Valve Announces Steam Greenlight to be Replaced

DualShockers

Valve Announces Steam Greenlight to be Replaced with Steam Direct Program in Spring

By Ryan Meitzler

Published Feb 10, 2017

In a community forum, Valve has revealed that its indie curation program Steam Greenlight will be discontinued and replaced by Steam Direct in spring.

As the dominant presence in PC gaming, Steam has grown exponentially year-over-year with thousands of new games coming through each year, with the platform announcing some larger-scaled changes with its Steam Greenlight service to grow and evolve the platform even more.

In an update on the Steam Community forums on the evolution of the platform, Valve announced that the company will be retiring its Steam Greenlight service, which instead will be replaced with a new program called "Steam Direct."

Valve explained in the post that Steam Greenlight will be dropped this spring in favor of Steam Direct, which will offer a more streamlined approach to curating that will "establish a new direct sign-up system for developers to put their games on Steam." Specifically, Steam Direct will require developers to complete various applications and verification similar to the process of "applying for a bank account."

After the initial setup, developers will pay a "recoupable application fee" for every title submitted to the service, which is intended to decrease the often-overwhelming amount of titles that previously came through Steam Greenlight. While no specific price has been set yet for the developers' application fee, Valve's current estimation (based on the response from developers) gave "a range of responses from as low as $100 to as high as $5000." Valve realizes that there are "pros and cons at either end of the spectrum," but the company will continue to explore the financial end of submitting games to Steam Direct "to gather more feedback before settling on a number."

Overall, Valve hopes that the introduction of Steam Direct will "make sure Steam is a welcoming environment for all developers who are serious about treating customers fairly and making quality gaming experiences." The company added that while the platform's updates over the past few years have been "paving the way for improvements to how new titles get on to Steam," Valve hopes that Steam Direct will provide "just one more step in our ongoing process of making Steam better."