Valve’s new “Greenlight” service lets gamers choose Steam games

Valve have come up with a new way to get the community involved with choosing which games make it to the Steam “store shelves”. The new Greenlight program will allow Steam users to vote on which games they want to publish for sale on the Steam Store.

The new idea came about after Valve admitted they had a tough time in deciding which games should or should not be published on the Steam store. Ultimately they felt it appropriate to let Steam users have the final say since they are the people who spend their hard earned cash on these games that keep Valve in business.

In addition to allowing customers to have their say, it also gives developers and publishers the opportunity to open up their game to the gaming community to be judged in a public way, instead of having it judged by a Valve “internal jury” in a closed loop environment.

The Greenlight system will piggyback on the Steam Workshop framework, allowing content to be better organised and letting customers rate or leave feedback on the proposed game publications. Greenlight should provide a lot of motivation to the game developing community, allowing their game to get a lot more public exposure and community involvement. This removes the opportunity for Valve to make contentious decisions by letting gamers make the hard choices.

“Making the call to publish or not publish a title isn’t fun,” said Anna Sweet, Many times opinions vary and our internal jury is hung on a decision. But with the introduction of the Steam Workshop we realized an opportunity to enlist the community’s help as we review certain titles and, hopefully, increase the volume and quality of creative submissions.”

The Steam Greenlight service will be released on August the 30th and Steam’s provided web page on it can be found here. We expect that Greenlight will mainly apply to indie games.

Source: Press Release