Valve has a right to be proud of their Steam platform. After all, it's become an essential part of any gamer's tool belt. Even if one does not buy games on the Steam store directly, many games require it as part of their DRM to activate and launch, and you will end up with Steam on your system anyway. Recently, Valve has been looking into ways to make their system more accessible to smaller companies and Indie Developers, and until now, Steam Greenlight has been the main way to allow for this.

Under Greenlight, for a fee of $100, a developer could put up as many games as they desired into the Steam platform, but they are not immediately put into the store. Rather, they are voted on by the community and only games that do well are allowed in. Steam Direct differs from this in that it gets rid of the community voting process and allows developers to publish directly for a fee that is paid for each title. This opens a new can of worms that depends entirely on how large this fee is. Valve is currently talking in the range of $100 to as high as $5,000 (based on a survey among developers).

Unigine's dazzling-looking Superposition benchmark (which was due for a late 2016 launch but still hasn't made the rounds, having an expected release date on Q1 of the current year) won't be coming to your average PC gaming platform of choice: Steam.

Apparently, the absence of the benchmark on Steam isn't a choice made by Unigine itself; instead, the "Superposition" benchmark has effectively been locked from entering Steam's catalog on account of it not being "suitable" for their Greenlight initiative. And this comes on the toes of the benchmark having recently achieved the status of number one application on Greenlight - not an easy thing to do, considering the amount of applications that vie for that spot.

Valve today revealed November 30th as the target date for announcing the next set of titles to launch via Steam Greenlight. Given current voting, at least 10 more game titles are expected to be offered worldwide distribution agreements via Steam.

In addition, Valve hopes to announce Greenlight's first graduating class of Software titles, with at least five Software titles targeted for inclusion in the group to be announced Nov 30th. Steam Greenlight is a new platform feature that enlists the community's help in selecting some of the next games to be released on Steam. Launched on August 30, Greenlight allows developers and publishers to post information and media about their game in an effort to convince Community members that their game should be released on Steam. For more information, please visit SteamPowered.