Steam Direct Sets Fee At $100

Earlier this year, Valve decided to axe Steam Greenlight, and made the move to its new publishing service Steam Direct. With the new system in place, Valve now required developers to pay a fee to publish their games on the Steam platform, in addition to ing their company status. At the time, Valve had not yet decided on what to charge for its new publishing service.

Valve has finally announced in a blog post that Steam Direct will be charging a $100 publishing fee per game.

Before they had announced their final decision on the $100 fee, Valve had a long, open discussion with developers and s alike as to what the optimal fee should be in order to help "decrease the noise in the submission pipeline". After much debate, Valve details its decision for the $100 fee below...

We knew that we wanted it to be as small as possible to ensure it wasn't a barrier to beginning game developers, while also not being so small as to invite easy abuse by people looking to exploit our sytems.

There were rational & convincing arguments made for both ends of the $100-$5000 spectrum we mentioned... So in the end, we've decided we're going to aim for 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.

We're going to look for specific places where human eyes can be injected into the Store algorithm, to ensure that it is working as intended, and to ensure it doesn't miss something interesting. We're also going to closely monitor the kinds of game submissions we're receiving [and] aim to reduce the financial incentives for bad actors to game the store algorithm.

In addition to the new publishing fee, Valve also discusses the changes to the Steam Curators system. As s have been requesting more human interaction and a streamlining of Steam's curation algorithm, Valve is hoping that more focus on the -created Steam Curators channel will help other players discover quality games. Another notable feature Valve is looking to bring is an open line of communication between developers and Curators.

It's often hard for Curators to get the attention of developers who build the specific kinds of games that a Curator covers, and it can be similarly hard for a smaller developer to find the Curators who would be interested. So we're building a system that will make that a painless process for everyone involved, which means that you should see more useful curations coming out of the Curators who like to explore newer titles.

We've [also] decided to give Curators more visibility throughout the Store as a whole, so if you're following a Curator, you'll see their thoughts in new places, and with higher prominence.

The launching of Steam Direct will hopefully be the much needed change for the platform, which had long been plagued with problems from its predecessor Steam Greenlight. Greenlight's community voting system was exploitable, creating an overwhelming influx of games that made it hard for s and serious developers to quality games. With these new features in place, Valve will be creating a more friendly and engaging experience for everyone.