Valve has announced that their recoverable publishing fee for games through Steam Direct (the upcoming Greenlight replacement) will be $100. That means not a whole lot has changed, financially speaking, as the Greenlight submission fee was already $100.
In their announcement post, Valve say they had lengthy discussions with community and developers about the initial suggestion of a fee ranging from $100 all the way up to $5,000. Their original intention was a fee around the $500 mark, but after being “really challenged … to justify why the fee wasn’t as low as possible” have settled on the lower end, at $100.
From this point out, the Valve philosophy will be “the lowest barrier to developers as possible, with a $100 recoupable publishing fee per game, while at the same time work on features designed to help the Store algorithm become better at helping you sift through games.” To that end, the rest of the post talks about coming changes to the Curation and Curator system.
It includes the line “We’re going to look for specific places where human eyes can be injected into the Store algorithm” which sounds all kinds of horrifying. Fortunately, it doesn’t seem to be referring to a literal eye-mulching machine.
Instead, Valve will be “expanding” the sorts of things Curators can create and share. It’ll be possible to embed things like YouTube videos alongside the curated suggestions, and people will be able to assemble personal lists of games around ideas and themes (or just a “these are five good games” I guess).
In the next (and final) post about these changes, Valve says they will cover “the sunsetting of Greenlight, and the timing for the release of Steam Direct.”
