Yes it was. Plenty of developers who didn’t already have an established audience to rally votes from complained about how difficult it was to even get noticed. And it invited a lot of shady tactics as other developers gamed the system to bribe or even bot votes, because if you’re not doing that then your game will be left behind as your competition gets Greenlit first. Many perfectly good games got stuck in “Greenlight Hell” for a very long time.
Greenlight era had a lot of problems, and these problems are well documented. Valve dropped it for a reason. Don’t start with the revisionist history.
That’s not how it worked
Yes it was. Plenty of developers who didn’t already have an established audience to rally votes from complained about how difficult it was to even get noticed. And it invited a lot of shady tactics as other developers gamed the system to bribe or even bot votes, because if you’re not doing that then your game will be left behind as your competition gets Greenlit first. Many perfectly good games got stuck in “Greenlight Hell” for a very long time.
Greenlight era had a lot of problems, and these problems are well documented. Valve dropped it for a reason. Don’t start with the revisionist history.