Steam is an incredible digital storefront for games on both OS X and Windows. Now, they are looking to let the community help decide what games are worthy of entering the store.
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.
When Steam Greenlight launches, it will allow the the community to decide what it deems worthy. This is an interesting implementation of a filtering system. Instead of employing a number of staff members to moderate game submissions, the most dedicated of users will be voting on what games they’d like to see on Steam. Considering Greenlight is just the first step in getting a game onto the store, there isn’t much to dislike. The games are still held to the same standards (no spyware, nothing obscene, and no copyright violations), so you still get the benefits of a curated store despite being mob-ruled to some extent.
Hopefully, this system will make for a wider selection of games, and make it even easier for developers to distribute their games.
Source: Greenlight
