03 June, 2017
Since Valve announced it was replacing Steam Greenlight with Steam Direct back in February, the big question has been how high it would set the fee for developers to be listed on the new service.
Steam Greenlight's funeral services are encroaching daily, and news of its replacement's coming in. "There were rational and convincing arguments made for both ends of the ... spectrum we mentioned". In a blog post today, Valve announced that the Steam Direct fee will be a "recoupable" $100, although they have not announced yet just how developers will be able to recoup that money. The lower fee is especially important for developers consisting of only a single individual from countries with weaker currencies like Russian Federation or India, as coming up with $500 United States dollars may not be realistic.
This time around, Direct is charging $100 per game, supported by features created to help the Steam Store's algorithm find the games you want. But perhaps what's most telling, is the confidence in letting buyers view Steam through curators. "We're also going to closely monitor the kinds of game submissions we're receiving, so that we're ready to implement more features like the Trading Card changes we covered in the last blog post, which aim to reduce the financial incentives for bad actors to game the store algorithm".
Since the barrier to entry will be so low, Valve is continuing to work on updates to discovery on the Steam Store, including its efforts to "inject human thinking into the Store algorithm". This includes showing YouTube videos alongside their curations, creating personal lists for games allowing for specific recommendations on a type of game or body of work from a specific developer.
Valve also revealed some upcoming changes planned for the Steam storefront. Valve is also looking at improving curator access to games pre-release, allowing for better discovery.
"At the same time, we're making it easier for players to use Curators to help them browse the Store". In many cases, they're existing journalistic outlets or influencers, using their Steam page in conjunction with their games coverage - though, unlike Valve, they don't appear to receive any form of compensation for their highlighting.
There's no word as to when, exactly, the Steam Direct process will go into effect.
