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Steam announced today the pricing structure for the new Steam Direct system at $100 recoupable fee per submission. This is the program that will be replacing Greenlight, which had a fee of $100 per developer.
Steam announced back in January of 2014 that it would be replacing the current "Greenlight" system with "Steam Direct" in an effort to give developers a direct path to get their game on Steam, while changing the submission fee structure to "decrease the noise in the submission pipeline"
The announcement also states that they will be re-working the Curators program, something we also covered in April. This new release goes into more detail stating that Steam is "We're expanding the kinds of content that Curators can create, allowing them to provide more information to players who are thinking about buying a game, and improving the tools to allow them to easily manage all their recommendations."
I have been following the follies of Greenlight for some time. The service has been quite problematic with terrible as well as broken games flooding the system, as well as multiple hostile developers putting the same game up multiple times if they do not get greenlit the first time. Between Early Access and Greenlight, the steam library has become extremely watered down in the last few years. I was hoping for a slightly higher barrier to entry for Steam Direct than what has been decided on, but it should still help the glut of terrible and broken games ending up on the platform daily. It used to be a badge of honor for your game to be available on Steam, hopefully we can get back to that point.
So in the end, we've decided we're going to aim for the lowest barrier to developers as possible, with a $100 recoupable publishing fee per game, while at the same time work on features designed to help the Store algorithm become better at helping you sift through games. We're going to look for specific places where human eyes can be injected into the Store algorithm, to ensure that it is working as intended, and to ensure it doesn't miss something interesting.
Steam announced back in January of 2014 that it would be replacing the current "Greenlight" system with "Steam Direct" in an effort to give developers a direct path to get their game on Steam, while changing the submission fee structure to "decrease the noise in the submission pipeline"
The announcement also states that they will be re-working the Curators program, something we also covered in April. This new release goes into more detail stating that Steam is "We're expanding the kinds of content that Curators can create, allowing them to provide more information to players who are thinking about buying a game, and improving the tools to allow them to easily manage all their recommendations."
I have been following the follies of Greenlight for some time. The service has been quite problematic with terrible as well as broken games flooding the system, as well as multiple hostile developers putting the same game up multiple times if they do not get greenlit the first time. Between Early Access and Greenlight, the steam library has become extremely watered down in the last few years. I was hoping for a slightly higher barrier to entry for Steam Direct than what has been decided on, but it should still help the glut of terrible and broken games ending up on the platform daily. It used to be a badge of honor for your game to be available on Steam, hopefully we can get back to that point.
So in the end, we've decided we're going to aim for the lowest barrier to developers as possible, with a $100 recoupable publishing fee per game, while at the same time work on features designed to help the Store algorithm become better at helping you sift through games. We're going to look for specific places where human eyes can be injected into the Store algorithm, to ensure that it is working as intended, and to ensure it doesn't miss something interesting.
