Valve’s crowdsourced Greenlight submission program, which let the gaming community select which games get chosen for distribution via Steam, is shutting down after nearly five years. It will be replaced with a new system called Steam Direct that will charge developers a fee for each title they plan to distribute. The Verge reports: Steam Greenlight was launched in 2012 as a way for indie developers to get their games on Steam, even if they weren’t working with a big publisher that had a relationship with Valve. Steam users would vote on Greenlight games, and Valve would accept titles with enough support to suggest that they’d sell well. Kroll says that “over 100” Greenlight titles have made $1 million or more. But Greenlight has also had significant problems. Developers could game the system by offering rewards for votes, and worthy projects could get lost amidst a slew of bad proposals. Since Valve ultimately made the call on including games, the process could also seem arbitrary and opaque. The big question is whether what’s replacing it is better. To get a game on Steam Direct, developers will need to “complete a set of digital paperwork, personal or company verification, and tax documents similar to the process of applying for a bank account.” Then, they’ll pay an application fee for each game, “which is intended to decrease the noise in the submission pipeline” — a polite way of saying that it will make people think twice before spending money submitting a low-quality game. Steam Direct is supposed to launch in spring of 2017, but the application fee hasn’t been decided yet. Developer feedback has apparently suggested anything from $100 — the current Greenlight submission fee — and $5,000.
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