Gaming

Valve’s Jason Holtman on Greenlight’s rating system: “People are smarter than we think”

Source: PCGamer

Owen Hill at 03:59pm July 13 2012

(snip)

“I think people are smarter than we think they are. It’s easy to think of crowdsourcing as going to a mean. If I’m crowd sourcing, all I’m doing is finding the highest votes and finding the most things and piling things up until they weigh everything else down. I don’t think that’s the function here.

“Customers are super smart, they’re not all going to vote for the top thing all the time or just be interested in the top thing. What’ll happen is that groups of customers will rally around smaller interesting things.”

“That developer who had no support before because they couldn’t get to those 500 interested people? Now they can start having a conversation. And those 500 have a forum to talk to other people and start getting them convinced,” says Jason.

Holtman points out that Greenlight won’t just be concerned with numbers: “It’s not just a vote. I think this is what’s important. If it was just a vote, it’s not interesting because all that’s happening is “who’s the top and I’ll rank everything else and I don’t see the bottom.” This is meant to be something where smaller things – even if they don’t get the most votes – can be identified.”

Read more: http://www.pcgamer.com/2012/07/13/valves-jason-holtman-on-greenlights-rating-system-people-are-smarter-than-we-think/

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It'll be interesting to see how it will work. My experience is generally that popularity attracts popularity; i.e. something already popular becomes more popular, and always gets more and new attention. It's the age old problem of being able to generate that initial attention that gets you over the level were incremental attention is self-generated, and not a result of a publicity effort on the part of the creator.

Hopefully once projects have garnered enough votes they're taken off the list, so the once that haven't are bumped up.