Market-dominating PC game store Steam is ending the X Factor-style voting system it has used for the past five years to decide which independent developers can sell on the storefront. Valve, the company behind Steam, will replace the programme with a simpler system which guarantees access to any developer who can pay an application fee.
Previously, developers below a certain size could use the programme, called “Greenlight”, to put their games up for a public vote. Those with enough votes would be allowed space on the web store, while those that failed to excite potential customers were kept behind the velvet rope.
The system was intended to prevent a stream of shovelware from flooding the Steam store, by ensuring that only those games that would secure reasonable sales could make it on the store. But it still failed to prevent the store breaking its banks: 38% of the games on the store were released in 2016 alone, an explosion in content.
That forced Valve to reassess what the store was for, leading to the introduction of new discovery mechanisms designed to improve upon an interface largely unchanged from the days when Steam had fewer than 100 games on it. Those mechanisms included curators, such as YouTube personalities and games journalists, who can recommend specific games to their followers, as well as an algorithmic recommendation system which suggests games based on purchase history, game playtime, and friends’ activity.
With the new discovery features working, Valve says that Greenlight is no longer as necessary as it was. “Greenlight 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,” the company said in a blogpost.
“To solve these problems a lot of work was done behind the scenes, where we overhauled the developer publishing tools in Steamworks to help developers get closer to their customers. Other work has been much more visible, such as the Discovery Updates and the introduction of features like user reviews, discovery queues, user tags, streamlined refunds, and Steam Curators.”
Replacing Greenlight will be a more direct application process for developers, called Steam Direct. The votes are gone, and in their place, developers will have to pay a publishing fee direct to Valve, as well as complete some “digital paperwork”. The fee is up in the air, with Valve mooting figures between $100 and $5,000, while it promises the paperwork will be no more complex than applying for a bank account.
The fee will be “recoupable”, according to Valve, suggesting that it won’t eat into developer’s profit margins, but will be a larger barrier for those without access to capital, or for those developers who don’t expect to turn much of a profit at all for their games. Valve notes that “there are pros and cons at either end of the spectrum, so we’d like to gather more feedback before settling on a number.”
Other than the fee, developers will see only a cursory check of their game before it goes live, “to ensure that the game runs on the operating systems it says it does and that there is some game-type content” according to VentureBeat. But the end result should be to turn the Steam store into something more like Apple’s App Store or Google’s Play Store, where the major filter lies, not at the point of getting the game on the store, but at the point of getting attention once it’s there.
