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5 years ago, in 2012, Valve appear Steam Greenlight — a new endeavour to surface content on Steam and let users to vote on which games should be featured. Unfortunately, Greenlight proved to be a disaster. There was far too picayune curation and the arrangement was easily gamed, with developers offer free copies, upvoting each others' content, and the entire organisation beingness generally buried in legions of trash.

Today, Valve announced that it would kill Steam Greenlight and implement a new program, Steam Direct. The company notes that Steam Greenlight did lead to over 100 games that fabricated over one million dollars. But that's zip in comparison to the sheer number of titles that take flooded the service.

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Graph by Steam Spy

This chart from Steam Spy shows that nigh 40% of the games available on the service were released in 2016 solitary. Valve'south printing release announcing the creation of Steam Straight tacitly acknowledges this problem, saying: "Greenlight likewise exposed 2 key bug we still needed to address: improving the unabridged pipeline for bringing new content to Steam and finding more means to connect customers with the types of content they wanted."

The company intends to roll out this new program starting in the spring of 2017. Developers volition be asked to complete some paperwork, verify their personal or visitor information, and supply tax documents like to applying for a bank account. At that place volition also exist a per-application fee to cover Steam's distribution costs. The size of this fee is still under discussion; the company has discussed something as low as $100 and as high as $five,000.

The question is, will any of this stop Steam from condign a further dumping ground for poor games and shoddy piece of work? The problem with Greenlight was that Steam could never devote enough resources to it (or chose not to) to effectively manage the program. Charging a steep distribution fee for titles would help scissure down on shovelware, only it would also make Steam more than of a walled garden. Then again, a footling walled gardening can be welcome if the wall is genuinely used to promote quality control.

That's going to be the most difficult attribute to whatever distribution system. Steam wants to put more games in front of people that desire to play them, and it'southward previously rolled out Discovery updates and algorithmic queues to ameliorate discoverability. Simply the sheer alluvion of games pouring on to the platform makes it difficult for anyone to find signal in the noise — and if Steam Directly doesn't accost that result squarely, it'll only get worse from here.

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