Steam's Greenlight program is a project where developers can list their games and have the community give feedback on their projects in the hopes that they will garner enough interest to be listed on the stream store for users to buy. Getting a game Greenlit on Steam is a huge accomplishment for many hard working developers but recently Valve is having issue with how some of its users are listing their games and the tactics they employ to fish for positive votes.
Some of the game listings don't even contain adequate gameplay footage or even a decent description of what Greenlight users are voting on, but developers have been giving away free keys in exchange for positive feedback on their lackluster projects creating a situation where an increasing amount of developers feel that they need to give away free Steam keys in order to accumulate enough interest to be greenlit.
Valve have made it clear to the developers using its service that employing these tactics will actually make the Greenlight process longer for their projects as it puts them in an awkward position where they have to take into account how much of the votes accurately represent consumer interest and they may even disregard titles that do this as the process is lengthy and frustrating for them to deal with. They acknowledge that competitions and give-aways are a legitimate form of marketing but believe Greenlight is not the place for it as it skews the data that valve is looking at when deciding whether to accept a game.
The message was posted on a private announcement page but a screencap can be seen below:
