Valve have announced a variety of new features and changes for the Steam Greenlight replacement, Steam Direct. When Valve first announced that Greenlight was being replaced, people were both skeptical and ecstatic. Greenlight has long been a haven for bad games and utter garbage. Anyone paying attention at all knew the move was inevitable. But the issue many people have is that their unsure if Valve can avoid the same issues Greenlight has with it’s replacement.
One of the ways in which Valve would attempt to discourage junk clogging up the platform was by charging a “recoupable” fee to submit a game. As a result, a ton of speculation about how the fee could be recouped and how much it would actually cost swirled around the internet. Well, Valve have finally made some aspects of that discussion clear. In a recent blog post, developers will have to fork over $100 for each new game they want to appear on Steam, a fee that will be “recoupable”, though at the moment it’s not clear exactly how.
“So in the end, we’ve decided we’re going to aim for the lowest barrier to developers as possible, with a $100 recoupable publishing fee per game, while at the same time work on features designed to help the Store algorithm become better at helping you sift through games. We’re going to look for specific places where human eyes can be injected into the Store algorithm, to ensure that it is working as intended, and to ensure it doesn’t miss something interesting. We’re also going to closely monitor the kinds of game submissions we’re receiving, so that we’re ready to implement more features like the the Trading Card changes we covered in the last blog post, which aim to reduce the financial incentives for bad actors to game the store algorithm.”
Valve is also revamping the way the Steam Curators system works. In the future, Curators will be able to share more types of content, including lists, and any YouTube videos they may have made. Meanwhile, if you’re following a Curator, you’ll find that they’ll have a bigger presence on the store. Curators and Devs will also have a more seamless interaction possible on the platform.
“We’re expanding the kinds of content that Curators can create, allowing them to provide more information to players who are thinking about buying a game, and improving the tools to allow them to easily manage all their recommendations. We’ll have some more details as we get closer to releasing the update, but here are some highlights:
Many Curators create content for other platforms, such as YouTube, so we’re making it much easier for them to show that content alongside their curations.
Another big request came from both Curators and developers, who want an easier way to help Curators get pre-release access to upcoming games. It’s often hard for Curators to get the attention of developers who build the specific kinds of games that a Curator covers, and it can be similarly hard for a smaller developer to find the Curators who would be interested. So we’re building a system that will make that a painless process for everyone involved, which means that you should see more useful curations coming out of the Curators who like to explore newer titles.”
