Valve Kills Steam Greenlight and Launches Steam Direct

After a controversial 5 years, Valve is finally ending Steam Greenlight. Greenlight allowed the community to vote on which games they thought should be sold on the digital marketplace and platform. The program was fraught with various issues including some abuse and gaming of the system. To replace the old system, Valve is introducing the new Steam Direct publishing framework.

Steam Greenlight was the first attempt at opening up the PC game distribution service to make easier for publishers to get their games listed. Before that, Valve ran their own internal curating group to vet games. However, Valve felt that Greenlight was still too much of a barrier to entry for publishers to get their game onto the market. With Steam Direct, there are pretty much no barriers except for signing up with Valve.

To sign up, all that needs to be done is file some company paperwork and tax information. The main check to stop spamming is a per title fee that needs to be paid to get listed. There is no word yet on the fee but the range appears to be somewhere about $100 to $5000. This fee is recoupable in somehow, perhaps being refunded once a certain number of sales are met to ensure only titles that the publisher thinks will sell and the community likes will be listed.

Since Greenlight, the number of game submissions has gone up 10 fold which is crazy and makes it hard to find the diamonds in the rough. With Direct, the real test is if Valve can set the fee at a rate that stops overcrowding yet is open enough for indie developers. Hopefully, we will get more details as Valve starts implementing the program and Steam won’t get overcrowded.