Steam Greenlight to shut down in spring, replaced by Steam Direct

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Thoughts on Greenlight's pros and cons


After the launch of Steam Greenlight, we realized that it was a useful stepping stone for moving to a more direct distribution system, but it still left us short of that goal. Along the way, it helped us lower the barrier to publishing for many developers while delivering many great new games to Steam. There are now over 100 Greenlight titles that have made at least $1 Million each, and many of those would likely not have been published in the old, heavily curated Steam store.

Greenlight also exposed two key problems we still needed to address: improving the entire pipeline for bringing new content to Steam and finding more ways to connect customers with the types of content they wanted.
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Some details on new system:

A better path for digital distribution
The next step in these improvements is to establish a new direct sign-up system for developers to put their games on Steam. This new path, which we’re calling “Steam Direct,” is targeted for Spring 2017 and will replace Steam Greenlight. 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. 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.

While we have invested heavily in our content pipeline and personalized store, we’re still debating the publishing fee for Steam Direct. We talked to several developers and studios about an appropriate fee, and they gave us a range of responses from as low as $100 to as high as $5,000. There are pros and cons at either end of the spectrum, so we’d like to gather more feedback before settling on a number.
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It's about time really, they've been talking about it for a long time now.
 
http://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail/558846854614253751

Evolving Steam
10 February 2017 - Alden

When we consider any new features or changes for Steam, our primary goal is to make customers happy. We measure that happiness by how well we are able to connect customers with great content. We've come to realize that in order to serve this goal we needed to move away from a small group of people here at Valve trying to predict which games would appeal to vastly different groups of customers.

Thus, over Steam's 13-year history, we have gradually moved from a tightly curated store to a more direct distribution model. 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.

What we learned from Greenlight
After the launch of Steam Greenlight, we realized that it was a useful stepping stone for moving to a more direct distribution system, but it still left us short of that goal. Along the way, it helped us lower the barrier to publishing for many developers while delivering many great new games to Steam. There are now over 100 Greenlight titles that have made at least $1 Million each, and many of those would likely not have been published in the old, heavily curated Steam store.

These unforeseen successes made it abundantly clear that there are many different audiences on Steam, each looking for a different experience. For example, we see some people that sink thousands of hours into one or two games, while others purchase dozens of titles each year and play portions of each. Some customers are really excited about 4X strategy games, while others just buy visual novels.

Greenlight also exposed two key problems we still needed to address: improving the entire pipeline for bringing new content to Steam and finding more ways to connect customers with the types of content they wanted.

To solve these problems a lot of work was done behind the scenes, where we overhauled the developer publishing tools in Steamworks to help developers get closer to their customers. Other work has been much more visible, such as the Discovery Updates and the introduction of features like user reviews, discovery queues, user tags, streamlined refunds, and Steam Curators.

These improvements have allowed more developers to publish their games and connect with relevant gamers on Steam. One of the clearest metrics is that the average time customers spend playing games on Steam has steadily increased since the first Discovery Update. Over the same time period, the average number of titles purchased on Steam by individual customers has doubled. Both of these data points suggest that we're achieving our goal of helping users find more games that they enjoy playing. (You can read a more detailed analysis of our recent updates here[www.gamasutra.com].)

A better path for digital distribution
The next step in these improvements is to establish a new direct sign-up system for developers to put their games on Steam. This new path, which we're calling "Steam Direct," is targeted for Spring 2017 and will replace Steam Greenlight. 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. 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.

While we have invested heavily in our content pipeline and personalized store, we're still debating the publishing fee for Steam Direct. We talked to several developers and studios about an appropriate fee, and they gave us a range of responses from as low as $100 to as high as $5,000. There are pros and cons at either end of the spectrum, so we'd like to gather more feedback before settling on a number.

Just the beginning
We want to make sure Steam is a welcoming environment for all developers who are serious about treating customers fairly and making quality gaming experiences. The updates we've made over the past few years have been paving the way for improvements to how new titles get on to Steam, and Steam Direct represents just one more step in our ongoing process of making Steam better.

We intend to keep iterating on Steam's shopping experience, the content pipeline and everything in between.

As we prepare to make these changes, we welcome your feedback and input on this and any other Steam issues. As always, we'll continue to read the community's discussions throughout the Steam forums and the web at large, and we look forward to hearing your thoughts.
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/Direct me to greenlight of asset swap if old.
 
I hope the fee isn't too high. Companies (even small ones) won't have an issue paying those fees, but any independent devs or students who want to get something on Steam will have a hard time.
 
Shocked (well not that shocked) it took them this long to officially kill Greenlight.

I think Gabe was out talking about it like it was a mess and was going to be replaced pretty soon after it was implemented.


A fee for each game is smart too. Hopefully will kill off a lot of the crap.
 
Hopefully this means Treasure will put out Radiant Silvergun soon. ;___;
 
I can't tell if that is better or worse. Now there might be a much bigger financial barrier to releasing a game.
 
It'll be nice to see things maybe clear up a bit.

I already avoid browsing for games on Steam because of how cluttered it is, and only buy things I already planned on buying ahead of time.
 
latest
 
DNAbro said:
I can't tell if that is better or worse. Now there might be a much bigger financial barrier to releasing a game.
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There was already a 100 dollar greenlight fee IIRC.

They may need to up the barrier a bit just to stop the flood of garbage a bit. I can't imagine they'd bother to go too high though.
 
Garrett Hawke said:
I hope the fee isn't too high. Companies (even small ones) won't have an issue paying those fees, but any independent devs or students who want to get something on Steam will have a hard time.
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I think the fee should be high, in the thousands. If you're going all in for a digital release on a major platform, you have to be ready to support it.

