Valve plans on charging $100 for Steam Direct submissions
Valve plans on charging $100 for Steam Direct submissions
For those that are not already aware, Valve plan on ditching Steam’s Greenlight system, replacing it with their new Steam Direct publishing model. This new model will force upon developers a publishing fee, which is designed to be recoupable after a certain number of sales and deter the sale of low-quality games on the platform.
Originally Steam listed this publishing fee as between $100 and $5000, with Valve now deciding to stay at the lower end of this scale in order to encourage developers to use the steam platform while also discouraging the development of low quality “fake games”. This combined with Steam’s recent changes to their trading card system will also discourage the practice of creating games that “farm” trading cards to profit from the Steam trading card system.
There were rational and 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. 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.
Valve has also announced several changes to their Curator system, which are designed to give curators more influence and allow them to create recommended games lists for specific genre’s and interests.
These upcoming updates are designed to allow Curators to give consumers more information on games and to enhance the Steam discovery system through the input of data from followed Curators, giving everyone a custom Steam discovery experience.
You can join the discussion on Steam’s latest community update on the OC3D Forums.