Tackling CS:GO and TF2 skins gambling and addressing abuses of Steam's user review system were their first steps in the direction of addressing the service's long-standing issues, but the elephant in the room remained: Greenlight. Once a promising program for enabling indie developers to find supporters in the community, Steam Greelight has long since devolved into an open sewer, rife with lazy Unity asset-flips, "games" with no detectable game-play, and scammers. Something has needed to be done for a long time, and some have been advocating for Valve to simply kill Greenlight and replace it with something else.
Well, today Valve announced that they're doing exactly that.
From Kotaku:
After years of saying they’d do it, Valve is finally getting rid of Steam Greenlight, Steam’s user-driven service for admitting smaller games to the Steam store. They’re replacing it with something called Steam Direct.
Here’s how it’ll work:
“We will ask new developers to complete a set of digital paperwork, personal or company verification, and tax documents similar to the process of applying for a bank account. Once set up, developers will pay a recoupable application fee for each new title they wish to distribute, which is intended to decrease the noise in the submission pipeline.”So basically, no more courting users to get their precious upvotes. Games will instead be admitted directly onto the store. According to VentureBeat, Valve will do a quick check to make sure game files run and contain, well, games, but beyond that, anybody will be able to get onto Steam. It might sound like Valve is asking for an even bigger flood of shitty games than they’re currently dealing with, but they think the current Steam algorithm, bolstered by the two recent Discovery updates, is up to the task of separating the cream from the crap.
Valve added that while Greenlight helped lower the barrier to getting games on Steam, it revealed nasty rot in Steam’ core. “Greenlight also exposed two key problems we still needed to address: improving the entire pipeline for bringing new content to Steam and finding more ways to connect customers with the types of content they wanted,” said Valve.
Some of the important details are still TBA, like the cost to list a game on Steam Direct (anywhere from $100 to $5,000), but very few people will be shedding tears over Greenlight's imminent demise. Stopping the flow of crap into their marketplace can only be a good thing -- even with the details somewhat up in the air, it's hard to see how Steam Direct can be anything but an improvement over the status quo.
Valve have spent years being infamously unresponsive to community concerns over Greenlight and other issues, but they're clearly awake now, and working to make Steam better, which will make life harder for all of their competitors. Steam basically own PC gaming, right now; it looks like they're finally getting serious about ensuring that they continue to hold onto the loyalty of PC gamers.