If the fee is too much there are plenty of fundraising avenues to get to that amount.
 
Garrett Hawke said:
I hope the fee isn't too high. Companies (even small ones) won't have an issue paying those fees, but any independent devs or students who want to get something on Steam will have a hard time.
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Well, they say fee is recoupable, so at least it's that. I imagine it won't be higher than $100.
 
Good, Greenlight made sense at the beginning but it was way past due. Hopefully the new system is developer friendly and the fee isn't crazy.
 
Greenlight was way too open to crap so it's good that valve are looking seriously into it but the increased costs might be a problem, guess i'm lucky that I got through greenlight last spring.
 
If you could get some free front page advertising as a part of that fee i wouldn't have a big problem with it being high.
 
Polk said:
Well, they say fee is recoupable, so at least it's that. I imagine it won't be higher than $100.
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If it's the same, then the flood of crap gets on easier. I'd rather the barrier be low but then it doesn't exactly fix one of the major problems that people have with Greenlight.
 
There should be a fee but thousands seems too much. I think a few hundred would stop most chancers.

Hopefully the more stringent polices to getting a game on there might mean they can blacklist people who just put up complete crap looking for a quick buck.
 
Good. There shouldn't be any content quality control, beyond the basic checks against fraud, malware, etc. Steam Direct seems like it'll be better against fighting those things, but keeping with the benefits of a gatekeeper-less platform.
 
$100 is far too low and barely a hurdle for shit peddlers. Maybe $5000 is too much, but with players being able to refund shitty games now, devs have to be willing to commit to an investment in their game. The fee needs to be high enough to scare off people who are trying to push shovelware cash grabs.
 
Raising the fee to release a game directly onto the store could be a good deterrent against asset flippers if it's steep enough, only people who'd be confident in the overall quality of their product would probably pay the higher fee. Looking forward to seeing the price of the fee closer to the program's release date.
 
DNAbro said:
If it's the same, then the flood of crap gets on easier. I'd rather the barrier be low but then it doesn't exactly fix one of the major problems that people have with Greenlight.
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I don't think Valve gives a single fuck about quality control, honestly. If they did, they would bother doing some proper editorial curation. Moving to a "just pay us a fee and upload your game" model is basically just cutting the middleman out of Greenlight and letting indies with small audiences sell their game without being at the whims of the small group of people who actually bother voting for games on Greenlight.
 
Guess Who said:
I don't think Valve gives a single fuck about quality control, honestly. If they did, they would bother doing some proper editorial curation. Moving to a "just pay us a fee and upload your game" model is basically just cutting the middleman out of Greenlight and letting indies with small audiences sell their game without being at the whims of the small group of people who actually bother voting for games on Greenlight.
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It's not that they don't give a fuck, but that they and many other people realize it's a better system for the platform and industry at large.
 
Yukinari said:
So does this mean we'll get less videos from Jim about horrible greenlight games?
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Steam Direct will do very little to stop the Digital Homicides of the world, it does raise the barrier to entry a little bit from Greenlight but as this has nothing to do with Early Access, you'll still end up with a dumpster bin full of unfinished games, cheap asset flips and minecraft clones till the cows come home.

Steam Direct just removes the need for an army of volunteers with steam accounts asking for valve to pretty please put this one game on the store, eventually, while slightly beefing up the minimum requirements to get on this ride as a developer.
 
chubigans said:
I think the fee should be high, in the thousands. If you're going all in for a digital release on a major platform, you have to be ready to support it.

If the fee is too much there are plenty of fundraising avenues to get to that amount.
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As someone who has gone through all that, it still hurts.
 
I think the idea of setting a higher listing fee is to economically discourage people from making raw asset flips and other techniques that look to flood the environment with games that have very low value but effectively zero production cost.

However, materially increasing the listing fee would negatively impact developers in developing countries, as a $1,000 USD listing fee would cost them way more relatively than such a listing fee for a developer in the US. That and I think a lot more developers than you may realize would have a lot of trouble fronting the fee, especially if it got up to be several thousand dollars.
 
Candescence said:
$100 is far too low and barely a hurdle for shit peddlers. Maybe $5000 is too much, but with players being able to refund shitty games now, devs have to be willing to commit to an investment in their game. The fee needs to be high enough to scare off people who are trying to push shovelware cash grabs.
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It also needs to be low enough that people like me can get games on Steam. Do I have $1000 lying around to put a game on Steam that might not even recoup those costs? Fuck no.
 
Father_Brain said:
Jim Sterling will not be happy
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On the contrary. I think he will be pleased that Value are essentially raising the barrier to entry so that less "garbage" makes it up there. They just need to make sure that they don't alienate legitimate developers who perhaps don't have a lot of money to initially invest.
 
Goron2000 said:
I'm an indie developer, I don't have $5000. This has taken a big shit on all my future plans.
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Same here. As someone who's only development costs accounted for so far are the cost of some software, an occasional art commission, and the $100 Greenlight fee, a charge any higher than a few hundred for the new system is going to throw a wrench in my current plans.

chubigans said:
I think the fee should be high, in the thousands. If you're going all in for a digital release on a major platform, you have to be ready to support it.

If the fee is too much there are plenty of fundraising avenues to get to that amount.
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...implying that releasing a game on PC without Steam is viable. A $5000 fee forces projects that could have been entirely self-funded before to go to Kickstarter for money to be able to release even if all of the *development* costs are already covered. And nevermind that such a fee de-facto brings back the Walled Garden that Gaben spoke out against so much when bringing in Greenlight.
 
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