Getting games onto Steam just got a whole new layer of meta with the arrival of the Greenlight Bundle , a new non-Steam-affiliated pay-what-you-want scheme for indie games. The idea appears to be that you can pay a pittance for the games now, and, in doing so, help promote the games enough that the devs can effectively promote themselves on Valve's own Greenlight promotion platform, and ultimately allow other people to pay for the games on Steam.
If only there was some way to vote for which games appear on the Greenlight Bundle, the circle would be complete.
Snark aside, the games are certainly going cheap: for a single dollar, you'll get pixel-pushing puzzler Pixel Blocked, Gozilla-inspired multiplayer game Omegalodon and the block-matching space-game mash-up Starlaxis: Light Hunter. For five dollars or more you get the above, plus Call of Cthulhu: The Wasted Land, Perpetuum, Dawn of Fantasy, Oniken, General Conflict and some bonus Awesomenauts DLC.
The FAQ suggests the bundle is open to further submissions from Greenlight hopefuls. It all seems like a rather elaborate way to navigate a system that many hoped would solve these exact issues of visibility - but perhaps having some barriers to entry avoids Steam's oversaturation by smaller games.
