What do you think of Steam Direct?

[ambershee]

@Whammy;664622

I’m not sure where you think there’s this big pile of money just laying around (under the seat cushions maybe?) that’s at the disposal of the indie developer. But many indies are self-financing and on extremely tight budgets.

sigh

Small business loans. Angel investors. Crowdfunding. Publishing agreements. Dev grants / equivalents.

The money is there for anybody who cares to put the effort in to find it. If you can’t seem to raise the money through these routes, you may want to accept the possibility that your game is probably one of the ones that fails to hit the quality barrier and that Valve are deliberately trying to keep out of their marketplace.

@DarkS474;664639

Maybe but if they would get 5,000 submissions/year or more at $5,000 each that would become a risk too high to make for Epic Games or any other business. Just too much money and too many of those games could easily fail at selling enough copies.

So it is just better for everyone in the business at any level if Valve avoids doing such a thing as forcing developers to pay an high ($1,000 to $5,000) fee+the 30% cut they would keep getting anyway.

Valve can’t make the fee low, or their store will be saturated with low-quality rubbish - this is the entire point of changing the system. Yes, it is possible that a game might not sell enough copies to make a return on the $5000 investment - but this is the risk that you accept when you pay the fee to have access to their storefront and customer base.

To ask a serious question - if you honestly don’t believe that your game is good enough to make $5000, why do you think your game should be on Steam in the first place?