Such a great thing, they have to stick a $100 surcharge on there so people would quit:
-Adding games that aren't even in beta.
-Adding things that aren't even games.
These are not reasons for the charge given you are allowed to upload concepts and software:
In order to keep spam and joke submissions out of the system, there’s a one-time submission fee that will enable your Steam account to submit games to Steam Greenlight.
What about non-game Software?
There's a section for that!
How early in development can I post my game?
There are two categories in Steam Greenlight: One for mostly-finished games seeking distribution via Steam and one for early builds and concepts that are simply seeking feedback from the community. You can choose the right category for your title when you post.
How does it have ANYTHING to do with "how they are developed" and "bringing it back to the community?" Being on Greenlight doesn't have squat to do with development or fan interaction, it's about selling the game.
As stated above, there is a category for getting feedback from the community on partially developed projects, so it can indeed have something to do with "how they are developed" and can have something to do with development.
Steam Greenlight also helps developers get feedback from potential customers and start creating an active community around their game during the development process
It gives exposure to games that haven't tried to formally submit to Steam. It's a fucking popularity contest so the winners can go "People like us, they really really like us!" Valve thought they could use it as a metric to sort through the submissions and decide what the best selling game of the crop might be. It turns out it's a cluster fuck of people adding anything and everything, and the signal to noise ratio makes it useless. Furthermore, developers try and use the fact they got "Likes" as though it adds some sort of legitimacy for their game. Assuming they even have a title that can be sold, which many of the Greenlight submissions don't.
The popularity contest is obviously true and is basically how the system is designed to work. Its a voting system, what were you expecting?
The large quantity of poor games is just Sturgeon's Law in effect (except there are no people to do the filtering for you as is usually the case when browsing anything from a distributor).
Develoers using Likes to advertise their game is not a Greenlight issue, it is an issue with the developers.
"exposure to games that haven't tried to formally submit to Steam" is just not true:
Steam Greenlight has replaced our previous submission process. Any developer or publisher who is new to Steam and interested in submitting their game to the platform should submit their game through Steam Greenlight.
It was Steam's attempt to create a Facebook Like button and run metrics off it. And it failed miserably, by their own standards even.
What truly pisses me off though is it's intended for games that are done and ready to be sold on Steam but need an extra hand.
What annoys me is when people
don't read the FAQ, what you said is just not true (it is also intended for games in mid development, concepts (in a seperate section), and even software).
It seems to be a significant issue, people view greenlight as something that it is not and critisize it for that.
I think greenlight does fine what it was supposed to do, and is basically functioning how I expected it would when I heard about it. I would have liked the ability to upload game demo's onto the service so it could also function more like the workshop does.