Steam Greenlight Set to be a Haven for Indie Developers

Today Steam announced something big. No, not their much-anticipated Summer Sale. They have unveiled their new project which is titled "Steam Greenlight". It's not live yet but they have already shared a fair amount of information about it.

So, what is Steam Greenlight? Here's the word straight from Steam:

"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."

Before this, Steam has been known as notoriously difficult to get indie developed games onto. Some very successful indie games on other platforms have been unable to make it onto Steam. This is a massive change to the system which will now let the community help bring games onboard that probably deserve it.

Greenlight will function very much like the currently existing Steam Workshop, except now it's not about modifications but entire games. Hopefully exposing new indie titles to the community instead of a small set of reviewers will help get many more titles onto the digital storefront. There will also be tools in place in case a game on Greenlight is obviously copyright infringing or doing something more malicious.

The launch of Greenlight will be at the end of August, so get your indie games prepared! This looks like an interesting new angle for developers to have their games shown, and hopefully accepted, by players everywhere.