At first Steam Greenlight was looking really good, the idea of it, but today I can easily say that the Steam store has been cluttered with all of those shitty games that no one wants to play and fake reviews for free games. Valve has been dissatisfied with Steam Greenlight as well, even Gabe Newell described the system as “probably bad for the Steam community” in 2013. A year later, he stated outright that they have to “make Greenlight go away, not because it’s not useful, but because we’re evolving”.
The direction of that evolution was finally revealed! New system called Steam Direct is coming this spring. It will enable developers to get their games on Steam without having to pass an approval process first. Greenlight helped the indie developers. It also ended up bringing in a lot of money. Valve said that there are now more than 100 Greenlight games that have earned at least $1 million each, many of which likely would not have been released on Steam under the pre-Greenlight rules.
Changes on Steam like: user reviews, refund system and the implementation of Steam Curators have all improved the experience for both users and developers, the next step “is to establish a new direct sign-up system for developers to put their games on Steam,” according to Valve’s blog post.
“This new path, which we’re calling ‘Steam Direct,’ is targeted for spring 2017 and will replace Steam Greenlight,” Valve explains.
“We will ask new developers to complete a set of digital paperwork, personal or company verification, and tax documents similar to the process of applying for a bank account. Once set up, developers will pay a recoupable application fee for each new title they wish to distribute, intended to decrease the noise in the submission pipeline.”
Clearly the goal is to discourage the submission of Greenlight projects that are submitted in bad faith (jokes, stolen projects etc.). The amount of the publishing fee hasn’t been finalized yet.
“We want to make sure Steam is a welcoming environment for all developers who are serious about treating customers fairly and making quality gaming experiences,” Valve wrote. “The updates we’ve made over the past few years have been paving the way for improvements to how new titles get on to Steam, and Steam Direct represents just one more step in our ongoing process of making Steam better.”
Lets just all say it out loud, most people are dumb asses and they shouldn’t be able to vote for games to be released on Steam. It’s better if Valve picks games that are going to be on Steam instead.
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