Earlier this month, Valve announced plans to remove the Steam Greenlight feature. While Greenlight has been an invaluable platform for indie developers and the Steam community alike, it has been a deeply flawed system. In 2016 we saw the release of over 4,000 titles to Steam, that’s quite an increase over the 1,500 plus released back in 2015. Due to this mass influx of games, countless subpar titles found their way onto the Steam Store, while other more promising titles slipped through the cracks seemingly unnoticed. To tackle this and the numerous other issues that the Greenlight system has showcased, this spring, Valve will be introducing Steam Direct. “A better path for digital distribution” Steam Direct will replace the voting system used by Greenlight, with a simple application process.
“We will ask new developers to complete a set of digital paperwork, personal or company verification, and tax documents similar to the process of applying for a bank account. Once set up, developers will pay a recoupable application fee for each new title they wish to distribute, which is intended to decrease the noise in the submission pipeline.”
Currently, Valve is looking to developers for suggestions on a reasonable publishing fee. Recommendations ranging from $100 to $5,000 have been made however Valve stated: “we’d like to gather more feedback before settling on a number”. Steam Direct’s recoupable application fee will be applied per project, unlike Greenlight’s one-time fee that allowed multiple games to be voted on.
Steam hopes to finally close the gap between customer and content. Fine tuning in Steamworks and the recent Discovery Updates, per the Steam Blog, have already shown some promising results. They report that game time logged on Steam after the first Discovery Updates launch, has been climbing steadily. This growth is complimented by the average number of titles being purchased by single consumers on Steam being doubled. Valve is striving to bring some much-needed improvements to the Steam Store and with the coming release of Steam Direct, it seems they are on the right path.