Valve announces plans to ditch Steam Greenlight; to give developers direct access to the community

Valve is finally killing off its 5-year old Greenlight service and paving the way for direct publishing from developers.

Originally, Steam started out as a game hub that only consisted of a curated list of games that were deemed worthy by a handful of Valve employees. As the platform grew, it was evident that manual curation wouldn’t be enough. This is how Greenlight came to be.

Under the Greenlight program, any developer could submit a game to be ‘greenlit’ by the steam community. This was done by voting. Once a game received enough votes, it would end up on the Steam store.

The idea was nice, but developers started pouring in with shoddy, generic titles, much as you’d find on the free-for-all that is the Play Store today. Valve then introduced a $100 (around Rs 6,700) to cut down on the “noise”.

This helped, but only slightly. Amidst reports of developers gaming the system, the number of submissions continued to rise. As ArsTechnica points out, over 4,000 new titles were greenlit on Steam in 2016. That figure was 396 in 2012.

To address the issue, Valve introduced a number of changes, including the introduction of tags and user-curated lists as part of its ‘Discovery Update’.

This update changed how results were shown to users. User-created tags and curated lists also helped to dramatically cut down the noise and best of all, easier refunds made it easier for gamers to explore new titles. Valve promised to refund any game titles if a user had spent less than two hours with the game.

As Valve mentions in its blogpost, the average number of titles sold on Steam almost doubled since the introduction of the Discovery Update, as has the time spent playing games.

This improvement is probably why Valve has decided to finally ditch Greenlight.

Greenlight will now be replaced by direct publishing. Developers will only have to pay an as-yet-undisclosed fee – ranging anywhere between $100 and $5,000 – and submit documents for tax purposes before being allowed to publish a game on Steam.

While it’s a bit scary to think that literally any title can now make its way to the Steam store, we assume that there will be at least some level of quality control happening. Hopefully, these tags, lists and refunds will keep the store from being flooded by sub-par titles.