Valve has just revealed how much publishers will have to fork over to push out games on its platform via Steam Direct, and it's $100.
Announced back in February, the company made the program to replace the current Steam Greenlight, and at the time, it was mulling over the fee between $100 and a whopping $5,000. Now it has finally settled on the lowest figure.
"We knew that we wanted it to be as small as possible to ensure it wasn't a barrier to beginning game developers, while also not being so small as to invite easy abuse by people looking to exploit our systems," Valve says.
Steam Direct Set At A $100 'Recoupable' Fee
Straight from the horse's mouth, anyone can publish games on Steam for a "$100 recoupable publishing fee per game."
By "recoupable," Valve means that it intends to return the $100 payment when the publisher's game reaches the $1,000 mark in sales.
Initially, this was unclear, as the blog post didn't exactly explain this in detail, leaving users speculating whether it would've ended up as a down payment of sorts on the typical 30 percent cut the company gets.
Valve has yet to announce a release date, though.
$500 Was Almost The Magic Number
Valve almost set the Steam Direct fee at $500. Fortunately, that didn't happen, and it's all thanks to the vocal community.
"Our internal thinking beforehand had us hovering around the $500 mark, but the community conversation really challenged us to justify why the fee wasn't as low as possible, and to think about what we could do to make a low fee work," Valve says.
Steam Curator Gets Updates Too
Valve is also changing up the Steam Curator system, both for the benefit of Curators and their followers alike.
Curators will soon have more options to showcase their content, including personal lists and YouTube videos.
About the personal lists, Curators will get to provide more in-depth info to their followers, such as the current games on sale or which titles to keep tabs on.
On top of that, they will be allowed to post YouTube videos beside their curations.
Just to be clear, the big change for followers is that they'll see more of the Curators they, well, follow on Steam, thanks to the aforementioned features.
Steam Algorithm Improved To Help You Find Games
Valve says it's working on features to improve the Store's algorithm, which in turn will help users search for games more easily.
To make sure things go without a hitch, it says it's "going to look for specific places where human eyes can be injected into the Store algorithm."
Long story short, anyone who wants to publish games through the Steam Direct program will have to pay a $100 recoupable fee to Valve. On top of that, the company is improving the whole Store experience.
It's also worth mentioning that Valve plans to launch more features that keep "bad games" at bay in the future, just like the recent changes to Steam's Trading Card.
With all said and done, what do you think of the steps Valve just took? Feel free to hit us up in the comments section below and let us know.
