Penny Arcade Goes Green[house]

Penny Arcade and Vancouver-based developer Hothead Games have unveiled Greenhouse, “a platform agnostic digital distribution portal”. Greenhouse will initially be used to distribute the Penny Arcade adventure game, On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness, but PA artist and co-founder Mike “Gabe” Krahulik says that’s just the beginning: “eventually we’d like to use [Greenhouse] as a way of promoting great independent games that might otherwise slide under the radar.”  

But with services like Steam and GameTap already in place, why create Greenhouse? Jerry “Tycho” Holkins told Wired that “Greenhouse isn’t an application by any means. It’s similar to the store we have for posters or shirts or whatever; it just happens to sell videogames instead. So we’re not asking somebody to install the Greenhouse client and then keep it updated or whatever.” 

The PA front men say that they will act as an editorial board: “The games have to go through us before they get to Greenhouse. Or we submit them to Greenhouse ourselves.”  So what kind of games would Gabe and Tycho like to see distributed on Greenhouse?

“The crayon game. Crayon Physics (linked here on O514 since forever! – ed). That’s the sort of thing that I would love to put in front of our audience, and say, you guys should play this, definitely. And obviously, we can link it, but to be able to actually distribute it through Greenhouse would be fantastic. It would enable us in a way that would be easy for the developer to get it out there with a royalty structure that is not full of shit. Which I think is a great combination.”

Greenhouse is currently in beta, and you can help stress test it by downloading an uncompressed podcast.