Steam Direct Publishing Fee Set at $100

In case you didn’t hear, Steam Greenlight has been offed.

Yep, after years and years of flooding the Steam store with unregulated shovelware, barely policed by an easy to exploit honor system, and swamped with asset-swapping mire that drowned many legitimate projects, former good guy and current Wal-Mart equivalent Valve decided to finally step up and do something about it. So, the system has been shut down and is set to be replaced with a new one called Steam Direct.

There was a lot we didn’t know about Steam Direct. And Sunday, that remained largely unchanged. But we did learn one little tidbit worth notice last Friday: in a post discussing their future plans for the program, they had this to say regarding the fee of submitting a game to the new system:

“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. We're going to look for specific places where human eyes can be injected into the Store algorithm, to ensure that it is working as intended, and to ensure it doesn't miss something interesting. 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.”

This is important, as early estimates were suggesting they would charge anything up to 5000 to submit games to the marketplace in the hope it would dissuade asset-flippers. Putting it at 100, which was the old fee for Steam Greenlight, is far more… manageable. Both for asset flippers and poor people with actual talent and vision

So they really are relying on “algorithms” and the human eye to keep junk off the system. But if those human eyes aren’t employed by Steam directly, there’s very little to keep them from being compromised by more organizations who can “encourage” users to let certain games slide in exchange for money.

A bit worrying, to be honest. I, like many others, were hoping that we might actually get to a point where Steam is back to being a reliable storefront again… but it seems likely at this pace…