Valve set to kill Steam Greenlight - Replace with a more costly service

GoodBytes · February 10, 2017

Valve announces that it plans to kill Steam Greenlight a service, a service which allows people to publish in there that are still in development or completed on their store to be vote to be actually added into the Store. It let the public to evaluate games to be worth wild to be on the Steam store over having Valve do that themselves, reducing their burden significantly.

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Valve is set to drop its Steam Greenlight system — which allows customers to vote on small-scale and fledgling projects — in favor of a more streamlined system.

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Valve originally positioned Greenlight as a way for the company to step back from evaluating and curating every last project that was submitted to the company. Last year alone, more than 4,000 new titles were released on Steam.

The new service will be called: Steam Direct. And the way it works, by having a form to fill, pay a fee that is still not defined, by the company said that they are considering a fee up to $5,000, compared to the $100 one time fee it charged for Greenlight.

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Steam Direct will dispense with any kind of popularity contest. Developers will now simply fill out a form, submit their game to a basic compatibility test, pay a fee and launch the game.

The fee is likely to prove a point of contention. Under Greenlight, developers pay a one-off $100 fee, under which they can then submit as many apps as they please. The new fee will be per project. Valve says that the new fee will likely be higher than $100, and is considering anything up to $5,000. The firm says it wants to find a balance between allowing struggling but talented creators to launch great new games, while discouraging multiple launches of questionable quality and seriousness.

Steam Early Access, under which developers can sell incomplete builds of games, will not be affected by this change.

Source: http://www.polygon.com/2017/2/10/14571438/steam-direct-greenlight-dumped