Steam Greenlight has been a tremendous success for both Valve and indie outfits and has resulted in several projects making it onto the platform that likely otherwise never have done so and subsequently wouldn't have achieved the same level of success. But now the Steam Greenlight program coming to an end, Valve states on the official forums:
"After the launch of Steam Greenlight, we realized that it was a useful stepping stone for moving to a more direct distribution system, but it still left us short of that goal. Along the way, it helped us lower the barrier to publishing for many developers while delivering many great new games to Steam. There are now over 100 Greenlight titles that have made at least $1 Million each, and many of those would likely not have been published in the old, heavily curated Steam store."
Valve goes on by explaining what hasn't worked for them and what will improve in the future:
"These unforeseen successes made it abundantly clear that there are many different audiences on Steam, each looking for a different experience. For example, we see some people that sink thousands of hours into one or two games, while others purchase dozens of titles each year and play portions of each. Some customers are really excited about 4X strategy games, while others just buy visual novels.
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."
Because of the, Greenlight will close this spring and be replaced by a new service called Steam Direct:
"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."
Valve ends the lenghty post by promising they want to "make sure Steam is a welcoming environment for all developers who are serious about treating customers fairly and making quality gaming experiences" and that they "look forward to hearing your thoughts".
It is interesting that Valve have yet to commit to how big the recoupable application fee will be and they state they have recieved feedback ranging from $100 to $5000 when talking to partners. Clearly the latter would be a major threshold for smaller indie developers who may be on all noodle diets as they finish up their games.
Do you think this will be for better or for worse?