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5 years ago, in 2022, Valve announced Steam Greenlight — a new effort to surface content on Steam and permit users to vote on which games should be featured. Unfortunately, Greenlight proved to be a disaster. There was far too petty curation and the system was hands gamed, with developers offering free copies, upvoting each others' content, and the entire system existence mostly buried in legions of trash.

Today, Valve announced that information technology would kill Steam Greenlight and implement a new program, Steam Direct. The visitor notes that Steam Greenlight did atomic number 82 to over 100 games that fabricated over one million dollars. Simply that's nothing in comparing to the sheer number of titles that have flooded the service.

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Graph by Steam Spy

This chart from Steam Spy shows that well-nigh 40% of the games available on the service were released in 2022 lonely. Valve's press release announcing the creation of Steam Straight tacitly acknowledges this problem, saying: "Greenlight also exposed ii key problems we still needed to address: improving the entire 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 plan starting in the spring of 2022. Developers volition be asked to complete some paperwork, verify their personal or company data, and supply tax documents similar to applying for a bank account. There will likewise be a per-application fee to comprehend Steam'southward distribution costs. The size of this fee is however nether discussion; the company has discussed something equally low equally $100 and as loftier every bit $5,000.

The question is, will any of this stop Steam from condign a farther dumping ground for poor games and shoddy work? The problem with Greenlight was that Steam could never devote enough resource to it (or chose not to) to effectively manage the program. Charging a steep distribution fee for titles would aid crack down on shovelware, but it would also make Steam more of a walled garden. And then over again, a little walled gardening tin exist welcome if the wall is genuinely used to promote quality control.

That'south going to be the most difficult aspect to whatsoever distribution system. Steam wants to put more games in front end of people that want to play them, and information technology's previously rolled out Discovery updates and algorithmic queues to improve discoverability. Just the sheer flood of games pouring on to the platform makes information technology difficult for anyone to find signal in the noise — and if Steam Directly doesn't accost that issue squarely, information technology'll only become worse from hither.

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