Fresh on the heels of releasing Filmmaker, Valve has announced a new way for independently released games to get on Steam. Greenlight is a fundamentally new approach for how games get on Steam based on how much the community wants the game to be released on the distribution service.
How does this differ from other store’s submission processes?
The prime difference is the size of the team that gets to decide what gets released. For many stores, there is a team that reviews entries and decides what gets past the gates. We’re approaching this from a different angle: The community should be deciding what gets released. After all, it’s the community that will ultimately be the ones deciding which release they spend their money on.
Basically, once Steam OK’s the game from a technical standpoint it’s up to the game to get itself green lit by Steam users at large. The idea is to get more diverse games on Steam faster, and more openly.
This could mean that developers will have to spend more time promoting their game (which would likely be still in development) instead of making the game. Overall, this new approach makes me worried that only teams with vast social reach will succeed on team.
Ironically, couldn’t that actually increase the barrier to entry for startup studios?
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