Steam needs to ditch its approval process and become an open distribution mechanism, Valve’s Gabe Newell says.

During a candid chat with students at the University of Texas, Newell called Steam a "dictatorship", and expressed his desire to make some sweeping changes to the popular service.

"One of the worst characteristics of the current Steam system is that we've become a bottleneck,” he said.

"It's probably bad for the Steam community, in the long run, not to move to a different way of thinking about that. In other words, we should stop being a dictator and move towards much more participatory, peer-based methods of sanctioning player behaviour.”

One step in this process would be getting rid of Steam’s only-recently-added Greenlight service, said Newell.

"Greenlight is a bad example of an election process. We came to the conclusion pretty quickly that we could just do away with Greenlight completely, because it was a bottleneck rather than a way for people to communicate choice."

“There's so much content coming at us that we just don't have enough time to turn the crank on the production process of getting something up on Steam. So whether we want to or not, we're creating artificial shelf space scarcity.”

The end result would see Steam become something similar to a network interface that anyone could call – essentially a user-run distribution and replication mechanism.

"It's the consumers who will draw it through. It's not us making a decision about what should or shouldn't be available. It's just, you want to use this distribution facility? It's there.

“And customers decide which things actually end up being pulled through. So Steam should stop being a curated process and start becoming a networking API."

The Steam store itself was boring, said Newell, and once again users would be a big part of the solution.

"The stores instead should become user-generated content. Other companies can take advantage of this as well, but if a user can create his own store – essentially add an editorial perspective and content on top of the purchase process.

“Then we've created a mechanism where everybody, in the same way we've seen a huge upsurge of user-generated content with hats, we think that there's a lot of aggregate value that can be created by allowing people to create stores.”

"I'd buy stuff from Yahtzee. I would buy everything from Old Man Murray," Newell added.