Valve shows Steam Greenlight the red card, then announces the impending launch date of Steam Direct.
Recently, Valve Corporation announced that Steam Greenlight was on its way out. The model was noble enough, allowing indie developers to get games ‘directly’ onto the Steam store, if they could garner enough community backing. Unfortunately it descended into a barrel of dross and nonsense, driven in part by the lack of quality control from Valve, but also by some shady ‘PR’ operatives promising to guarantee any game’s Greenlight status, for a fee, of course.
So Valve has decided to cut out the middleman, and you’ll now be able to pay said fee directly to them, via the appropriately – but rather boringly – named Steam Direct.
That wasn’t without its difficulties, though. When the idea was floated, Valve suggested the Steam Direct fees could be anywhere between $100 and a whopping $5000 US. Indie developers were understandably a bit upset by this, and felt that it played into the hands of the tat-making sausage machine publishers, who had as much money to play the Steam Direct game as they did with Steam Greenlight.
So yesterday, with no fanfare and barely a muffled sound, Steam Greenlight was closed. A couple of days earlier, Valve settled on a $100 charge – which is recoupable, if a game earns over $1000, after first passing an internal Valve vetting process – for Steam Direct, and the new service is set to replace Steam Greenlight next week, officially launching on June 13, 2017.
Games still in Steam Greenlight will remain there, for the Valve team to review, and determine whether they make the grade under whatever criteria they’re using for Steam Direct over the coming weeks.
And the last game added into Steam Greenlight? A quirky little strategy-racing-RPG called The Underground King. That’s a dubious honour, perhaps, but the extra publicity can’t hurt when they’re trying to get past the Greenlight Community Valve quality controllers.
