Steam Greenlight is No More

Isn’t that great news? 

Let’s be fair: Steam Greenlight was a great idea. By voting, it helped independent developers publish their work without any financial worries. A lot of people became able to publish their games in the great Steam marketplace by the community’s help. BUT it also helped crap to flourish: We started to see underdeveloped or gameplay-nightmare fuel games more and more. I was thinking of writing article about these Greenlight abominations, but I didn’t want to upset people (neither you, nor developers).

Via Kotaku, we learned that Valve is switching off the Greenlight system:

In the coming months, we are planning to take the next step in this process by removing the largest remaining obstacle to having a direct path, Greenlight. Our goal is to provide developers and publishers with a more direct publishing path and ultimately connect gamers with even more great content.

An “obstacle”? They are being very, very kind friends. Anyway, Valve also states that as evolving distributors, they’ve learned a lot of things from Greenlight: First, they developed the Discovery Updates to dampen the flood of beetlejuicestastic games; and second, they learned to care more about the dispositions of their customers. Both helped a lot; but thanks to the first one, there are less cockroachy games on our discovery queues right now.

What will replace the Greenlight?

Steam Direct. The new “path” of Valve on connecting with developers; Steam Direct will — as you can imagine — directly involve developers in the publishing process. The developers will sign-up to Steam to publish their games and in order to publish them, they will:

…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, which is intended to decrease the noise in the submission pipeline.

After doing the paperwork, developers will pay a fee. What will the fee be, we (and Valve) do not know yet. When asking the developers, the got answers ranging from $100 to $5000. Now, the Steam Blog’s comment section is full of know-it-all clever dicks babbling about what would be the best system for their over-imaginitive chair-entropicizing butts. Ehm. I get a little tense when looking at the comment sections nowadays.

The “Steam Direct” system will be available in Spring 2017, states Valve. So we wait, while enthusiastically waving goodbye after Greenlight.

Please, don’t be shy about posting your comments about the issue! I don’t get tense when reading your comments.

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