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Steam Direct Now Available

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  • Steam Direct Now Available

    Valve rolled out Steam Direct today to developers. This spiritual successor to Steam Greenlight promises a few changes that will maybe make it not suck as much as Greenlight did. With any luck, it will perhaps cut back on the number of low to no effort games. Perhaps.

    Valve talks a bit about what happened to the near 3,400 titles that remained on Greenlight.
    The end of Greenlight
    Last week, we disabled new submissions and voting via Greenlight and have been reviewing the remaining submissions. As of today, we've greenlit many of the remaining 3,400 titles that were remaining in Greenlight. There are a number of titles that we could not Greenlight, due to insufficient voter data or concerns about the game reported by voters. Titles that are not ultimately Greenlit may still be brought to Steam via Steam Direct, provided they meet our basic criteria of legality and appropriateness.

    If you are a developer with a submission in Greenlight that was not Greenlit, you may be able to request a refund if you meet the following criteria:
    • If your current submission in Greenlight is your only submission, and it has not been Greenlit, or
    • If you have more than one submission and none of them have been Greenlit.

    If one of these situations applies to you, please visit the Steam help site and select the "purchases" category to find your Greenlight submission fee purchase and request a refund.

    Next Steps For Steam
    With this transition to Steam Direct, we'll be keeping an eye on new submissions and making adjustments as necessary. We aren't quite sure whether there will be a lot more new submissions, just a bit more, or even fewer. It's most likely that there will be an initial surge of new submissions and then a new rate somewhat higher than what was coming through Greenlight.

    Our analysis suggests that quite a bit of the previous volume of submissions to Greenlight was motivated by trading card abuse, which we detailed in our blog post Changes to Trading Cards. With the changes detailed in that blog post, we expect there is a category of game-shaped objects that are unlikely to be worth someone paying even $100 to bring to Steam. So that will likely lower the rate of incoming new titles somewhat. But, Steam Direct also intentionally provides a more transparent and predictable path for new game developers, which is something we heard held back many developers, especially in non-Western countries.

    After Steam Direct has been up and running for a while, we'll share some analysis of what (if any) changes in volume of submissions or behavior of developers. We also appreciate the scrutiny and feedback from developers and players (such as Lars Doucet and Sergey Galyonkin) that keep holding us accountable, making smart suggestions, and digging into our changes because this whole wonderful platform exists to serve you.

    We also have work well under way for more improvements and new features to expand and improve the Steam store.

    We're in the progress of completing some major updates to the Steam Curator system as detailed in our previous post here. We're also quite a ways into rewriting the core of our recommendation engine to better predict which games any given user might find most exciting. And we're also in the process of updating various sections of the Steam store that haven't received as much recent attention as the home page.
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