Linking to Greenlight

Willem came across an interesting article about Greenlight over at Gamasutra, which contained a useful tip I wanted to share with you.

By linking to a URL using the steam:// protocol and an undocumented feature of the Steam client, you can link directly to a game's Greenlight page, inside Steam. The user is generally already logged in to Steam, making it much easier for them to vote.

The URL in question is steam://url/CommunityFilePage/95359349, with the number replaced by your account identifier. The article sends the browser to this URL using server side scripting, but some Javascript works equally well if you prefer a client side solution. Here's what I set up at www.powargrid.com/greenlight - have a peek at the source if you want!

First, an invisible iframe to do the loading in. In several browsers, this prevents an error message if Steam is not installed.

  <iframe id="loader" style="display:none"
    height="0" width="0"></iframe> 

Then some Javascript to "load" the Steam URL.

 var loader = document.getElementById("loader");
 loader.src = "steam://url/CommunityFilePage/95359349"; 

That's it! I tried to get fancy and make it load the normal Greenlight page if the user doesn't have Steam installed, but making that work across different browsers turned out to be a pain in the neck. Instead, I just included a regular link people will have to click themselves.

That's all, maybe it'll be of use to someone!

Hack on,
Michiel