Valve has announced that it is launching a complementary element to Steam called Steam Greenlight. Launching in August, this new program is designed to be a way that developers can turn to the Steam community to greenlight a game to launch on the digital distribution service instead of using the internal team that greenlights products for Steam.

“Steam Greenlight is a new system that enlists the community’s help in picking some of the next games to be released on Steam,” reads the site for Steam Greenlight. “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.”

“Over the many years that Steam has been selling games, the release rate of games on Steam has continued to grow significantly. But given Steam’s existing technological pipeline for releasing games, there’s always been a reliance on a group of people to make tough choices on which games to not release on Steam. There are titles that have tied up this internal greenlight group in the past, and we knew there had to be a better way,” the website adds. “With the introduction of the Steam Workshop in October 2011, Steam established a flexible system within Steam that organizes content and lets customers rate and leave feedback. This opened up a new opportunity to enlist the community’s help as we grow Steam and, hopefully, increase the volume and quality of creative submissions.We know there is still a lot of room for improvement in making Steam distribution easier and faster; this is just a first step in that direction.”

“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,” Valve asserts.

Source: SteamCommunity.com