Valve to replace Steam Greenlight this spring with new Steam Direct

4.5
As the dominant presence in PC gaming, Steam has grown exponentially year-over-year with thousands of new games coming through each year, with the platform announcing some larger-scaled changes with its Steam Greenlight service to grow and evolve the platform even more.

In an update on the Steam Community forums on the evolution of the platform, Valve announced that the company will be retiring its Steam Greenlight service, which instead will be replaced with a new program called “Steam Direct.”

Valve explained in the post that Steam Greenlight will be dropped this spring in favor of Steam Direct, which will offer a more streamlined approach to curating that will “establish a new direct sign-up system for developers to put their games on Steam.” Specifically, Steam Direct will require developers to complete various applications and verification similar to the process of “applying for a bank account.”

After the initial setup, developers will pay a “recoupable application fee” for every title submitted to the service, which is intended to decrease the often-overwhelming amount of titles that previously came through Steam Greenlight. While no specific price has been set yet for the developers’ application fee, Valve’s current estimation (based on the response from developers) gave “a range of responses from as low as $100 to as high as $5000.” Valve realizes that there are “pros and cons at either end of the spectrum,” but the company will continue to explore the financial end of submitting games to Steam Direct “to gather more feedback before settling on a number.”

Overall, Valve hopes that the introduction of Steam Direct will “make sure Steam is a welcoming environment for all developers who are serious about treating customers fairly and making quality gaming experiences.” The company added that while the platform’s updates over the past few years have been “paving the way for improvements to how new titles get on to Steam,” Valve hopes that Steam Direct will provide “just one more step in our ongoing process of making Steam better.”

Posted:
Related Forum: PC Gaming Forum

Source: http://www.vg247.com/2017/02/10/valve-to-replace-steam-greenlight-this-spring-with-new-steam-direct-service/

Related Articles

Comments

"Valve to replace Steam Greenlight this spring with new Steam Direct" :: Login/Create an Account :: 7 comments

If you would like to post a comment please signin to your account or register for an account.

IlcamorristaPosted:

Hopefully it will make it faster for us. Good job.

AzirPosted:

Hopefully this will deter us from having to sift through countless useless broken games.

NickPosted:

It sounds like a great idea to fully being steam up to its full potential

TaigaAisakaPosted:

I kind of have mixed feelings about this. Steam Greenlight was great when it first came out, but now it definitely needs an overhaul. It's become a shit fest of people trying to "meme" and create poorly made games. Some games like a Sanic type game, straight up meme games (Quickscope Simulator type games) and of course, people trying to get actual porn games on Steam. There are rarely any good games on the Steam Greenlight, unless you want to go searching for an hour or so.

However, Steam Direct I still don't see as a complete fix. The way it sounds is that anyone with a little money can drop a game in there to try and make back. I'm assuming the 5k fee would be for people who make repetitive games in a short amount of time, with low reviews. Example, say Quickscope Simulator came out, they pay the $100 fee. Fine, they sell it for $2 each. It passes the $100 they made, then within a month or two, Quickscope Simulator 2 comes out and now the price is increased, more so if the reviews are bad because people are getting tired of seeing it popping up on the store page. I still don't see it as a fix to the problems in Greenlight. Any creator with a little bit of money, will get their game on Steam, no matter how shitty it is; the sad thing too, they can make multiple copies of said game, if they play their cards right because of people who want to jump in on the "meme." If you make a game Quickscope Simulator and throw in Steam Trading Cards with emoticons that are "dank" or full of memes, you'll have people buying that game and/or those cards/emotes, which adds more money to the spam to come of the next chapter. On the other hand, it can hurt small time devs who can't really afford to pay the fee, but looked like they actually worked really hard and wanted something everyone can enjoy so they can get their name out there. I believe Kickstarter, GoFundMe or any of those other crowd funding sites will be used more for indie devs now that Steam Direct is becoming a thing.

I have high hopes for Steam Direct, but I don't think it'll fix the root problem of that Greenlight has. I'm just hoping it doesn't screw over small time devs that would have a great game, but are unable to buy their game onto Steam.

SleepPosted:

Doesn't seem like too bad of an idea.

SakuPosted:

Dayum this sounds awesome

SkatesPosted:

This actually sounds like a great idea and it could work out smoothly.


Latest Downloads

Latest Tutorials