Steam Greenlight is Shut Down

Well, ladies and gentlemen, it’s finally happening. After years of complaints from fans, journalists, and of course, publishers, Valve is finally going to do what it should have done years ago and finally shut down Steam Greenlight.

Greenlight, one of Valve’s better-intentioned but ultimately backfiring efforts to open up the market for new developers, allowed people to swamp their online marketplace with barely-made shovelware, and bribe people into supporting their endeavors so they could get themselves on the largest PC gaming marketplace in the world. This would go on to be the source of antagonism for everyone as slighted developers of crap games would complain, censor, or even sue people when their crappy game got the backlash it deserved.

Taking its place is a new system, called Steam Direct, which is a more traditional, albeit far less open approach.

“We 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.”

So if you want your game published on Steam, no more tricks, no more lies: you have to do it the old-fashioned way with some good, old-fashioned vetting. While Valve isn’t sure how much they’re going to charge developers for Steam Direct, they suspect it’ll be anything as low as 100 bucks, to anything as high as 5000. Of course, there are pros and cons to both approaches, between making it easier for new ideas vs making sure only people serious about their games will bother posting them on Steam.

Greenlight won’t be going away until later this spring, so hopefully in the meantime, we’ll be getting more facts out there. Still, I think we can all agree that this is mostly good news… a little late, but hey, better than never, right?