User-generated stores

"Another piece of Steam is the store. The store is… I don't know about you, but I think the store is really boring. It's like this super middle-ground marketing thing. Like, oh, here's a list of features in our game.

"The stores instead should become user-generated content. Other companies can take advantage of this as well, but if a user can create his own store -- essentially add an editorial perspective and content on top of the purchase process… then we've created a mechanism where everybody, in the same way we've seen a huge upsurge of user-generated content with hats, we think that there's a lot of aggregate value that can be created by allowing people to create stores.

"A store is just another piece of content that can be created that creates overall value for all of this collectively.

"I'd buy stuff from Yahtzee. I would buy everything from Old Man Murray."


Bye bye, Greenlight?

"Right now we have inside of Steam we have a dictatorship. 

"It's probably bad for the Steam community, in the long run, not to move to a different way of thinking about that. In other words, we should stop being a dictator and move towards much more participatory, peer-based methods of sanctioning player behavior.

"Greenlight is a bad example of an election process. We came to the conclusion pretty quickly that we could just do away with Greenlight completely, because it was a bottleneck rather than a way for people to communicate choice."