Home

 › 

Articles

 › 

Bye-Bye Steam Greenlight, Hello Steam Direct!

Bye-Bye Steam Greenlight, Hello Steam Direct!

Valve has been making tons of behind-the-scenes changes to their company and the Steam gaming platform. There was some recent work done that revealed to customers what the current wait time is on support tickets. And now there’s been some massive changes to the Steam Greenlight system for developers.

Previously, games would be put through the Steam Greenlight process before being published. Developers would pay $100 once, and then they could publish as many games as they want. This will be changing to an entirely new system called Steam Direct. This will allow publishers to bypass the Greenlight period of marketing and hoping people like your game enough to get it passed. However, the $100 fee will be for every single game, rather than just once per developer.

This is a bit of a bummer but it’s much better than the alternative. Valve was originally considering making the fee anywhere from $100 to $5,000, and they were very close to moving forward with a $500 fee. There was a massive backlash from the indie game development community however, which made Valve take a closer look at their required fee amount.

For $100 each game, developers will be able to instantly publish to Steam. Another step Valve has taken to make sure this will work for everyone is that they will only keep the $100 fee if the game’s revenue passes that. Essentially, this should make it possible for every developer, big and small to self-publish on Steam.

There’s no date or time yet for the replacement of Steam Greenlight with Steam Direct, but that announcement is sure to come in the future.

Source: Polygon

To top