Valve is slowly but surely paving the way for its upcoming Steam Direct
Steam Direct is going to be the replacement for Steam Greenlight – an online portal that allows indie publishers to publish their games and get “likes” from players to receive a “green light” to be allowed to be published and sold on Steam.
Steam Greenlight currently have the payment method of having to pay $100 once, which allows game developers to publish as many games as they want, so this news that developers will now have to pay $100 per game may come as a bit of a shock.
A sigh of relief
However, this is not the case – in February, when Steam Direct was announced, Valve stated that they were going to charge between $100 to $5,000 per game that developers want to publish on Steam. This resulted in indie game developers complaining about Valve possibly preventing those who are lacking in cash from even having a chance of publishing their game. So it seems that Valve actually listened to their worried game producers and has agreed on $100 per game – resulting in a huge sigh of relief to game developers who aren’t exactly swimming in cash but still want to create amazing games.
Though Alden Kroll, one of Valve’s UI designers, said that original discussions within the company had reach the agreement of “around the $500 mark”, the complaints and pleas from the public “really challenged us to justify why the fee wasn’t as low as possible, and to think about what we could do to make a low fee work”. He added that “aiming for the low publishing fee gives every game developed a chance to get their game in front of players”.
The fee of $100, Valve has stated, is going to be recoupable, meaning that the company will keep the fee if the revenue of the published game doesn’t exceed the amount.
Curators
Users of Steam known as “curators” were added in September 2014, and was Valve’s attempt at injecting “human thinking into the Store algorithm”. Though this “hasn’t received the attention it needs to be a good solution”, as Valve stated on its Steam blog, Valve are opening up the possibility of these Curators – they are going to be able to provide information outside of Steam on their game recommendations. This could, for example, take the shape of a video published on YouTube.
Curators are hopefully also going to be able to receive pre-release access to games that are about to come out, so that they have enough time to give a game a good play through and review it, giving players recommendations for it. So it’s not only Steam Greenlight that’s getting all the attention with a brand new platform – Valve are really looking into how to make Steam the best, with many competitors out there trying to top them.
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