‘Steam’s Greenlight’ has been a go-to place for all the indie developers who wanted Steam to be their game’s platform. Now, Valve is planning to change a lot of things, one of which is the closure of its Greenlight system.
Initiated in 2012, more than 6,000 games have been launched through the system. The system had got mixed reactions from both players and developers and Valve acknowledges it by saying it was just a ‘stepping stone’.
The company has now announced that it will be launching ‘Steam Direct’, a somewhat similar initiative like Greenlight, except, it will let developers publish their games directly. The most notable of those would be the fee that developers would have to pay now to submit their games. Now, in order to submit a game, the developer has to make their way through some paperwork, somewhat similar to the process of “applying for a bank account”. The fee however is not decided as Valve is still taking feedbacks into consideration, but it can range from somewhere between $100 to $5000. A developer has to pay the fee for each time they go ahead with a game, however the amount would later be refunded.
Valve explained the change citing the reason as “decrease the noise in the submission pipeline.” Although, this would stop some content from making their way into the platform which is barely games and help in discoverability of deserving titles, it might impact the small-scale indie developers for whom the price might be too steep.
According to Valve, Greenlight help them figure out two areas to focus on, “improving the entire pipeline for bringing new content to Steam and finding more ways to connect customers with the types of content they wanted.”
We’ll have to wait and see what awaits us through ‘Steam Direct’, as it is due to launch in the near future.
