Valve prepping Steam Greenlight for crowd sourced video game approvals

Valve has been a significant player in the digital distribution of games via its Steam service on the PC for long time. Steam has turned out to be very good for independent game developers allowing them to publish games digitally, directly to the gamer. Valve is set to unveil a new plan that will help independent developers, to get crowd source assistance to get their games distributed via Steam.

The new service is called Steam Greenlight and is described as a place where "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 previously had a similar offering called Workshop, but that was for mods to existing games. Greenlight will be for standalone games.

Greenlight is set to launch at the end of August and should make for much happier independent developers. Apparently, all independent developers received from the folks who decided on what games would be distributed via Steam in the past was a yes or no answer. Greenlight will allow developers to submit a lot more content to go along with the game, such as photos and video, and then the gamers can vote on what games will be offered via Steam. An unspecified number of votes will be needed for the game to get approval for distribution on Steam, and the specific number of votes will change depending on traffic to Greenlight.

[via Tech2.in.com]