Steam Direct publishing fee revealed... still 100$ :D

Hey guys good news, publishing on Steam will still cost 100$, this time it will be per game and recoupable.

Update: A Valve representative tells us “we plan to return the $100 fee after a game hits $1000 in sales.”

Greenlight closed, Steam Direct coming on June 13th.

I think this is good (for me :stuck_out_tongue: ), it might be better if it was 200$ if you ask me.

That is very arguable. I originally started making indie games for mobile devices, but because that market was so crowded, that it’s was almost impossible to earn living making games for that market. I’m afraid that this is exactly what will happen to steam with such a low fee. :frowning:

Not everyone can pay 500$ just to release their game… If the fee was that high only big studios would release games on Steam.

This is a horrible turn of events and will have extremely dire long-term ramifications for Steam. I just hope Valve will be observant enough to change this before the massive ****-storm of asset-flips and 3-day template projects becomes too overwhelming.

If you can’t muster up $500 to release a game then you have no business making games in the first place. If you can’t pay $500, how did you invest the time (which costs money) to make a quality product?

Some people live from 500$ (not talking about myself) a month so yeah, think about it…
Where I live 800$ is an average monthly wage, not everyone can throw money around (not everyone is living a “dream”).

When we are already talking about time, yes time costs money but if you are making games as a hobby in your free time then there is no real cost…

And amount that you can pay doesn’t reflect the quality of your project, someone can pay 1000$ and make a bad game.

It is easy to imagine someone having time to work on a hobby project despite not being rich.
Or wanting to publish a free game without no intention to make profit.

Good that no one suggests a cost of 500$ to make a website, in fear of poor quality websites.

And if you are afraid of the bad games hiding your submission, the other part of the post says how they will use more sophisticated methods to choose what is on the front-page, not just submission time.
So if they manage to do this, the really bad games should be invisible.

They just need the fee high enough to pay for basic quality control.

Exactly! Also Valve should vary the fee based on region. If you’re in a country where the average monthly pay is $800 then you can pay $100 fee for publishing. If you’re in a developed country then the fee needs to be way, way higher. $500-$1000 would be perfect. If they will not go through a process of measuring each and every entry then at least have a high enough fee that folks will think twice before publishing. In fact in a way this will make sure games are more polished and more ready to publish even for people who can afford the higher fees. The high fees would create more structure for all. This is good for gamers and gamers would agree. It is only devs who dont want to pay more that disagree.

No surprise… As I said on that other thread, the fee would be $200 at max and probably less than that.
Everybody (platform holders) wants to follow the iOS/Google Play model, tons of easy money for the gatekeeper; it doesn’t matter if developers manage to survive or not, that is the point for the platform owners and this is why Blizzard/Epic/EA/Ubishit/etc are right when they publish their games on their own Launcher/Portal instead of giving away 30% to Valve for no reason.

The thing is, in Greenlight, you paid a fee once and you could then spam Steam with small and terrible games, hoping a few of them would get through the process. Now, you have to pay for each game. So ten games is already $1000. If they don’t sell, they vanish into the depths and you won’t get the money back.

Sure, it’s low, but why should you block developers who really want to develop good games, but don’t have the funds to pay the fee (remember that we have to buy a lot of hardware and software too)? Sure, time is money, but that’s exactly it. The more time you spend on the developing a game, the more it costs. So once you spend most of your money, you then have to pay a huge fee to get the game released? People would then find another way to get the game released, but even if it’s free (like Itch), it still takes time to expose the game, as you have to do it yourself.

We will have to see, but Steam is improving its services to help good games get recognition, while ignoring the garbage. Though, I wouldn’t be that disappointed if the fee had been between 200 and 500 dollars, but not higher.

That’s my 100 dollars.

If you developed a good game, getting $100 for the last hurdle is the easiest part of the development process. Borrow it, loan it, fund raise it, sacrifice for it, sell stuff for it.

Steam has had discoverability problems for years, even if the fee is higher you’ll still have to promote the game and build a community around it just like on mobile devices. The days in which you published on Steam and sold hundreds of thousands are long passed.

And Valve has deactivated trading cards for new publishers so asset flippers won’t get any easy money like before giving away thousands of free keys.

The “but not everyone can pay $500, think of the poor developers who just want their game on Steam” argument is stupid beyond measure. You’re arguing destroying the entire PC ecosystem just to avoid hurting the feelings and prospects of a few outliers. Steam is the biggest PC market ecosystem out there, having your game exposed there should not be a given, it should require a premium. That way we’ll not only filter the stream of **** on Steam, but would also facilitate the rise of smaller “poor-friendly” ecosystems that those developers could use as stepping stones toward Steam. Don’t have money to pay the Steam premium? Go to the SMALL_ONLINE_DISTRIBUTION_A and sell your game there until you make enough money to put it on Steam.

This will be bad for everyone involved less than five years down the line. And all that just so some poor little underdog developers can release their infinite runner on Steam where it’ll promptly be burred by a stream of unfiltered BS.

I think the fee is a good idea, but it only solves a tiny part of the problem. Frankly, I feel as though Valve has managed to do something without actually achieving anything.

I also don’t think the fee is large enough but it does have to cater to all margins. $100 is worth more in some parts of the world than others, and one persons **** could be someone else’s treasure. The curation system NEEDS to improve, but on Valve’s timeline it’ll probably be too late by the time it does.

@DamirH Your argument is basically this: “Well, you are poor and you shouldn’t even think about Steam”. This might be a bit over-exaggerate but that is how it sounds.

No, my argument is “Not everyone has to be able to afford staying a 5-star hotel, otherwise that 5-star hotel won’t be a 5-star hotel for much longer”, or, to put it another way - “If you can’t afford a BMW, buy a Volkswagen”.

If Steam is this big ecosystem that 90% of the world is using, it should be available to every developer for a reasonable fee (my reasonable is not same as your is).
Instead of raising the fee they should add a review process similar to what we have with Marketplace. A ton of new games are submitted every day but no automated system can match a true review. Some community members could review games and Valve could give rewards to those people. This will never happen probably but it would be great if it did.

The problem with an actual review is that some of the games a reviewer would deny as “complete garbage” actually sell a lot of copies for no reason. Of course steam wants all of those… :smiley:

Most times bad games get popular because some big youtuber played it and then it is all over the internet.