When video game developer Double Fine raised $3.34 million with its Kickstarter campaign last March, the entire industry took notice, scrambling to harness the crowd’s wisdom and cash. Valve Corporation and GamesPlanet just jumped on the bandwagon, revealing their own crowdsourcing efforts: GamesPlanet Lab and Steam Greenlight.

GamesPlanet Lab

European digital distributor GamesPlanet, in partnership with crowdfunding platform Ulule, last week launched a crowdfunding platform called GamesPlanet Lab (GLP). Unlike Gambitious, an equity-based crowdfunding platform for video games, GPL is purely a pledge-based platform. As on Kickstarter and Indiegogo, GPL campaign creators craft a tiered reward structure to entice the crowd to back their projects. Additionally, like all the aforementioned platforms, GPL allows development studios to retain the intellectual property rights to their games.

“This is not a publishing house,” reads the GamePlanet press release. “No matter what support GamesPlanet Lab offers, developers retain full control and copyright over their ideas. GamesPlanet Lab is also committed to putting the gaming experience first, by demanding not only good results but a gamer-friendly approach to the issue of [digital rights management].”

If GamesPlanet Lab’s first project is an accurate indication, the platform is off to a fantastic start. Magrunner: Dark Pulse, a first-person puzzle game set in a steampunk-inspired version of H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulu mythos, has raised €44,475 in roughly a week — about 44% of its €100,000 goal.

Steam Greenlight

Steam, the popular video game marketplace, will begin to utilize its crowd to determine which independent games get the “green light” for sale on its digital shelves, Valve Corporation announced on Monday. The community voting program, aptly named Steam Greenlight, will launch sometime in August.

Greenlight shares some similarities with LEGO’s CUUSOO platform, which allows fans to vote on potential LEGO projects. But unlike CUUSOO, which requires projects to solicit 10,000 votes before LEGO considers selling it as a boxed product, Greenlight doesn’t require indie games to acquire a certain number of votes to be selected. The specific number of votes in less important than its popularity in relation to other games in contention, explains Valve in its Greenlight overview.

“We know there is still a lot of room for improvement in making Steam distribution easier and faster,” says Valve. Greenlight “is just a first step in that direction.”