Valve Steam Direct Price: Developers to Be Charged $100 to Self-Publish Games
While Valve had to wait for a few months to unveil the final pricing, they have finally announced that the Steam Direct publishing price will be at $100.
As revealed earlier this year, Valve will be changing up their game publishing system by replacing Steam Greenlight, which let the customers vote on what games they want to see on the store before these get published, with Stream Direct, which allows starting developers to self-publish as many games as they want without having to wait for a greenlight from the customers.
In the announcement posted on their community page, Valve said: "We knew that we wanted it to be as small as possible to ensure it wasn't a barrier to beginning game developers, while also not being so small as to invite easy abuse by people looking to exploit our systems."
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The time between the first announcement and the latest one gave the game developer and distribution company a chance to review the different opinions on pricing from both players and developers in the community.
Moreover, the announcement stated: "There were rational & convincing arguments made for both ends of the $100-$5000 spectrum we mentioned. Our internal thinking beforehand had us hovering around the $500 mark, but the community conversation really challenged us to justify why the fee wasn't as low as possible, and to think about what we could do to make a low fee work."
The good news, though, is that this fee is recoupable. A representative from Valve reportedly told Ars Technica that the $100 publishing fee will be returned to the developer once the game hits $1000 in sales.
Valve will also be making sure that their store does not get filled with low-quality games under the new publishing system.
As of writing, there has yet to be a launch date for Steam Direct. Players and developers will have to wait for Valve's next community update to for new announcements.
