Valve continues to innovate in the distribution market. Here's to the death of monolithic publishers and retail!

Except in this case, aren't they the monolithic "publisher"? Not technically publishers but they are now holding the gates to all the users who are not willing to register / pay on a separate site or run down to a store. Sort of similar to the apple app store.

Compared to self-published works, sure. But compare them instead to the old standard, the likes of EA, Ubisoft, and Activision, with their buyouts, exclusive contracts, editorial control, and very small volume of profits returned to developers. This is a big step forward, and will help break ground for others to follow in the future and take the ideals even further.

(Of course, the old publishers also made large initial investments in games/game studios, but there's good evidence that such investments are no longer necessary for quality games to be produced, and when they come with so many strings attached it's easy to see how the quality can suffer)

Goes to show that it's not necessarily the type of system that matters, but its incarnation. A democracy can be hell, while kings can be benevolent.

I'm not trying to imply any judgments about steam vs apple necessarily, but a more general point.

Comes with the danger of a popularity contest... part of Steam's existing brand is its fairly strict curation.

Sort of: Popular game devs are generally good ones, interestingly. Take notch or Wolfire or any of the other small indie game studios. The non-quality stuff like "Angry Elephants 3 HD Knockoff Version!" comes from devs that also have no social contact.

Steam will still curate; this system only prioritized some games for review. It works a lot like the Steam Workshop.

As I read the page, this is in addition to whatever methods they have currently. A good thing.

Go Steam!

If your brand is based on strict curation, then accepting the union of the selections of your curators and popular demand removes that strictness. It didn't sound to me like they're accepting the intersection of the two methods.

The intersection of these two would be pointless. Even less stuff would get made. The goal of this is more money. Steam has proven sales way before the game is released.

Well, the original commenter might've thought that they were becoming more selective, or even just letting the community select titles for final consideration.

Are they going to put the next Half Life 2 episode on there? That would surely get the go-ahead from fans.

Sounds like Kickstarter: Steam Edition.

Sort of yes. For many games its not the funding, but the exposure a kickstart campaign gives.

Will Valve be promoting Steam Greenlight using Greenlight itself?

If not, why not?

Steam Greenlight isn't a promotion platform, it's a tool for community-driven curation. It would be kind of hard to use Greenlight to vote when it's not live yet, and there would be no point in voting on Greenlight after it's live. :-)