More and more successful PC games are being made by small, and sometimes even one man, development studios. Sometimes it can be difficult for those games to find distribution. This week, Valve announced a new program for its Steam PC and Mac game download service called Steam Greenlight that is designed to help small PC games get submitted and accepted on Steam.
Currently, an internal group at Valve decides which games are made available on Steam. However, Valve feels that this approach can be made better by allowing its own community members to participate in this process. The Steam Greenlight page states:
Developers post information, screenshots, and videos for their game and seek a critical mass of community support in order to get selected for distribution. Steam Greenlight also helps developers get feedback from potential customers and start creating an active community around their game as early in the development process as they like.
While this service doesn"t offer a way to directly fund a game"s development, like Kickstarter does, having a game be accepted on Steam via community feedback could set the stage for a successful launch. The new program will accept just PC and Mac game titles, at least for now. Valve says it will launch Steam Greenlight at the end of August.
Source: Steam Greenlight page | Image via Valve