Valve, the creators of Half-Life, Portal, Team Fortress 2, and the popular Steam digital video game distribution platform, announced today that Steam Greenlight has officially launched. The voting has already begun.

Greenlight is a new system that allows gamers to vote on what new games should be sold in the Steam Store. Developers can post screenshots, descriptions, and videos detailing their game in an effort to impress gamers and garner votes. As of right now, a quick count shows that there are already over 250 game projects to be voted on, and more are being added constantly. Some of the more interesting titles I’ve already glimpsed in Greenlight include Kenshi, Dawn of Fantasy, and Slender: Source.

“We’ve been working on this feature for the last few months with the input from a group of indie partners, and the response has been extremely positive,” said Anna Sweet, business development at Valve. “With the additional help of beta testers, we are able to launch with a solid line-up of titles for the community to start viewing and rating. And, as we’ve done with all Steam features, we intend to continually grow and modify Greenlight as more and more developers and community members have a chance to get involved.”

Perhaps Steam Greenlight is simply part of Valve’s redesign of Steam to focus more on user-generated content. Or, perhaps Steam Greenlight is the result of Valve being inundated with more indie game submissions than they had the manpower to keep up with. Either way, PC gamers now have a ton of control over what gets into the Steam store, and indie developers will have to keep that in mind when designing games.