No More Room in Hell is coming to Valve’s Steam. Why? Because you demanded it. At least, that is, if you’re one of the 54 million registered users on Steam and you also happened to participate in Steam Greenlight, Valve’s new community-based game selection process. One of the initial ten selections from the Greenlight program to be added to the Steam store, No More Room in Hell says a lot about what games will make it through the selection process. Digital Trends caught up with No More Room in Hell’s creators to discuss Steam Greenlight, its shaky launch, what opportunities the service offers independent developers, and how Steam will help the game reach an even bigger audience.
“We planned since the very second Greenlight was announced that we would try it if it was open to Source Engine mods,” says David Meade of the NMRiH Dev Team, “We didn’t know if sourcemods would be allowed on the platform. At QuakeCon2012 this year I knew a few names from Valve were attending and I wanted to know more about Greenlight. I ended up talking to Chet Faliszek [about Greenlight] in a little more detail. We exchanged emails, he told us to go for it, and it paid off quite well for us in the end here.”
Like every other developer on Greenlight though, Hell was buried beneath a wave of spam, prank, and offensive game submissions. It was rough, but Meade’s confident Valve will work out Greenlight’s kinks. “You saw the issues with spam and hiccups with percentages changing every time you refresh the page. It’s going to be some time before it’s perfect but overall we believe the service has real potential.” That isn’t to say there aren’t things that can be fixed though.
“As it is you can’t submit a game as a group, only as an individual. If you were able to say link it to a steam group or at least add moderators to manage the page it would have made things easier to manage on our end.”
Even with PC Magazine naming it mod of the year in 2011, there are still many people who never had the chance to play Hell. “The game is free, we just want people to play it and enjoy it so being on Steam will make that a much more achievable goal for us, says NMRiH Dev Team’s Matt ‘Maxx’ Kazan, “Greenlight will allow us to open up the game to a much wider audience of people who might not even know it exists.
It’s more than just a ready made audience though. As Steam has done for PC gaming in general, Greenlight will help make mods like Hell and other selectees like Black Mesa easier to run for less tech savvy players. “I don’t know if you’ve ever tried installing a sourcemod before but it can be quite confusing and frustrating for beginners,” says Meade, “We try our best to explain in detail where to download how to install etc. It’s never enough. Steam fixes all of that as it allows us to auto patch. One click download and install and you’re done.”
No More Room in Hell won’t be available on Steam right away, as the team is still trying to sort through a number of technical and legal issues to get the game available. Details on the road to reaching a broader audience. Congratulations again to the NMRiH DevTeam and the other initial Greenlight selectees.
