Valve to Launch Steam Greenlight In August

Valve has always been big on social features with its Steam gaming platform. It’s now extending that by croudsourcing the approval process for games to appear on Steam, calling it Steam Greenlight, which is to go live in August. This is how Valve describes this new feature: “Steam Greenlight is a new system that enlists the community’s help in picking some of the next games to be released on Steam. 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”.

Valve explain why it hasn’t always worked this way, which boils down to the increasing rate of new game releases and the tough choices the approval team have to make when deciding what to leave out. Since it’s the community / customers at large that get to play them, they feel that now is a good time to give the community a choice in what games appear for sale on the Steam platform and acknowledge that “there is still a lot of room for improvement in making Steam distribution easier and faster” calling this “just a first step in that direction.” Click the link below for more details, along with a useful FAQ for gamers and developers.