Being on Steam can make a world of difference for independent game developers. It’s the platform where these developers tend to see the bulk of their sales even when they have the advantage of being featured elsewhere. Take Super Meat Boy for instance, which was released on Xbox Live Arcade more than a month before Steam. In its first two weeks of availability on Steam made as much as the XBLA version despite the head start the latter had. Likewise, the revenue generated by Breath of Death VII and Cthulhu Saves the World in their first week on Steam eclipsed what they did on the Xbox Live Indie Games service in over a year. Unfortunately, not every project that developers seek to have released on Steam makes it, and not just because those games are unworthy. Valve has only a small team to evaluate these applications, but it’s a team that will soon expand greatly with the launch of Steam Greenlight.
As announced earlier this week, Greenlight is a way of essentially crowdsourcing Steam’s approval process for indie games. Although users themselves won’t directly be pressing a button to make games available on Steam’s store, their feedback will influence which games do and do not get the go-ahead. They will do this by voting on games they want to see, though Valve will look at the relative amount of interest each title receives compared with others on Greenlight as opposed to simply tallying the number of votes.
