Pay-what-you-want bundle raises publicity for Steam Greenlight games

Valve's Steam Greenlight should help popular indie games get on Steam, but many lesser-known developers are concerned they'll have trouble finding the support. In an attempt to raise the profile of their not-yet-on-Steam games, a small group have banded together and deployed that old indie favorite--a pay-what-you-want bundle.

The Green Light Bundle offers four games for whatever you fancy paying--Dino Run SE; Ichi; Muffin Knight; and Syder Arcade--plus another four--Gunman Clive; Guerrilla Bob; Paper Monsters; and Samurai II Vengeance--if you pay above the average price.

Then, as the bundle has introduced you to the games and perhaps made you like them, the organizers hope you'll vote for them on Steam Greenlight and they'll get onto the actual Steam store, where they can be introduced to a far larger audience.

Exposure is only one problem potentially facing Steam Greenlight, mind. Some makers of quirky, unusual, and hard-to-explain games are concerned that they won't come across well on the platform, such as Dinner Date creator Jeroen D. Stout.

"Steam Greenlight does sort-of worry me. I am not sure the people who bought Dinner Date are the people to click 'like' on a Greenlight page," Stout said on Twitter today. He added, "I am also not sure an aggregate should be a curator and whether popularity should define a sales platform."

The Path developer Tales of Tales responded, "We sort-of make games for the other half of the human spectrum. La resistance. The not-joiners. Let's hope Valve likes us."

Of course, we're not yet sure how exactly Valve will pick games from Greenlight to put on the store. One would certainly hope that it won't be a simple popularity contest, or we could end up with an awful lot of very similar games. But if a game can't draw much attention on Greenlight, would it shift that many copies on the Steam store anyway?

Steam Greenlight is due to launch later this month. The Green Light Bundle will run for two weeks, then the organizers hope to put together another bundles of games on Steam Greenlight.