What do you think of Steam Direct?

Hi. It seems that Steam Greenlight will be replaced in March by Steam Direct, a service that allows you to publish a game on Steam just by paying a fee. What do you think of this system? What ammount of money would you consider reasonable for the fee ?

I’m not sure that it will prevent the flood of crappy games that came with Greenlight, people seem capable of filling out the forms, and I think it’d be a bit much to expect more than a $100 fee

Money grubby is what it is. (In the sense that it’s now ALL about the money.)
Now games arn’t green light by the community. (Or at least in theory they were choosing? I can’t remember if it had problems.)

So some really horrible games will come to the store. (Not to say that hasn’t been already happening…)
But now the community didn’t choose it! So the store might get flooded with Really bad games from devs who would otherwise not make it with games that would not make it? (Possible small scale 1983 for indie devs?)

I wonder if the community will respond like it did with Paid mods?

So pretty much they can just bypass the greenlighting process and go straight to Steam?
Would in theory we would end up with more bad games? (As the community has no say from what I am seeing.)

Yes, according to the blog post Steam :: Steam News :: Evolving Steam
there is no community involvement anymore. Just provide all required documents + the fee(s) for the game(s) and you’re good to go.

Not sure how I should interpret this… Its good on some level but I’d still prefer the new process + community involvement!

It depends on if the trouble of filling out all the forms and paying a fee of at least $100 is enough to make those people give up or not–I’m thinking not

The issue with Greenlight was that it was very easy to get a terrible game into it, the original idea was that the community would push good games out but that’s not what happened. In the last year there were more games released on Steam than existed in the store before that. There’s a massive number of games that are essentially just taking stuff from the Unity or Unreal asset marketplaces and doing nothing else with them.
The ultimate solution would be for Valve to personally check every game submission but I think they might be trying to avoid that expense with things like this.

Definitly should have some involvement.

They should revise greenlight… If possible.

Like more rules for submission.

Yep, the influx of these games is crazy now!
And sadly most of them are worthless and boring. Almost as bad as some of those old shovelware games I used to get on floppies and early cd’s!

Seems Valve plans to dump Greenlight

Considering that there are communities of people and/or developers just for manipulating Greenlight to get the worst kind of garbage through (and I assume making money off of it, although I’m not sure), letting people bypass Greenlight for a fee (or replacing it completely) doesn’t seem like a terrible idea.

Also having a fee per game rather than once per developer should help cut down the worst offenders of shovelware as well.

It is the worst that could happen.

  • There is no Quality-Control at all (not like there was one in Greenlight)
  • They are Discussing a fee between 100 and 5000 USD for every game. (a too high fee would kill smaller devs, that actually create quality games)
  • If the fee is too low, we will see even more **** flooding steam
  • If it is too high, it robs the existence of many Devs.

I do not like it - there needs to be quality control instead of a more open way to flood steam with **** and asset-flips.

Luckily, i already got my first game onto Greenlight, but it might be the last, if the fee is too high…

I do believe the quality of the products will depend on how much they charge.

If they charge the same as greenlight, we will see the greatest overload of shovelware of all time.
If it is to much, all you are doing is hurting small indie studios or single man projects. Thus loosing more money in the long run due to less sales? (Possibly. Hard to judge the game market sometimes.)

I really believe they should just revise greenlight to work better.

And Valve… Stop messing with steam and put out HL3 already! :smiley:

Very well put sir!

I think a high fee is a reasonable filter. It’s certainly not perfect, but Greenlight is even less perfect.
Let’s say the fee is set at $1,000.
If you’re an indie dev who actually create a game you believe people will purchase, why would a $1,000 fee be too high?
If you don’t expect at least $10,000 of sales, why would you submit to Steam?

Note that $100 is not enough of a fee to keep **** out. The Xbox Live Indie Games required a $99 fee, and the Apple iTunes App Store requires a $100 fee, and both of those marketplaces have lots of content that is … less than great.

Like stuff in this vid?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rm_Y2t51tUE (Hehehehe… :D)

I right now could never afford a fee that high.

To be honest, friends gave me the money for Greenlight, and even bought the Sounds for the game.

My whole game has a budget of less than a 100 bucks, and yet manages to look and play very well. (even real game-developers that currently work in a dev-studio played it, and said that it is fun to play.)

I expect this amount of sales, but i can not afford such a Fee up-front when i have literally nothing for food and everything else.

I am just p*ss-poor, and could not afford such a fee.

I am already working on an all-improved and from ground up rebuilt sequel that will surpass this by far (and is currently doing so), but i do not know if i could afford a 1.000 dollar fee, if this game gets kicked out of greenlight, when they switch to the new system.

If they really overkill it with their fee, there is only one thing left to do -> hang myself.

For me, currently everything depends on these 2 games, everything

Any higher than 500 USD and I will have to look for another platform. Even that is too much, anything from 100 to 200 USD is reasonable.

What do guys think about Epic creating a tab on the launcher for games. MarketPlace Games.
Games would have to be curated and perhaps community approved and maybe a small fee $25-30 per games.
Would provide the first time indie an easy entry point and generate enough sales to venture to other platforms.
This would be ideal for both developers and Epic. A win win for all.

Was thinking about this a bit more and I think it would be a really great idea.
If your game can thrive and survive here you could take it to the next level.
Epic already has this infrastructure in place. The forum, marketplace and the launcher. Combine all three and you have
the perfect setup for this to happen.

A hope Epic seriously considers this.

There isn’t much of an advantage to do that–they would have to deal with the issue of creating yet another store that people would have to install (people hate using anything besides Steam)and have to build up a customer base so that people can get enough sales, not only that they would have to develop support for that system which would take a lot of time considering how long it has taken to add features to the marketplace.

I have to disagree with you. The commerce store is already created and all we’re talking about is adding a another tab/category to the marketplace. Nothing fancy at first, but enough to start the rolling.
All games from indie to AAA created with the Unreal Engine should first go here and get notice. Is no different the marketplace now only your reviewing games instead of game assets. I vote yes for this.