Valve Is Discontinuing Steam Greenlight, Replacing It With "Steam Direct"

If you've followed the saga of Steam Greenlight at all, you probably know that basically everyone was excited for it when it first launched. Finally, the games we wanted could get on Steam. Finally, developers had a reasonable chance of getting their games on Steam. And for a while, it was great. Only games that people really wanted on Steam made it onto Steam; some of the first games to make it through Greenlight reported upwards of 50,000 Yes votes.

But, as usual, the excitement faded and the entire system devolved. Users began to lose interest in Greenlight and games began to get less votes overall. Perhaps because there were smaller margins between games or simply because people complained that there still weren't enough games getting through, Valve began to approve an increasingly large number of titles. Eventually, batches of approved games stopped being announced in the grand fashion that they used to be and it seemed that Valve was letting everything in, from games that played off of the GabeN memes to...whatever this is supposed to be. Too many games got through because people voted for them jokingly or replaced the question of "would you buy this?" with "do you think this looks amusing?"

Of course, Valve has been aware of the fact that Greenlight isn't ideal; Gabe Newell has been talking about making Greenlight "go away" since early 2014. They simply didn't have a replacement in mind...until today, that is.

Today, Valve announced that it will be replacing Greenlight with something called "Steam Direct" later this Spring. Whereas Greenlight had a one-time fee of $100, all of which was said to be donated to charity, Steam Direct will feature a per-title fee. All developers hoping to use Steam Direct will be required to "complete a set of digital paperwork, personal or company verification, and tax documents similar to the process of applying for a bank account." Valve is hoping that these two requirements will "decrease the noise in the submission pipeline," ultimately allowing only those who are very, very serious about their projects to get through. The fee in question has yet to be decided upon, but developers that Valve has talked to provided "a range of responses from as low as $100 to as high as $5,000." Developers that go through the process and pay the fee will then be able to put their games directly on Steam.

It will be interesting to see how this works out. The failed experiment in consumers picking the games that get onto Steam that Greenlight is cannot be replaced soon enough. We can only hope that its replacement succeeds in its attempts to "decrease the noise."