Steam Greenlight is going down in 2017!

Probably everyone already know about it but just in case if you don’t, Steam Greenlight and the very low Indie friendly one time publishing fee is going down later this year and going to be replaced with a new service called Steam Direct.
steamcommunity.com/games/593110/ … 4614253751

The main difference is that the Steam community is no longer going to be involved in the decision making if a title is worthy to be released on Steam or not and instead of the one time publishing fee, developers are going to be required to pay for each title and the fee can be as low as 100 USD and as high as 5000 USD per title. At this point Valve didn’t made a decision on this, they are still talking to developers to get feedback and set the final price.

Of course what it really means we can’t know for sure until Steam Direct actually replace Steam Greenlight and Valve set the final price for publishing fee but what it looks like, it means better quality control, better, more polished titles released in the store which is generally a good thing for gamers, and for indie developers it means their titles need to be more polished and better designed (than usual) to make it in to the store and also need to be dedicated to provide great and fun content worthy to pay the potentially higher per title fee.

The bottom line is, a supporting community is no longer going to be enough and “to pay for support (offer steam key for vote)” is no longer going to be an option to get a game published on Steam.

Sad news or good news difficult to say. They might still decide to accept every game that is decent (to avoid 90% unfinished demos and other things being sold).

As for the price of submission, that is never good news, but for really small indie developers, is it really worth trying to make many games (while leaving them buggy or unfinished)? Sticking on making one game for a long time could result in a lot of awesome updates, improvements, and bug fixes. So this might also improve game quality in some way, but no one really likes to spend more, so… it’s not purely good.

So in other words Steam decided to raise the price for developers.
Before it was 30% from each sale, now it is 30% from each sale + up to 5000$ per game published.

Personally I can’t see any benefit in this. If you can afford the money you can still publish crap.
This could also mean less indie games since 5000$ is a huge sum for someone making a hobby project especially if the developer doesn’t live in a “first world” country.

Big studios won’t care if they have to pay 100, 5000 or 10000$ per game but indie titles often struggle to recover their expenses.
Unfortunately PR is more important nowerdays than quality (I’m not talking abut “really crappy” games here).

I thought that valve would select which games… Forget about my comment. :slight_smile:

Actually I don’t think the higher publishing fee supposed to help on this but the fact, the community no longer going to vote for games to be published but all games going to be submitted directly to Valve and Valve going to make the decision on it own. This is why it called Steam Direct because the community is going to be left out and submission is going to be “direct”.

I believe it should improve the quality of the games published on Steam (and the requirements). But if it not then yeah it about nothing but money. Need to wait and see.

Before Greenlight Valve tested the games themselves and decided if they were worth publishing but since it got too expensive for them they made Greenlight where the community was the gatekeeper.
But since that didn’t work either the new approach is some kind of “paywall”.

Here is a (german) news article about it where they say that there won’t be quality checks anymore.
https://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Steam-Valve-stampft-Greenlight-ein-3623262.html
German Quote: “Steam Direct soll Spiele nicht inhaltlich oder qualitativ prüfen, sondern vielmehr eine finanzielle Hürde darstellen.”
English: “Steam Direct wont check games content or quality wise anymore but put up a financial barrier.”

I guess we need to wait and actually see. Steam definitely needs to have as many (quality) games as possible, but too many low quality games can affect the reputation. And by low quality games, I actually mean unfinished demos, not simply bad games. Bad games exist, and will always exist, will have bad ratings and so that’s not a real problem.