Getting your game on Steam is an incredibly big deal for an indie developer. Valve’s combination digital distribution/social gaming network serves over 5.5 million concurrent users every day, and that number is continuing to trend steadily upwards with every passing month. This is a huge potential market – far larger than an indie dev would be able to reach on limited or no marketing funds – and Steam access can make all the difference between ridiculously successful sales figures and going out of business. At the same time obtaining that access is a rather murky and opaque process that can be rather baffling to everyone outside of Valve, with games being rejected or accepted for Steam in a manner that seems somewhat arbitrary to say the very least. I say “is” rather than “was”, because despite the introduction of Valve’s Greenlight community voting system the process is still rather uneven.
