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Valve Is Shutting Down Steam's Greenlight Community Voting System (theverge.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the work-in-progress dept.

Valve's crowdsourced Greenlight submission program, which let the gaming community select which games get chosen for distribution via Steam, is shutting down after nearly five years. It will be replaced with a new system called Steam Direct that will charge developers a fee for each title they plan to distribute. The Verge reports: Steam Greenlight was launched in 2012 as a way for indie developers to get their games on Steam, even if they weren't working with a big publisher that had a relationship with Valve. Steam users would vote on Greenlight games, and Valve would accept titles with enough support to suggest that they'd sell well. Kroll says that "over 100" Greenlight titles have made $1 million or more. But Greenlight has also had significant problems. Developers could game the system by offering rewards for votes, and worthy projects could get lost amidst a slew of bad proposals. Since Valve ultimately made the call on including games, the process could also seem arbitrary and opaque. The big question is whether what's replacing it is better. To get a game on Steam Direct, developers will need to "complete a set of digital paperwork, personal or company verification, and tax documents similar to the process of applying for a bank account." Then, they'll pay an application fee for each game, "which is intended to decrease the noise in the submission pipeline" -- a polite way of saying that it will make people think twice before spending money submitting a low-quality game. Steam Direct is supposed to launch in spring of 2017, but the application fee hasn't been decided yet. Developer feedback has apparently suggested anything from $100 -- the current Greenlight submission fee -- and $5,000.

4 of 99 comments (clear)

  1. Possibly good news by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    If you are a serious indie game developer, this may be good news. Hopefully this will reduce the amount of scams/shovelware/asset flips by 80%. However, there was a good side to Greenlight: cross-promoting a Kickstarter campaign with it was useful.

    If Steam does not put in place anything similar (for games that already paid the fee but are still developing), it can take a big hit for marketing of indie games.

    We are just in the middle of deciding whether to do our campaign before or after Steam Direct closes the gates... :-)

    1. Re:Possibly good news by Quakeulf · · Score: 5, Interesting

      As a poor indie-dev if I have to pay up to four digits to get my game out there it will not happen. I have already passed Greenlight once and sold over 20000 copies on Steam, but as I also have to charge very little for my games a $5000 entry fee would eat up a lot of its income. This could kill a lot of serious submitters as well. What I hope is that they do it like Android and to some degree Apple (they're dinosaurs now), with a lower submission fee but with more weight on accountability. Then again, if they make it easier for people to get exposed to your crowdfunding campaign, that would help too, because right now all I see is crowdfunding campaigns just to afford the entry fee.

    2. Re:Possibly good news by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Valve isn't real big on accountability, at least not when it applies to Valve. They want a system they can set-and-forget and that doesn't require human resources to supervise. On the other hand, they need to address the toxic garbage fire that the Greenlight has become. We aren't even talking about merely shitty games anymore, we are talking about lowlife scumbags a step below email SPAMers turning the storefront into a tragedy of the commons. Given those business priorities they don't have much choice but to increase the barrier to entry. They should have done it years ago.

    3. Re: Possibly good news by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      We're a mid-sized indie shop who has put two titles through Greenlight.

      This is fantastic news. Anyone who believes otherwise either has never had to go through the bullshit of Greenlight before, or is one of the shit-ware peddlers this is meant to filter out.

      If you believe in what you are doing, a $5k deposit is nothing. Do a kickstarter for it when you can demo a good playable product.

      Greenlight was terrible for indies. You were left in limbo for months not knowing if you would be able to pay employees soon, with a totally opaque approval process. The game you worked years on was lost in a sea of "Shower With Dad Simulators" made by children over the weekend.