Valve to Shut Down Steam Greenlight, Will Put Up Steam Direct In Its Place
Valve will soon close down its Steam Greenlight submission program. In its place, the online game distributor will be putting up Steam Direct sometime in Spring 2017.
Steam Greenlight has been started in 2012 as an alternative route for games to make it to the Steam store. A game does not have to be produced under a big-name publisher — if enough Steam users will vote for a title, Valve will see this as an indication that the game will sell. The company will then put them up for sale.
Like any other crowdsourcing effort, this approach tends to lead to a lot of problems, mostly community-related. Fake games, games with objectionable content, low-quality titles — the greenlight system has been host to a lot of questionable entries over the years. The resulting spam has made it very hard for a new game to rise above the noise. Instances where developers have resorted to buying votes have given rise to a cottage industry of "giveaway groups" involved in dubious transactions in which people ask for keys or even money to publicize a title.
Get Our Latest News for FREE
If the Greenlight system has become a free-for-all self-promotion contest to publish a game to the Steam store, the new Steam Direct could not be more different. Just to list a game on Steam Direct, the author has to accomplish digital paperwork, pass some personal or company verification checks, and submit tax documents like those needed to open a bank account.
An application fee for each game will also be required, although the amount is still being decided. The fee, "intended to decrease the noise in the submission pipeline," is currently up for discussion as an amount somewhere between $100 and $5,000.
The rigorous application process for Steam Direct could be one answer to the problem of making sure that only quality games from reputable developers would make it to the store page. As it stands, Steam Greenlight is on the way out and Steam Direct is being aimed at a spring 2017 launch.
