicks.

However, you have to compare apples to apples. If you compare the best and most interesting of what AAA gaming has to offer with the best and most interesting of what indie gaming has to offer, I'll side with indie gaming most of the time. I simply find it more enjoyable and more fulfilling. It's a matter of taste. Some people prefer the highly refined entertainment that AAA gaming excels at, some people prefer the wild experimentation and forays into artsy territory that the indie market can cultivate. I certainly can appreciate, enjoy, and love AAA games. But if I had to side with either AAA or indie, I'd go indie.
How so?

You seriously have no reason to. It's an episodic comic, so it's absolutely possible to read it and enjoy some or even most of the individual comics while going "dafuq is wrong with you" when it's warranted.

Hahaha.
I can see why Greenlight is useful.Concept is good ... And yes problem is people seem to vote for the same bloody type of games all the time. SOME is nice. But a bit of variety... which is surprisingly lacking considering most greenlight stuff is indie right?.
Then you have the WarZ and Town fiasco's.....

The system is very flawed certainly. It's why we end up with games being greenlit when all they have is a nebulous release date that might never be reached, when games that are complete and ready to be delivered, like La Mulana, never see the light of day.

In that case it might partly be because they planned to charge U$15 for it, hence it needing more votes, which only shows another problem: not knowing how many votes a game will need, what's the criteria for that number and how many votes are left. Well that's strange. Because Wadjet Eye Games has The Blackwell Series, Emerald City Confidential, Resonance, Puzzle Bots and Gemini Rue on Steam and they were still forced to go through Greenlight to get Primordia there. Which is bullshit because there is a difference between letting us choose what will be published and evading your responsabilities, as this was a decision they should have made on their own.

I don't see what the problem is.

Ah, so now instead of a legitimate concern over the allowance of potentially shady business practices within the Steam platform they're just whingeing because it's a game they don't like.

It's actually a quite smart move of Valve.
They are needing less manpower to evalute if a Indiegame is good or not.
So they can fire some Indie-Game-Testers-employees who were working there just to evaluate the potential profit margin an unknown indiegame is going to make.
Thus Steam is now earning even more coin and while looking goog to the public because more cosumer choice is "always" better than less consumer choice.

Well played, Steam, well played indeed.

It does seem like much of the initial excitement for Greenlight has waned. I haven't checked Greenlight in quite awhile, other than voting here or there for games like Primordia.

For me it's a bit overwhelming to browse through all the projects. I tried searching and filtering early on, and that helped, but even then it's a lot of information to process.

Would be nice if they had a randomize function or something to just flip through what they have blindly. I find greenlight something to look through once in a blue moon but otherwise ignore.

I lol'd at that comic especially with that slenderman game XD