After nearly five years, Valve is shutting down Steam Greenlight, to be replaced in spring, by what the company calls Steam Direct, which would provide developers straightforward access to the platform. However, developers are not happy.
Steam Greenlight lets users vote on which games they thought should be sold on the PC distribution service. Unfortunately, the system Greenlight employs proved to be disastrous as there was allegedly too little curation and according to Extreme Tech, the system was easily gamed. Accordingly, developers offer free game copies, upvoting each other's content, while the system gets buried in legions of trash.
The flawed popularity contest that is Greenlight is finally being killed off by Steam to be replaced by a new system called, Steam Direct. According to PC Gamer, every game will now have a simple path onto the PC Game distribution platform that is as long as developers put up a fee.
Though there is still no specific price point for the fee, Valve is playing on developers suggested price between $100 and $5,000. Developers say that paying $5,000 is too much and indie developers could be locked out.
Valve says the fee will be "recoupable," but did not elaborate how. It is implied that the fee will most likely be returned to the developer after the game hits a comfortable revenue target. This means Valve will not keep the fee, just its cut of the revenue. However, the money still has to be put up, with the potential of losing it if the game fails to sell.
In the current Greenlight setup, developers pay $100 that serves the same quality control. The fee goes to charity allowing any developer to put in as many games as they want to be voted on by the community. The problem was that it became too easy for Greenlight games to be approved for sale. Assuming being on Steam meant quality, it has been relegated to an iOS style-free-for-all where finding quality titles became tedious.
The coming Steam Direct system's only barrier would be paperwork and a fee. The implications could be a less selective and a more crowded Steam.
