Steam Greenlight has officially launched! You know what that means, right? It means that lots of new and exciting indie titles will be making their way to the Steam catalog soon!

Greenlight is essentially a haven for the latest and greatest indie titles, but the games listed on Greenlight can’t be purchased just yet. The way it works is fairly straightforward, the community votes yay or nay for a certain indie title, and when it receives enough endorsements Steam developers will work on adding that title to the game catalog.

Traditionally, Valve has doled out distribution decisions to a small group of publishers and developers. That is, a specific team at Valve was tasked with choosing what games were to be added to the catalog and when to add them. Now Greenlight will allow the gaming community to decide what games are brought to Steam.

To vote on your favorite game all you need is an active Steam account!

What Are The Developer Requirements to Submit a Game to Greenlight?

The requirements for Greenlight submissions aren’t difficult to meet, games must at least run on a Windows PC but can be of any participating platforms. Developers need to own a valid and non-limited Steam account, which means they must possess at least one game on Steam.

To publish a game on Steam Greenlight developers must provide a product description with a clear list of system requirements, a demo video and at least four screenshots.

In addition, games are not allowed to contain offensive material or violate “copyright or intellectual property rights.”

How Long Will it Take Games to Pass The Voting Phase?

Once you’ve rated a game, the evaluation results will appear in the window showing you how many more positive votes are required for it to make its way to the Steam catalog.

If you truly want your favorite game to be made available, you can even share the Greenlight page link using Facebook, Twitter, Reddit or Digg. Hopefully your friends will see your link and vote so that the game can pass the voting stage.

Valve has also explained that they “are most interested in finding the games that people want, not always requiring them to reach a specific number of votes.” This essentially means that Valve will be adding games to the Steam catalog based on community wide value instead of just the number of endorsements.

What Happens When Games Finally Pass The Voting Stage?

Once that progress meter is almost full the game will start making its way into the official Steam catalog so that you can finally buy it and add it to your Steam library. Just to reiterate, as soon as a game passes the voting period it will be added to the Steam catalog.

Valve encourages developers to publish their unfinished games in Steam Greenlight, similar to other crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter. Of course, they also warn that as soon as a game is accepted into the Steam catalog it needs to be added soon after. So developers need to be ready to launch the game as soon as it passes the voting stage. Of course, that could realistically mean we’ll be seeing a lot of Alpha and Beta phase titles now offered on Steam.

What Do I Need to Participate in Greenlight?

Since Steam is currently only available for Windows and Mac PCs, you will need to have Steam installed on one of the aforementioned platforms. Steam will be making its way to Linux soon, so Linux users could be taking part in Greenlight in the near future!

You will also need a Steam account, so that your votes can be associated directly to your account. This also allows you to track the voting progress of a game once you’ve voted. Greenlight filters games that you’ve already voted for and uses the information to suggest similar games.

Have you ever wanted to pick the games that you could buy and download through Steam? Well now is your chance to do so, get out there and start voting for your favorite titles!