Steam Direct – Valve Finally Confirms Publishing Fee

Valve has announced that Steam Direct, the service intending to replace Greenlight will only charge $100 to self-publish a game. This represents a significantly lower figure than the company wanted. The price should, however, help indie developers moving forward.

What is Steam Direct?

Details at the moment are a little bit sketchy, it is, after all, going to replace the Greenlight system so many of us are currently familiar with. It seems that broadly speaking, the changes are going to be applied to what criteria a game requires to be published (make available) by Steam. Steam Direct is also anticipated to hold a lot more features for those who enjoy creating content and mods for popular games. Whilst this may not be important to larger developers, for the indie designers, it’s a fantastic tool.

How does Greenlight work and what are the proposed changes?

Under the current Greenlight system, you pay a 1 off fee of £70 and from that you can submit as many games as you like. The game is then submitted to a public vote and if it receives enough votes it is officially Greenlit. Being Greenlit means that the game will be published and open to sale via Steam when it is finished. Following this Valve will publish your game for you, take a slice of the profits and hopefully everyone wins.

The changes from Steam Direct appear to be more towards the initial costs. Under the current system, as above, the £70 pays for your account to have permanent access to the Greenlight system. Valve have confirmed that Steam Direct will have a $100 fee per game.

Whilst this may not necessarily represent a bonus to most developers, Valve has promised that if the game earns more than $1000 they will refund you the $100. Developers, even small ones, who create quality content that sells will actually come out of this better. From a cynical standpoint, Valve might be trying to stem the tide of quickly made, cheap games. More colloquially known as ‘shovel-ware’.

There was initially a lot of concern from the community as Valve had discussed a figure between $100-$5000. They hovered over $500 for quite a while. They eventually decided that keeping the community happy was the most important factor. Therefore the low-end figure of $100 has been used.

What’s this about Steam Curators?

Through Steam Direct, it seems pretty clear that they are looking to really build on their developing community. The blog post from Valve reports: “We’re expanding the kinds of content that Curators can create. Allowing them to provide more information to players who are thinking about buying a game, and improving the tools to allow them to easily manage all their recommendations. We’ll have some more details as we get closer to releasing the update, but here are some highlights.”

On the whole, this all sounds like good news for those looking to get into game developing. The price structure change, despite some early warnings, appears to actually make a lot of sense.

For as little as $100, you could make a game and release it on Steam. The only caveat it, if you want to earn your money back, it must sell.