Valve's Doug Lombardi to talk Steam Greenlight in livestreamed lecture

Greenlight Logo

Valve's Vice President of Marketing Doug Lombardi is giving a talk about the Steam Greenlight process later this afternoon at The Guildhall at SMU, which will be streamed live for your viewing pleasure on Twitch.

Greenlight, of course, is the pseudo-democratic system that determines what does, and what does not, make it onto Steam. Simplistically, game makers submit their games for user approval, and once one has earned enough votes, it's in; realistically, the process is much more arcane and opaque. As Valve puts it in the FAQ, "The specific number of votes doesn't matter as much as relative interest in a game compared with other games in Steam Greenlight—we need customers to help us prioritize which games they want to see made available on Steam."

If you want to watch Lombardi (hopefully) shine more light on the inner workings of the process—the Redditor who posted notice of the talk describes him as "one of the best guest lecturers we've had"—you may do so on the SMU Guildhall Twitch channel, which we've also embedded above. It begins at 12 pm PT/3 pm ET.

Andy Chalk

Andy has been gaming on PCs from the very beginning, starting as a youngster with text adventures and primitive action games on a cassette-based TRS80. From there he graduated to the glory days of Sierra Online adventures and Microprose sims, ran a local BBS, learned how to build PCs, and developed a longstanding love of RPGs, immersive sims, and shooters. He began writing videogame news in 2007 for The Escapist and somehow managed to avoid getting fired until 2014, when he joined the storied ranks of PC Gamer. He covers all aspects of the industry, from new game announcements and patch notes to legal disputes, Twitch beefs, esports, and Henry Cavill. Lots of Henry Cavill.