As of today, June 6th, Valve has closed their Greenlight program. New submissions will not be accepted and voting has been disabled. Next week, starting on June 13th, Valve will open Steam Direct, which allows anyone to put their game on the platform for a deposit of $100 per title, which will be refunded once the title makes $1,000 in sales. Valve performs a light amount of testing on each game it receives, so it makes sense to have something that prevents you from drowning upon the opening of the flood gates, and it’s nice that they refund it when sales are high enough that their typical fees cover their expenses, rather than double-dipping.
There is still some doubt floating around the net, though… especially regarding developers from impoverished nations. As a Canadian, it’s by no means unreasonable to spend around a hundred dollars, plus or minus the exchange rate of the year, to put a game, made up of years of work, onto a gigantic distribution platform. That doesn’t hold true everywhere. At the same time, Valve does have a measurable cost per submission, so, if they lower the barrier below that, it would be at their expense. It would also be the right thing to do in some cases. Either way, that’s just my unsolicited two cents.
Steam Direct opens on June 13th.
Haha calling it Steam Direct
Haha calling it Steam Direct is a nice slap in the face to G2A with their FAKE “G2A Direct” program, which is nothing but a protection racket that gives devs a cut of money made via credit card fraud, thereby making them accessories to the money laundering that G2A facilitates.
Well done Gaben.
By all appearances, this
By all appearances, this seems to be the same process as Greenlight (same $100 to apply, same send game to Valve for basic testing, get listed on Steam as Early Access) but with the ‘community voting’ component removed. If Valve were actually intending to more stringent testing to weed out the current flood of crapware, why not just apply that same testing to Greenlight rather than spinning up a new program?