Valve’s Steam Direct Publishing Service Is Now Live

[kcarbotte]

The days of Valve’s game publishing lottery have come to an end. Valve shut down the Greenlight service last week, and on Tuesday evening the company brought Steam Direct online, which introduces per-submission publishing fees.

Valve’s Steam Direct Publishing Service Is Now Live : Read more

 

[dstarr3]

"Valve said that once a game reaches $1,000 in sales or in-app purchases, the developer would receive a full refund of the initial fee at the next pay period."

"Valve said that the Steam team must play the game 'to check that it is configured correctly, matches the description provided on the store page, and doesn't contain malicious content.'"

Unfortunately, these measures don't really do anything to prevent zero-effort asset flips from oversaturating the market. I suppose it slows them down a bit because a dev can't just flood the store with 20 flips a day like some have in the past, but it certainly won't put an end to much of anything else. If you charge a buck for a lazy asset flip that drops dozens of trading cards for people to sell and profit from, you'll sell a thousand of those easy and get the $100 fee back, no problem. So the honest indie devs and students that are just trying to get their small, hand-crafted game out there will have to hope it can be discovered among the hundreds of asset flips that are still going to be in the way of its discovery.

But I suppose it is worth doing now that those scummy websites that sold Greenlight votes are now out of business. And games that straight up don't launch are going to be cut. So at least there's that.

 

[Gillerer]

But I thought Valve was going to address the trading card problem? They were going to adjust it, so only games that have sold X amount get access to them.

 

[dstarr3]

But I thought Valve was going to address the trading card problem? They were going to adjust it, so only games that have sold X amount get access to them.

That would be an excellent thing. But I would not be surprised if Valve drag their knuckles a bit on that, because they do make a serious bit of dosh from it themselves.

 

[randomizer]

Add an extra zero on both of those figures. $100 is spare change for a business and $1000 can be achieved with a few dozen early adopters who don't know what they're getting into yet.