Valve to Axe Steam Greenlight, Move Closer to Direct Distribution with ‘Steam Direct’ this Spring

Steam Greenlight, Valve's grand social experiment in community curation/labor outsourcing, will be replaced with a new system dubbed Steam Direct sometime this spring, the company announced today. Many details are still being ironed out, but Valve did give a few important specifics.

Perhaps most importantly, Steam Direct will remove the Reddit-style community voting part of the existing submission process. "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," the announcement reads. "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."

This "recoupable" application fee could be anywhere from $100 (the current Greenlight fee) to $5,000, according to the announcement. These numbers were reached after conversations with "several developers and studios," but are not final. "There are pros and cons at either end of the spectrum," Valve said, "so we'd like to gather more feedback before settling on a number."

There is obviously an enormous difference between $100 and $5,000, one that will shape Steam's content for the foreseeable future, and indie developers have already started to gauge the impact it will have on the industry. One developer, Connor Sherlock, voiced his concern on Twitter:

Connor Sherlock got his game Marginalia through Greenlight last August, and is in the process of rebuilding the existing itch.io version for release. If Steam Direct's application fee ends up being $1,000, for instance, Connor describes his outlook as "likely very fucked."

Connor isn't alone, though. Robert Yang, an indie developer and instructor at Parsons School of Design and NYU Game Center, also weighed in on Twitter:

As he points out on Twitter and in a blog post, neither Greenlight nor Steam Direct impact the daily operations of major publishers/developers or indie publishers with an existing relationship with Steam, such as Devolver Digital and Adult Swim, so in their case the submission fee is immaterial. The only developers impacted are small/solo outfits, which encompass an enormous breadth of financial capability. He also makes the point that Steam Direct disincentivizes developers who make cheap/free games, as they are unlikely to ever recoup the application fee.

It's worth noting that, while Steam Direct's application fee will be recoupable, this isn't really a new feature in a practical sense. While it may not have been called such, Steam Greenlight's $100 listing fee is also recoupable in that developers who make at least $100 from sales break even on the investment.

The issue of discovery is one Valve has been wrestling with since Greenlight's explosive growth, which will have added over 10,000 games to the platform, assuming the rest of the 5,000-plus approved titles make it to market. A higher application fee will surely slow that flow, but it also risks locking out the developers whose break-out successes have made Steam what it is.

Connor Sherlock and Robert Yang consented to the inclusion of their tweets in this story.