Steam Greenlight has been launched
Sean Cargle August 31, 2012 - 8:30 amNews: Steam’s indie game approval tool, Steam Greenlight, is freely available to all today with nearly 500 entries already.
I’m sure most PC gamers have heard about Steam Greenlight in the last six months and now Valve has finally taken it out of beta and released it to the community. With this tool you can vote on hundreds of games and determine whether or not they will be released on Steam. Just looking through it I can already spot some great games that I’d love to see on Steam, like the zombie survival game Project Zomboid, the dwarf fortress-lite Gnomoria, the turn-based strategy RPG Call of Cthulu: The Wasted Land and the very popular Slender: Source.
They also have some Kickstarter projects on there already, like the popular and successful platformer Project Giana and the not-so-successful but critically acclaimed Forge. Developers who submit their game to Greenlight may add videos, screenshots or demos to help get people interested and if they manage to earn enough votes they will get moved to the pending stage. Not every game will have to get a specific number of votes, especially since they will be changing the required number of votes over the next couple of weeks, but if a game gets popular enough and Valve sees enough interest in it then they may just offer to put them onto Steam.
Steam Greenlight may seem like a little thing, but when you hear about all of the games that get inexplicably denied by Valve without not so much as a note as to why, then it is great to see some power in the hands of the millions who are part of the Steam community. Greenlight is also important for games that are in alpha or beta. If a game has a pricing model similar to Miencraft, where they essentially release the game at a discounted price early on and in the alpha stage, they now have an actual chance on Steam. If you want to check out the full and growing line-up of submissions head on over to Steam Greenlight. There is a lot to look through and some of those games really deserve the chance to be on a digital distributing platform as huge as Steam.
