Valve replacing the Steam Greenlight program

Valve has today announced plans to end the Steam Greenlight program, and replace it with a different system.

"After the launch of Steam Greenlight, we realized that it was a useful stepping stone for moving to a more direct distribution system, but it still left us short of that goal. Along the way, it helped us lower the barrier to publishing for many developers while delivering many great new games to Steam. Greenlight also exposed two key problems we still needed to address: improving the entire pipeline for bringing new content to Steam and finding more ways to connect customers with the types of content they wanted," said the company. There are now over 100 Greenlight titles that have made at least $1 Million each.

The next step is to establish a new direct sign-up system for developers to put their games on Steam. This new path, called “Steam Direct,” is targeted for Spring 2017 and will replace Steam Greenlight. Valve will ask new developers to complete a set of digital paperwork, personal or company verification, and tax documents similar to the process of applying for a bank account. Once set up, developers will pay a recoupable application fee for each new title they wish to distribute, which is intended to decrease the noise in the submission pipeline.

"While we have invested heavily in our content pipeline and personalized store, we’re still debating the publishing fee for Steam Direct. We talked to several developers and studios about an appropriate fee, and they gave us a range of responses from as low as $100 to as high as $5,000. There are pros and cons at either end of the spectrum, so we’d like to gather more feedback before settling on a number."

The Steam Early Access program will remain unaffected.

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