Steam has announced their fee for Steam Direct and other store updates in an official Steam Blog news update. The fee shockingly is only $100 per game, which will give developers the opportunity to be able to use Steam to publish there games.
“There were rational & convincing arguments made for both ends of the $100-$5000 spectrum we mentioned,” said Alden Kroll in the news post, an employee at Valve. “Our internal thinking beforehand had us hovering around the $500 mark, but the community conversation really challenged us to justify why the fee wasn’t as low as possible, and to think about what we could do to make a low fee work.”
This enables smaller developers to use the platform, since the cost for publishing per game is much cheaper than the range Valve originally said.
Steam Direct was announced back in February to replace Steam Greenlight, which was a system where developers can have the opportunity to get their games published for one flat rate as opposed to per game through Steam if the community likes what they have to offer. Steam Greenlight, before the program was discontinued, cost $100 to use and allows developers to put up as many games as they want on Steam Greenlight, according to PC Gamer. The $100 would go to charity.
The biggest problem with the Steam Greenlight system was that it was unable to keep the publishing system as filtered as possible, allowing people to post games that either didn’t work or didn’t have any gameplay. Because the fee has changed from $100 to publish in general to $100 to publish a game, it will be easier for developers who actually want to use the platform to put out games.
“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,” said Kroll.
“…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.”
Gamers have been complaining about the Steam Greenlight system for a very long time now, which includes this Gather Your Party post on the top 10 worst Steam Greenlight projects from 2012, another post on the top 13 worst games from Steam written by TheINQUIRER just late last year, and even a change.com petition whose goal is to “stop bad games on Steam Greenlight.” These problems weren’t addressed by Valve until the change from Steam Greenlight to Steam Direct just earlier this year.
Although the price was announced to be only $100 per game, indie developers were worried that they wouldn’t be able to use Steam as a publishing platform anymore if the games were priced as much as $5,000 to publish, according to Polygon.
Luckily, it seems that Steam listened to these indie developers and offered the lowest price possible per game, so that trolls won’t be able to afford to produce multiple unplayable or terrible games at once and be able to be detected quickly.
“Like all the work in the Steam Store, Steam Direct will take some iteration to get the kinks out. We’re optimistic,” Kroll continued in the news post. “Aiming for the low publishing fee gives every game developer a chance to get their game in front of players.”
The next Steam news update will inform the Steam community when Steam Greenlight will be discontinued and when Steam Direct will be used to replace it.
Featured image via Valve
