Showcase Saturday - Steam Greenlight and Skelattack

When I mention that I’m making a video game to friends and family, many people are curious how we’ll take our game to market. I’m going to use this showcase Saturday post to give a quick explanation of how we plan to get our game to consumers: Steam Greenlight.

Image found on Steam's website

Steam is essentially a digital storefront for nearly all computer games on the market. With few exceptions it’s safe to say that if you’re into PC gaming, you know Steam and use Steam. Steam used to curate all available games on its own, accepting titles from known publishers and then reviewing games from smaller companies to see if they belonged on Steam. With more and more independent (indie) publishers trying to get their games on Steam, the company decided to use a new crowdsourced approach called Greenlight.

So once our game is a little farther along—we’ll need to include screenshots and a nice trailer that show polished gameplay—we will enter Alkanaur into the Greenlight process. Once there, people can vote whether or not they’d be interested in buying the game. If we get enough attention, our game gets “greenlit” and we reserve a spot on Steam’s digital shelves, so to speak. From that point on we’ll continue to develop our game until it’s ready for release. Another nice feature of this process is that we’ll be able to build a community on Steam and keep receiving feedback to improve.

With so many games trying to be greenlit, the first few days of being on the front of the Greenlight page are vital. After you slip further back in line, you rely on other avenues to get visibility on your personal Greenlight page. So we’re hoping for a big first day, but if we don’t get greenlit right away, we’ll just keep spreading the word. Both Robby and I are confident that we’re making a well-designed, polished, and meaningful game that belongs on Steam, but it might take some extra work to make sure we get the necessary visibility. When the time comes, we’ll be reaching out to everyone for a bit of help. We’ll let you know!

In the meantime, I’d like to showcase a fun game called Skelattack. I’ve been following its progress on Twitter, and I think it has a unique character design and some fun gameplay. Skelattack is currently in the Greenlight process, so if you have a Steam account head on over to this link and check out the game. There’s even a demo version for Mac and PC users.