Valve dates its new Steam Direct programme

Steam has announced that their new service, Steam Direct, will go live on June 13th.

The replacement for the Steam Greenlight programme also confirms that there will be a submission fee of $100, which is the same as Greenlight.

Greenlight has ceased operations as of today, with submissions no longer accepted and user voting for projects also closed. However, if a project is still in the pipeline for Greenlight, Vale will be reviwing the catalogue of outstanding submissions over the course of a week. That catalogue current sits at over 3,400 games and games that are not ‘Greenlit’ will be refunded the submission fee.

According to the Steam Blog, Valve will be selecting "as many of the remaining games as [Valve] have confidence in." On their voting process, Valve also said that "there are some titles that will not be Greenlit, 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."

Valve annouced the planned closure of the Greenlight progamme earlier this year, following criticisms in discoverability due to the amount of titles pushed through it. However the programme has been a resounding success is broadening and diversifying games and genres, with visual novels, small indie projects and breakout hits being able to be seen alongside triple-A titles.

Steam Greenlight was launched in August, 2012. Steam, discussing this on the blog admits that this was "a time when we realized that we weren’t able to predict which titles players were really interested in. Up until that point, a small team here at Valve had been hand-picking games to invite on to the Steam platform, and almost every day we would hear from players wondering why awesome new game X wasn’t available on Steam."

As part of that legacy, such titles as Rogue Legacy, Verdun, The Forest, 7 Days to Die and Stardew Valley have gone on to great success and acclaim in some cases. Steam claim that over 90 million votes have been cast on the program in its five year life with over 63 million people having played a game that came from the programme.