Valve Corporation, video game makers are to shut down Steam Greenlight and bring Steam Direct in place. Greenlight, a program used by many game developers to bring their game to steam directly, expanding Steam, a 13 year platform with over 100 Greenlight titles. In their
blogpost, Valve explained their move to bring Steam Direct into action, “Thus, over Steam’s 13-year history, we have gradually moved from a tightly curated store to a more direct distribution model. In the coming months, we are planning to take the next step in this process by removing the largest remaining obstacle to having a direct path, Greenlight. Our goal is to provide developers and publishers with a more direct publishing path and ultimately connect gamers with even more great content.”
The move has also been taken to significantly curb fake games populated on Steam and developers adapting to ill ways to popularize their titles. “Greenlight also exposed two key problems we still needed to address: improving the entire pipeline for bringing new content to Steam and finding more ways to connect customers with the types of content they wanted.” They further added, “These improvements have allowed more developers to publish their games and connect with relevant gamers on Steam. One of the clearest metrics is that the average time customers spend playing games on Steam has steadily increased since the first Discovery Update. Over the same time period, the average number of titles purchased on Steam by individual customers has doubled. Both of these data points suggest that we’re achieving our goal of helping users find more games that they enjoy playing.”
Steam Direct establishes a new sign-up system for game developers to put their game on Steam. The signing up process would also require the developers to completes a series of verification levels which would include, digital paperwork along with personal or company verification and tax documents check. Also, developers would now have to pay a fee to put their game on Steam Direct. However, the ‘publishing fee’ has not been zeroed upon by Valve yet. It is expected the fee would be quoted between $100 and $5000.
Notably, the newly introduced ‘publishing fee’ has been criticized by a bunch of developers, as it would restrict many of them from putting their game online as many student developers or amateur developers cannot afford it. Some also said, the move restricts Valve platform to a handful now, which was earlier accessible to masses, bring a diverse range of game titles on board.
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