As previously announced, Steam Direct, Valve’s replacement for Greenlight, launches today. Valve have posted another piece about the transition, which includes a few details about where the process may go next.
They say they will be “keeping an eye on new submissions and making adjustments as necessary,” with the admission that they’re not yet sure whether this new system will see more, fewer, or about the same number of game submissions. In their estimation, there will be an initial surge of new submissions.
Internal analysis has suggested to Valve that a lot of Greenlight submission volume was coming from people trying to exploit the trading card system. That was also the impetus behind Valve’s changes to how trading cards drop (read about that here).
They’re hoping that Steam Direct will prove to be a more transparent and predictable path to game submission, which, they say, is “something we heard held back many developers, especially in non-Western countries”. After the process has been running for “a while”, Valve plan to make another post about any changes to volume or developer behaviour.
Changes to the Steam Curator system, which Valve previously detailed, are currently said to be in progress too. They’re also busy “rewriting the core of our recommendation engine.”
