When Valve unveiled the successor to its Greenlight platform on Steam a few months ago, quite a few questions were left without answers. However, in a recent blog post, the company announced that Steam Direct will only cost a recoupable fee of $100 for developers. The $100 mirrors the fee developers had to pay to list their games on Steam Greenlight, although that was per developer and not per game.
Now, after four months of deliberation, with Valve receiving suggestions ranging from $100 and $5000 (per game) the company has settled on the lower end of the spectrum, although they initially were going to settle on $500.
“Since then, we’ve seen a bunch of great conversations discussing the various pros and cons of whether there should be an amount, what that amount should be, ways that recouping could work, which developers would be helped or hurt, predictions for how the store would be affected, and many other facets to the decision. There were rational & convincing arguments made for both ends of the $100-$5000 spectrum we mentioned. 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.”
– Alden Kroll
However, the low entry fee for Steam Direct does run the chance of turning Steam into a cesspit filled with low-quality games. Valve hopes it won’t come to that by closely monitoring the game submissions; if necessary, the company will implement more features like changes to Trading Cards.
Furthermore, Valve is looking to revamp the curator’s feature of Steam by giving curators more power. For instance, curators will be able to create personal lists of games. This will allow Curators to provide specific kinds of advice, whether that’s general suggestions about which games to buy in the current sale, or more specific lists, like which games to play to follow the evolution of a particular type of game design, the body of a work from a favorite developer, or the games in a Curator’s weekly Game Club. Curators will also be able to feature content they make outside of Steam (such as YouTube videos) viewable alongside their curations.
Source: Steam Blog
