Valve announced major plans to overhaul Steam this year. The company has already revealed their plans for dealing with trading cards which you can read about here. One of the biggest announcements was that the Steam Greenlight system would be replaced. Valve has now released a blog post which details these changes.
The new system is called “Steam Direct”. However, unlike the previous system developers will need to pay a flat fee to get their game onto Steam. The one-time fee for submitting games is $100 which “gives every game developer a chance to get their game in front of players”. While this may seem a lot of money to some developers, Valve originally considered a $500 fee.
This new system will not use an approval system. Games will be released straight onto Steam and as a result, the number of games on Steam is expected to rise. To deal with this, Valve is updating Steam to handle this new incoming flood of games.
Valve is also looking to improve the tools available for Steam Curators. The Steam Direct update will be arriving with the ability to create “Lists”. Steam Curators will be able to recommend games and share videos through these new Lists. Curators will be able to show off-Steam content alongside their suggestions such as YouTube videos. This is a big move for Steam and it will be interesting to see how it works in practice.
In addition to this, Valve will also be making it easier for players to use Curators. This means that Curators will be given more visibility throughout the Store so players can see their thoughts on Store pages.
The full blog post from Valve is available here. This new system will be releasing over the next few weeks however it doesn’t have a release date yet. Valve has previously state that Steam Direct would be releasing sometime this Spring.
