Steam: Greenlight

Steam's Greenlight initiative/storefront/thing launched yesterday, and I think it's a pretty cool idea. I'll let them describe it:

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.

The exact number of votes to get a game for sale on Steam remains a moving target, which makes sense, because the voting base should (hopefully) grow over time. It provides for a weird but useful mix of inputs - first-look interest in a game from people who've never heard of it combined with concerted and organized up-votes from the game's aready existing fans. There are a number of games on there I've seen on Kickstarter, so I assume those folks are reaching out to their backers and asking for votes. Or at least they should be.

Obviously we're going to give this a try with Haunts, hopefully sooner rather than later.

In related news, I used to really like that show, Project Greenlight, about funding indie movies. I did not, however, like any of the three movies that got made because of the show.