Fans of indie gaming on PC are no doubt already aware of Steam Greenlight, which allows Steam users to vote for the video game titles that they want to see available to buy through the Steam store. Since the program's launch on August 30th 2012, 260 titles have received the green light from Valve, and now the company is celebrating a successful first year.
If you failed to spend your fill during the Steam summer sale then get over to the Greenlight Sale, which is ongoing between now and September 2nd, 10AM PDT. The sale features over 50 discounted indie titles, including the hilariously horrific Surgeon Simulator 2013, dystopian moral conundrum thriller Papers, Please, and blocky creative shooter Guncraft.
Aside from the sale, Valve also observed the anniversary of Steam Greenlight by recapping the first year of the project, which doubled the number of indie titles available on the platform. The statement marks the current number of active Steam accounts at an impressive 50 million, and includes a statement from Gabe Newell on the company's further aims for Greenlight in the future:
"Ultimately our goal is to have no bottlenecks at all between developers and consumers. As we move closer to that, launching Greenlight and evolving our backend toolset has helped us increase our publishing throughput, pushing the number of independent titles released in the last twelve months to equal the number of titles published from all other categories combined. We expect that number to grow dramatically as we continue to iterate upon our developer service features and seek more ways to improve Steam's value to the community."
To give an extra big push to the number of indie titles available, Steam also celebrated Greenlight's anniversary by approving 100 new greenlit titles, including episodic adventure Shadow of the Eternals, Precursor Games' follow-up to classic survival horror game Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem. The games that have been given the green light in this batch will be released through Steam over the next few weeks and months as they complete development. That may take some time for Shadow of the Eternals, which recently failed to meet its Kickstarter campaign goals.
Steam has been something of a trendsetter when it comes to providing a platform for indie titles, and Microsoft has pledged to capitalize on this corner of the industry with the Xbox One. Backtracking from the company's previous decision not to allow developers to self-publish on the new console, Microsoft has launched the 'Independent Developers Initiative,' through which it will provide development kits to developers who wish to publish on the Xbox One. Whether or not this will provide serious competition for Valve's indie avenues remains to be seen.
What's your favorite game that's been launched through Steam Greenlight, and which games are you hoping to see approved in the future?
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Source: Valve