Valve has been quickly iterating on their Greenlight service ever since they launched it on August 30th of this year.
Right on launching the service was bombarded with fake and joke entries, making it harder for real and interesting games to stand out. This prompted Valve to quickly add a one-time $100 fee for submitting an entry to Greenlight—the money goes to charity. They them made multiple changes to the website to make it easier to discover games, and changed it to ensure that popular games don’t stick to the top, accumulating more votes while other entries dangle at the bottom waiting for some front-page time. The latest additions to Greenlight are categories for Software and Concepts.
In the digital game distribution business, Valve’s Steam service is the undisputed leader. For indie games, being on Steam can be a big boost, and the difference between popularity and obscurity. Recently Valve was faces with some criticism for the arbitrary criteria with which with games are selected to be included on the service. With Greenlight Valve opened up the process of selecting good games to the community.
Greenlight lets people vote on what they consider to be worthy games that they would buy, and the most popular games will then be accepted for release on the store. As of now 31 games have been “greenlit” and one of them (McPixel) has already been released on the Steam store.
Valve also, just recently, opened up its digital distribution service to non-game software, with a selection of seven software titles.
Now Valve has opened up Greenlight to non-game software titles as well, so software developers too have a way to let the community vote for their software to be included on the service.
Another addition is to the possibility to share ideas with the community that are still in the concept phase. These can be posted for free, but such entries wont end up on Steam no matter how many votes they get. It is instead a way for developers to gauge interest in their title from user’s of Steam; which given the large audience of the site, can be quite valuable.
