Steam Greenlight was first revealed 5 years ago and, at the time, it was meant to be an avenue for letting Indie games onto the Steam platform for wider distribution. It soon became a controversial method for introducing new games onto the Steam Store and now, half a decade later, Valve is replacing it with Steam Direct.
Originally free, Valve quickly rolled out a $100 fee-per-developer who wanted to have their games listed on Steam Greenlight. Paying the fee didn’t immediately mean your game would be listed on the Store and as a result, it was likened to buying a coupon for a raffle. If you had a great game that targeted a very niche type of gamers, chances were your game would fail the popularity contest that was Steam Greenlight. Steam Direct is meant to remove that hurdle.
The new Steam Direct platform will merely require new developers to provide tax details and company paperwork before being able to use Steam to distribute their games. However, each game will require a recoupable fee before being made available. Valve still hasn’t decided on a price point and are looking for suggestions somewhere between $100 and $5000. Compared to Steam Greenlight’s $100-per-developer, this could be a steep price for most aspiring indie developers, especially if the fee is towards the higher end of that spectrum.
However, the fee will be recoupable, meaning that it will be returned to the developer once the game hits a revenue target. On the other hand, questions still arise as to what would happen if the game never hits its target revenue. Would the fee remain in stasis or would a portion of it return to the developer, at the cost of the failed game no longer being listed on the store?
From the sounds of it, Steam Direct’s success hinges on how low or high the fee-per-game that developers will have to cough up. Steam Direct is expected to be launched sometime in Spring.
