Recently, Valve has announced a vast amount of changes to their popular platform; Steam Greenlight, which allows Indie game developers a straightforward publication of their new games on Steam. All of that is going to change because of Valve's changed approach which does not count with Steam Greenlight anymore and plans to shut it down.
The pioneering services which Steam Greenlight provided were meant to simplify the process of approving new games. Sadly, this system came up with several issues that could not be fixed easily, such as flooding the Steam Store with low-quality games which incorrectly targeted Steam users' preferences. This flaw made a huge impact on customer's trust which led to a financial loss for publishers and developers.
Nonetheless, Valve openly admitted that Greenlight was an innovative mechanism that helped to expand the Steam Store and eventually was not completely bad despite the fact that original idea was a bit different. To achieve their initial goal the only option was to alter it to what Valve had originally in mind. On this way shutting down Steam Greenlight was a necessary move which brought a new opportunity of launching something new. With the arrival of Steam Direct, a lot of improvements have been made that simplify the process of games publishing on Steam as long as developers can afford the initial fees. That means the community is no longer involved and there are no players' reviews and comments required.
Valve has not revealed the exact price yet, but it seems to be pretty costly as it varies from 100$ which is a price of current Greenlight submission fee up to 5.000$. They need to gather more feedback before settling on the final price. A lot of new problems might arise if the price was set incorrectly. If you wonder what could possibly happen, please follow our next article.
source: steamcommunity.com
Crazy Fees For Developers
SteamDirectly.com