Kotaku - Steam Greenlight Is Still Broken.
Once upon a time, the point of Greenlight was to gauge people's interest in games, to democratize the process of Steam game selection. In practice, though, it never worked out that way. There were too many games, too many community members saying too many things, too few Valve employees to sift through it all. So Valve tore down their stoplight and tossed their traffic officer into a fire. They started approving games not in trickles, but in truckloads—in part, honestly, because that's what everyone thought they wanted at the time. But that didn't work either. As a result, these days the truth is that nobody knows what the exact point of Greenlight is—especially not Valve.