Posted in: Games, Video Games | Tagged: Steam, Steam Direct, Steam Greenlight, valve

Valve's Steam Direct Fee Will Set You Back $100

Valve has always been a bit of a mysterious company, and so it hasn't been too shocking that they've kept pretty quiet about their new Steam Direct program. One of the early questions about the switch from Steam Greenlight to Steam Direct was just how much the Steam Direct fee would set back indie devs from putting their games on the popular PC platform. And finally, we have an answer.

Valve has decided to set the price for Steam Direct to $100 USD, despite considering higher options. The company explained the wait by saying, "back when we announced Steam Direct in February, we hadn't decided how much developers would need to pay to publish their games. 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." So Valve then sat back and let the community as a whole respond. Remember, when we originally heard about Steam Direct, that fee was going to be anywhere from $100-$5000 USD as a flat fee per game.

Valve then went on to say, "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. So in the end, we've decided we're going to aim for the lowest barrier to developers as possible, with a $100 recoupable publishing fee per game, while at the same time work on features designed to help the Store algorithm become better at helping you sift through games."

So not only are we getting a lower Steam Direct fee, we're also getting changes to the Steam Store algorithm to "inject human thinking" into it, which sounds exactly like the kind of thing Valve would try to do. As long as the Steam Store doesn't end up being run by GladOS, I think we'll all be fine.

Valve are also making changes to the curator system, and you can read all about the upcoming changes to Steam on the Steam blog.

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