I want to personally thank every single one of you for coming this far in the group's history. Even if you haven's posted anything I want to thank you for coming over and publically showing you support this group and for checking the group out in the first place. The main intention of this group when I received it from Khell back in July 2016 was to inform and critique, those were the main priorities. Since then I've broadened out upon the work I do with my writing style and etiquette improving along with my analysis and research capabilities, and as a result, I am proud of how far this group has come and I'm happy of what this group has brought and given to me as a person.


Now, in case you didn't notice, this group is called "Guardians of Greenlight" and also of you didn't know, Steam Greenlight is going away this Tuesday and is being replaced with Steam Direct. If we place those two facts together, unfortunately that means that I can't continue with the usual work that this group is centered upon. Now I've been asked "Just change the group name", but there is one issue with that, I can't. Steam does not allow you to change the name or the abbreviated name of a group after it's been set up, so that means that I can't start the next phase of the work on this group. However, this does not mean it is the end of this group, because I would hate to just have built up this great community over the span of a year with over 800 of you and just let that go to waste, so I'm going to open up a new direction for this group while I additionally work on the other projects that are to come.


After talking with a lot of people and getting requests from some developers, this is what I've decided to do with this group. Now, in case you don't know, Steam Direct's intention is to form a more direct approach of getting a developer's game on Steam, with a fee of $100 per title, it's essentially Greenlight with a tweak to the pricing being per game and not a one time fee and it's also cutting out the community input on the titles, which a lot of developers really liked. Now like I said I've been approached by a few developers and a couple has also commented about this publically and so as a way to address this, here's what I'm going to do.

Since I know that there are a great number of people within this group that are more than happy to give constructive feedback, I have opened a forum called "Call to Arms", which is a place in which developers can post their title/ideas before going through the Steam Direct process to get additional insight into their games and ideas from community members. There are some requirements for posting there though:

1. A trailer (posted on YouTube)
   
2. 4 screenshots minimum (can be posted anywhere such as Imgur)

I would also recommend that if you have or can get a playable demo of your game up, that may assist in the quality of the feedback that you're given from members of the community, and I myself also intend to give feedback to the titles as well. This will also be a good way for you to interact with a community before your game goes live and you can get a good overview of the actual quality of your title and the possible general interest it will bring if it were to be on the Steam store.

There will be no fee for posting your trailer/screenshots/demo in the forums and request feedback, all that I and the moderators request is you follow the guidelines set here and be nice and cooperative with the members interacting with you, and the same goes for the members to be respectful when interacting with developers that come to the forums.


On the note of adapting towards Steam Direct, the overall aim for me is not going to change, I'm going to continue to be as critical, informative and consumer-friendly as I can be, the only things that are going to change are the location.

On the note of those two, I have structured out 2 groups that have been up for some time and that some of you may already be members of and noticed if you took a look in the description of the group, and these two groups are probably now going to be where I centre my work on.

The first group is MellowReviews in which it's a place where I can showcase my own personal recommendations of titles to play based on the quality of the products, and in my eyes this will be important now more than ever with Direct coming in as I am expecting to see a drastic high point for games coming onto Steam. There is currently not much on the group, just some old announcements that now lead to some dead links and no recommendations and the reason for that is that that group is currently going through a reprocessing phase for me to find a good centerpiece to base the group on. There's also the fact that reviewing products does take time as I have to play the game for an allotted time beforehand, and if I can't get round to writing a full review on some titles, I will definitely at least give it a curation-based recommendation.

The second group is Sentinels of the Store which is essentially the same as Guardians of Greenlight but centered on games already on the Steam store. Sentinels of the Store, on top of already having the same base setup as Guardians of Greenlight, Sentinels of the Store also has a curation page which means that if a game has received SOS coverage, the information will be displayed at the top of the Steam store page.


So with that out of the way, I want to thank everyone that has joined this group, the people that have partaken in this group and contributed in any way, and I want to send out additional thanks to my moderators for moderating the discussions well over the group's run and for gaining my trust to make them moderators in the first place.

I thank everyone for their hard work and dedication and hope you can all follow on into the next chapter.

-Mellow