Game designers now have a new place to crowd source their ideas and potentially turn them into the next big indie hit.
The gaming world has changed, friends. It’s now the visionary and his or her Internet savvy followers that have the keys to the game-creating ignition, instead of the monolithic corporations who used to hold them in their cold, dead grips.
More and more have games – typically of the indie variety – have bypassed the middle man thanks to publishing initiatives such as Steam Greenlight, where developers can submit half-baked, or fully baked, games up to a community vote.
If a certain title gets enough attention amongst Steam members, Valve, the parent company and builder of the popular PC gaming distributor, will inquire on attaining publishing rights so that it can be sold on their storefront.
The process for hosting a Greenlight project isn’t free though, it requires a $100 entry fee – chump change for any small league game maker, okily dokily, but what if you just want to throw out a hypothetical gaming pitch and see what comes from it?
Ah-ha! That’s where Steam’s latest toolset comes in, a new section on Greenlight called “Concepts.” Ditching the startup fee, Concepts lets developers purpose ideas for new games that, for whatever reason, don’t have enough Greenlight leverage to be put on voting block.
This also means nothing gets “greenlighted” on the Concepts page, rather user ratings, favorites, and comments are pulled together for the developer to gauge whether a potential project has enough interest to move forward onto the Greenlight process.
Pretty nifty, indeed, and hopefully, we’ll see a lot of interesting submissions budding through such a venture from creators known and unknown. Who knows, someone reading this could be on the verge of the next indie darling. What a brave new world it is!
Head over to Steam Greenlight to check out the Concepts page, where already a few new projects have been posted, and afterwards, travel the information superhighway back to Walyou for an incredibly detailed set of Mass Effect N7 armor and 12 amazing Batman: Death of the Family covers.
