In February, Valve announced plans to terminate the Greenlight community voting program on Steam and replace it with a new developer verification process called Steam Direct.
With Direct, a developer will have to submit paperwork and pay an application fee in order to publish their game on Steam. There were reports that that fee could could go as high as $5,000, but Valve announced today it will only charge $100 per game.
Steam Greenlight charged a one-time fee and allowed developers to submit as many games as they want. But the Steam Direct fee will be recouple, which means Valve will refund the $100 once a game makes $1,000 in sales, Ars Technica reports. There's no word as to when, exactly, the Steam Direct process will go into effect.
Valve said in its latest blog post that it opted not to announce a specific amount at first to give players and developers a chance to weigh in.
"Since then, we've seen a bunch of great conversations discussing the various pros and cons of whether there should be an amount, what that amount should be, ways that recouping could work, which developers would be helped or hurt, predictions for how the store would be affected, and many other facets to the decision," Valve's Alden Kroll wrote. "There were rational and convincing arguments made for both ends of the … spectrum we mentioned."
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Valve originally thought it would charge around $500, but decided to go with a lower fee after considering comments from the community.
"The community conversation really challenged us to justify why the fee wasn't as low as possible, and to think about what we could do to make a low fee work," Kroll wrote. "So in the end, we've decided we're going to aim for the lowest barrier to developers as possible."
Valve is also making some changes to the Steam Curators program, which lets individuals an organization make recommendations to help other discover games they might like. The opt-in feature lets you follow curators to see their recommendations on your Steam home page. Going forward, curators will be able to show YouTube videos alongside their curations, and create personal lists of games. Valve is also building a system that will make it easier for curators to get pre-release access to upcoming games.
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