[News] The End of Steam Greenlight

To start, a joke that Jimquisition fans will find particularly funny:

...Thus, over Steam's 13-year history, we have gradually moved from a tightly curated store to a more direct distribution model.

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Anyways, after years of Steam's aptly named game curation service, Steam Greenlight, declining due to what could be called abuse or lack of oversight, Valve recently announced that the service is coming to an end.

...In the coming months, we are planning to take the next step in this process by removing the largest remaining obstacle to having a direct path, Greenlight. Our goal is to provide developers and publishers with a more direct publishing path and ultimately connect gamers with even more great content.

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This is something of a shame as I can name a fair few games that rose from greenlight to be stellar titles. Hell, I can name a number of games that I watched grow over the years into solid titles that went on to sell well simply because they were given that opportunity. But on the flipside, for everyone greenlight game that comes out like this, there were about 30 others that were barely finished, didn't even start, or were mere content flips. And let's not even get started on the bribes for votes. Some have even gone as far as to call the Steam Storefront basically a trash can for whatever project someone could slap together and put a price on, which is pretty bad for Valve when you consider that Steam has more competitors than it ever has. To say something of value was lost today would be selling the news short.

This isn't to say they haven't planned their next steps:

The next step in these improvements is to establish a new direct sign-up system for developers to put their games on Steam. This new path, which we're calling "Steam Direct," is targeted for Spring 2017 and will replace Steam Greenlight. 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.

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In other words, Steam is planning some sort of quality control, and pretty soon at that. It certainly sounds promising, but whether it actually works will be left up to its execution.

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So what do you think? Will you miss Steam Greenlight? Are you glad it's gone? And what do you think about the upcoming "Steam Direct"?

I'm glad it's being replaced, and the fact that Valve will put a fee to use the service will certainly increase the content quality.
People will be more motivated to do a better job if they have to invest some money in their creation.
I hope that fee won't be too high though...

Gonna miss "The Best Of Steam Greenlight" series Jim does. I'm sure there will still be some shit games added though for Jimpressions.

I'm torn.

On one hand greenlight is very unstable and not effective. The paid fee for direct also should theoretically help improve product quality.

On the other, it also means community choice will be gone, and that any game that can cough up the cash can get on (I.e: ones people don't want). It's also hard for me not to see this as another attempt at valve to monetize stuff (how they push with revolutionary ways to charge gamers in game for example)

So idk.

As someone who's spend a fair share of my time on Greenlight, I always felt sad for not really getting much out of my vote outside of a number that slowly declined over time. I can see that desire to get something out of a vote being one of the main driving forces that made "game devs" abuse the system by promising keys and whatnot.

Greenlight was flawed from the beginning and Valve didn't do anything to make it better. Hopefully they put a little bit more effort into their new system.

I wanted to be shocked, but on the other hand, I can't wait for Jim Sterling to make a Jimquisition episode. I can smell his youtube money growing with gold and pots of diamonds already.

Despite the dogturds that's often seen trying to be greenlit, there has been a few stew of decent looking promises coming from developers who really do deserve a greenlight. Heck, our boy Jimmy showcased two really decent and promising titles that came out of such service.

Ripperino Greenlight though. It will be missed. Of course we can thank Valve for that.

Kind of on the fence but I think I like this idea, and this is coming from someone who loves discovering new games and supporting smaller developers. From what I can tell so far, this could (more effectively) reduce the amount of joke submissions and streamline the process of getting your game on Steam, if you're a serious developer.

And a note on the fee thing, Steam Greenlight is not free either - it costs $100 to submit your game, and then you still have to go through the community voting process, so even if your game doesn't get Greenlit you're still out a hundred bucks. And yes, this means for every shitty game you see on the store page and Greenlight, someone actually paid $100 to put it there, so clearly that wasn't enough of a deterrence to weed out the trash. Direct will possibly (most likely) have a higher fee, but they've always been charging developers to submit games.

A fee on the higher end would hurt small developers though, but I can see many turning to Kickstarter and other crowdfunding services to help pay for it, if it ends up being in the thousands or something.

Honestly had no idea this existed lol.
I do feel like it's not a bad thing, but I can't say I miss it much. There are sites out there that do pretty much the same thing, so I'm sure game developers won't be hurt too much.