Valve announced today a new system that enlists the community's help in picking some of the next games to be released on Steam
Using the new "GreenLight" service, game developers post information, screenshots, and videos for their game and seek a critical mass of community support in order to get selected for distribution.
"Over the many years that Steam has been selling games, the release rate of games on Steam has continued to grow significantly," the company explained. "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."
Needless to say, the new system applies to smaller games only whereas blockbusters from large publishers such as Activision and EA will be published directly.