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Valve has announced a new initiative within Steam that will allow the users themselves to select which independent games are released on Steam. Being showcased on Steam can mean a huge boost for some indie games, and competition can be fierce.Steam Greenlight (opens in new tab)gives this power to the players, allowing them to select which games they’re most excited about.
“For many stores, there is a team that reviews entries and decides what gets past the gates,” Valve wrote in a post announcing the initiative. “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.”
“We are most interested in finding the games that people want, not requiring them to always hit a specific number of votes,” the post continues.
In an industry where megahits like Minecraft can go unnoticed by the industry at-large (while the game spreads through word of mouth through forums), the new initiative should be a much more democratic way to get attention focused on the right games.
Increasingly, it seems like Valve is focusing their support on independent developers. Just today a (completely unsubstatiated, yet exciting) rumor (opens in new tab)broke that they’ll be launching a big indie bundle sale soon. It’s growing pretty clear that Valve wants Steam to be the location of choice for the next wave of big indie games.
