Following Valve’s recent announcement that Steam Greenlight would be phased out to make way for Steam Direct, Publisher Raw Fury has responded by saying they will help a ‘handful’ of developers cover costs.
From Spring 2017, Steam Greenlight will be no more. Valve explained that while Greenlight was a ‘useful stepping stone’, Direct will help Steam transition to a more direct method of distribution and publication by improving the pipeline that allows new content to come through Steam’s digital gateway. The changes include a sign-up system in which developers will have to complete a set of digital paperwork and pay a recoupable application fee. The fee, which is designed to ‘decrease the noise in the submission pipeline’, will cost anywhere between $100 (the cost of the original one-time fee required to submit multiple games to Greenlight) and $5,000 USD. Raw Fury feels this might pose a danger for talented developers who would struggle if the upfront fees were too high:
“There could be some real gems that never make it to Steam because of this barrier to entry (assuming the price is high—we’ll all have to wait and see) so we want to help those devs out. They don’t need to sign with us or anything either.”
Last month, Steam hit a record 14 million concurrent users.
