Kickstarter and Steam Greenlight

So if I am going to do this Blogging thing for real I should probably talk about some things that I'll mention a whole bunch and that is Kickstarter and Steam Greenlight. Kickstarter and Steam Greenlight are two major aspects of the Indie game Community. Now most people already know what they are but I feel that I should explain it to those who don't know or those who completely get it.

Lets start with Kickstarter. Kickstarter is a website that allows people to crowd fund projects. 
"What is crowd funding?" you ask, well crowd funding is when companies skip past publishers and go straight to the audience, us. 

This means that some game developers can use Kickstarter to bypass a publisher that doesn't want to publish their game.

The way it works is that someone, in our case a games developer, will create a Kickstarter campaign for a game that they want to develop, asking for an amount of money. Gamers like you or me will see said campaign and think "hmmm that looks interesting I might want to play that" and might fund it, adding to the total funded.

When that game gets fully funded, the developers will be trusted to fully develop the game but even if the game is funded many people can still add their funds to the game, because of this many Kickstarter projects can have "stretch goals" that are additions to the project if it gets funded by an extra amount.

A prime example of a good Kickstarter would be the game Shovel Knight as it was funded really early into the Kickstarter campaign but decided to add many stretch goals that all got funded, adding in many new features into the game.

It's important to note that although Kickstarter has had a massive  impact in the Gaming community it is not restricted to games, many projects are not gaming related at all.

That was Kickstarter in a rather lengthy nutshell, I guess I will go onto Steam Greenlight now.

Steam Greenlight is a way for smaller indie games to get noticed. Because Steam is freaking awesome and it is pretty much the primary place to shop for PC games Valve decided to help the little guy with Steam Greenlight.

 What Steam Greenlight does is helps smaller games get published onto Steam. They do this by allowing the community to vote for which games they want to get published onto Steam. 

Valve then accepts the highest rated games into steam every now and then, this is super useful for indie games because many of them don't get much attention and would get overlooked easily but with Steam Greenlight they will get onto Steam and get seen by loads of people.

Thanks to both of these systems the Indie game community has grown so much over the past few months. 

With some Kickstarter games going viral like Shovel knight or FTL: Faster Than Light they can get accepted onto Steam Greenlight allowing many gamers who didn't know about it before to notice the game and play it.