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Steam Greenlight is going away for good, will be replaced by Steam Direct

Steam Greenlight started off as a noble idea to help smaller developers get their games onto Steam by riling up community interest. Unfortunately, the service was quickly taken advantage of and led to more than a few awful games landing on Steam's front page. As a result, Steam Greenlight will be going away later this year and will be replaced by a new system- Steam Direct.

Steam Direct will be a “direct sign-up system for developers”, allowing them to apply to get their games on Steam. The catch here though is that while Greenlight was free, an application fee will be in place for those going through the Steam Direct system. This fee is intended as a way to “decrease the noise in the submission pipeline” and weed out some of the worst Greenlight offenders.

Right now, a price has not been set for the Steam Direct application fee but Valve is in talks with developers to figure out a fair cost barrier. However, suggestions so far have been broad, with some opting for as low as $100 with others saying the fee should be as high as $5000. Valve hasn't settled on a number yet but the company hopes that this will help improve “the entire pipeline” for bringing new content to Steam.

KitGuru Says: Valve has made it clear that it doesn't want to curate the Steam Store itself. However, putting a cost barrier in the way should help reduce the number of awful games sneaking onto Steam, as well as the number of trading card scam titles. That said, setting the Steam Direct fee too high could discourage some well-intentioned indie developers, so Valve will need to try and strike a good balance here. 

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8 comments

  1. I thought Greenlight had a fee

  2. this is infinitely worse. It’s like opening the flood-gates to shovelware, but pushing poor indies out.

  3. Completely agreed, this does more harm than good.

  4. I’ve never brought anything from GreenLight anyway as I’ve found most of the games on Steam these days to be utter rubbish, I’d say at least 50% off the stuff could be removed as it just supports “Early Access” money grabs and skins.

  5. I don’t see why Steam don’t withhold like 85% of the money from the Steam games until the game is officially published and certified to have met standards. If they do not meet the standards then the contract they will have signed will owe any money they have received back to the Steam users. This would still provide developers with enough money to work if they are actually going to make a game instead of just squeezing some money out of people, whilst also providing an incentive to finish a game. I am not aware of a single large early access title on Steam that has a) come out of early access and b) met standards and not had the developers just take all the money and run.

    For example, Subnautica (2 years in early access, not from the beginning of production but since it was released in “early access”) which said originally “yes we intend to add multiplayer at some point” so lots of people bought it early because they trusted them, and then because there was no official guarantee of it and so many people had already handed over the cash they decided “oh no, not in this game. Although, in future we will release more sh*te for you to give us cash for that will have multiplayer”. Another, Day Z which is 3 years in early access (not including all pre-early access release production AND anything they had from the years of the DayZ mod existing). If you do not know about Day Z by now then you’re been living under an early access rock. Still at a premium of £23 on Steam and yet has probably 1/100th of the content offered by the FREE mod, and all because they got their money too early and ditched the game, and it really tells you how many people bought it when they have 162k reviews

    Steam really absolutely has to do something about this, because way too many developers are just going on Steam Greenlight, putting enticing concepts and extremely flattering early access videos and images along with a “promise” that usually runs along the lines of “we care about our users, so we decided to go into early access so we can get all your feedback and all the support while we work so we can provide the best game possible!” and then probably on average around 8 months later it becomes very painfully clear the project is all but abandoned.

    Another huge issue with this is, a lot of early access games probably benefit more than hardworking honest developers because everyone sees this unfinished product and thinks “wow, look at it’s potential!” and then they cash out and f**k off, whereas when you are provided with the finish game your imagination can run less wild with the possibilities for a game.

    Oh, and one more, any developers that have worked on previous games should be 100% barred from ANY access to Steam.

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  7. Glad to see I was not the only one who had same opinion.

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