Valve announced today that its Steam gaming platform is bringing the power of game selection to the players.

Valve announced today that its Steam gaming platform is bringing the power of game selection to the players. Steam Greenlight will allow users to vote on the games they'd most like to see released by Steam.

Developers can post information, screenshots, and videos for their own games so they can "seek a critical mass of community support in order to get selected for distribution," according to the Steam community website.

Valve has not yet determined how much support or votes a game must receive in order to be distributed on Steam. "It's going to change during the first few days/weeks since we don't know what kind of traffic to expect, Valve said. "[But] the specific number of votes doesn't matter as much as relative interest in a game compared with other games in Steam Greenlight."

Until now, Steam's pipeline for releasing games has always relied "on a group of people to make tough choices on which games to not release on Steam." But "we knew there had to be a better way," Valve said.

The biggest difference between most retailers' review teams and Steam Greenlight is that stores gather a small group of gatekeepers; Steam wants to turn its entire community of fans into one large team.

"After all, it's the community that will ultimately be the ones deciding which release they spend their money on," Steam said.

Steam Greenlight is expected to launch on Aug. 30.