[UPDATE] June 7 2017: Valve has shut down Steam Greenlight. Go here for the full story.
[UPDATE] June 5 2017: Valve has announced how much it will cost developers to submit a game to Steam Direct. The fee comes in at a relatively low US$100, considering options of up to $5,000 were being considered. Valve says "Aiming for the low publishing fee gives every game developer a chance to get their game in front of players" and that additional work to the Steam Store's algorithms and presentation will help worthwhile games get more visibility.
The original story continues below.
Over on the official Steam blog, Valve announced a major change that it would be making to the digital distribution platform. After long-promising to overhaul the Steam Greenlight process, in which the community votes on which games should make it onto the Steam platform proper, Valve has announced a straight up replacement for the system called Steam Direct.
Previously, with Steam Greenlight, indie developers would pay a small fee to have their game appear on the Steam Greenlight system. Players would then vote for games which they wanted to see appear on the Steam store. Valve would regularly take the top-voted Greenlight games and then actually greenlight them, giving them access to the Steam backend so those developers could get their store pages up.
Issues arose when the act of curation that Greenlight seemed intended to create gave way to mass greenlighting of games which many felt were sub-par, shovelware, or quick-fire “asset flips”. As a result, the Steam store became inundated with games that were not of a certain bar of quality. Valve’s intention has always been to essentially greenlight as much as possible, and create stronger discovery and filtering tools within the store itself. But that system has not yet reached a point where poor titles do not still overtake the new release list. Still, Valve has analysed the improvements that the store’s latest Discovery update has created, here.
Greenlight’s replacement, Steam Direct, is set to release sometime in the next month or two. It will require new developers to submit a number of digital forms to Valve, including company and tax documentation. It then bypasses the community voting system, and instead will require developers to pay a fee for each new game submission.
The nature of the fee is still being debated internally at Valve. The idea is to discourage submissions of poor quality games by making it too expensive, but not expensive enough that quality games from smaller developers don’t have a chance of making it onto the store. Valve states:
“We talked to several developers and studios about an appropriate fee, and they gave us a range of responses from as low as $100 to as high as $5,000. There are pros and cons at either end of the spectrum, so we’d like to gather more feedback before settling on a number.”
This fee is currently the biggest point of contention amongst indie developers. However, most agree that the old Greenlight system had its own problems, and that a direct-access model is an improvement over a vague and opaque voting system. We’ll keep updated with Steam Direct’s developments as Valve irons out the exact process and cost for Steam store submissions.
I am not sure how I feel about this yet. It is going to be an interesting transition. I guess we will see once the details are laid out.
The devil is definitely in the details:) If recoupable means what I think it means then it wouldn't be such a bad idea with a fee around $500-$1000. $5000 would probably be too prohibitive for many indies who could put that money to much better use paying artists for original artwork.
Well this transition just may deter any future "Digital Homicide-like" development antics... I guess.
This is something that was bound to happen, way too much low level games found their way unto Steam. A single $50 fee (i believe), was all that was needed to get listed on GL.
And yes, i do have mixed feelings about this approach a lot of Indie developers will shun the "new greenlight" concept.
I can only hope that some sort of quality control will active and give some Indies a chance to prove themselvs.
don't know. I was afraid and hopeful of what the solution Valve found might be, but the tone they found seems indeed wrong to be.
If the cost was meant to work a bit as an entry barrier, 100$ is obviously too low. Specially if recoupable. Even crappy games can fairly "easily" recoup that.
Greenlight was weird and ugly, we all agree on that, but at least it imposed an additional effort, in presentation, quality, trailers, etc to the developers. Now even that is not needed any longer.
Everything else, the filtering, the discoverability, etc. could be very good, or it could be very ******, only time will tell. We will see, now it tastes a bit bitter, but maybe it works, fingers crossed.
Direct is gonna flop. Especially if the $5K price tag becomes a reality. Courtesy of the ignorant and arrogant Steam gamers.... They just want to punish both bad AND good devs with the $5K idea, just like the new refund policy and how that was being abused.