After the transition to Steam Direct, many questions have to be answered, so there are rumors and speculations among consumers and developers. As a developer who has been very familiar with the Greenlight process since 2015 and successfully completed it twice with Spooky's Jump Scare Mansion and HD Renovation (these games have more than a million users in total), I would like to talk about Direct and first impressions of it. It is worth telling a lot, including about changes to protect against abuse of Steam collectible cards, prices and what the new system will mean for developers and consumers.

Old way: Steam Greenlight

Let's start the conversation with Steam Greenlight. It will be just reference information, I will try to present it shorter. Steam Greenlight is a Steam feature implemented by Valve to help indie developers sell their games on Steam. How this process worked: the developer paid Valve $ 100 to participate in Greenlight. The developer had to pay this fee only once, and then he could upload any number of games to Steam Greenlight. Money did not come back.

After payment, the developer was given access to the Steam Greenlight portal in which he could create a Greenlight page with information about the game (name and description), upload videos, trailers and screenshots to it, useful links (for example, demo games) and links to pages on social networks . In addition, it was necessary to add to the page all those involved in the creation (if there was someone else but you), after which everything was ready to publish the page in Greenlight.

Now about how the approval process worked - after publishing the page, your game ended up on Steam Greenlight, where users voted “Yes,” “No,” or “Maybe” to express their interest. In addition, they could subscribe to a page and share links to it, leave comments, read blog posts and page creator announcements. All games in Greenlight were ranked by the number of “Yes” votes, and if your game got into the hundred of the best Steam Greenlight, then you could count on possible success. If the game got to the very top in the popularity contest (one of the top five places), your game was approved by the community and it was given a “green light”. Congratulations! What happened after is not very important for this article, so let's dwell on this.

New Way: Steam Direct

Now let's talk about Steam Direct and what we know about this process. Remember the $ 100 contribution on Steam Greenlight? By paying it, you could publish any number of games. Well, now you have to pay $ 100 per game . The contribution is no longer one-time. The bright side, if I may say so, is that if your game itself earns more than $ 1,000 on Steam, then these $ 100 will be returned to you.

After payment, you need to fill out information about yourself: name, social security number, etc., so you can make sure that you are really the one you impersonate. Valve also requires you to fill out a tax form and banking information. During the filling process, you will need to sign several non-disclosure agreements (NDAs). After completing all this bureaucratic work and when the company makes sure that you are a real person, you will be allowed to enter commercial information - the name of the game, description, cost, etc. In the Greenlight process, this was not required to be done until your page was given a green light.

When you figure this out, you'll be invited to the Steam Developer Portal. Here you can download your game: files, achievements, Steam trading cards and the like. You need to submit an almost finished version of the Valve game for testing, so that the company makes sure that you are not trying to publish malicious software or something similar on the platform. It usually takes several days. The same applies to Steam Trading Cards and other additional files for the game. Valve recommends doing all this no later than 30 days before the planned release of the game, so that all files are approved in a reasonable amount of time, and no one has to panic. The term “game” has no strict definitions, but Valve will spend several days checking to see if your game matches the description on the page. After Valve approves, you can release the game on Steam. Congratulations!

The price of fame

Yes, there are problems with this. The most important thing is that before your game was supposed to gain some interest in Steam Greenlight. On Steam Direct, you just need to pay, and that’s it - you're already in the business. The problem is that Steam is practically turning into the PC version of the Google Play Store.

This is a very dubious move for me as a developer and a consumer, because there will be even more games on the platform. It doesn't seem so bad, does it? But in fact this is so, because on Steam it is already difficult to find worthwhile games in the general heap - 40% of games on Steam were released in 2016. With the Steam Direct system, the process of finding new games that will attract your interest is even more complicated. As a developer, you have to compete with a bunch of not very high-quality games that occupy the main page that you should have occupied.


Steam Direct adds a new continuous stream of games, but finding games is also difficult due to user-added tags. Any person, whether he is a troll or not, can go to the game’s page on Steam and add tags to it. Often, in very poor-quality games, people add the label “horror” or “scary,” even if it is not a horror. It can be a two-dimensional sidescroller about a unicorn collecting cakes, but if the game is of poor quality, then the trolls will add a horror mark to it. If you search for new games with the “horror” tag, you will surely find horror games or scary games, but there will also be games that are definitely not related to this genre. This problem already exists, but the more low-quality games appear on Steam due to the constant addition of new ones, the more users will abuse the tag system.

Another of my opinions may be unpopular. I spoke with several developers and they, like me, believe that the price of publishing a game on Steam Direct should be slightly higher than $ 100 . In my opinion, it should be at least $ 500, especially considering that you will get the money back by selling more than $ 1,000. Thanks to Patreon, Twitch’s developer’s streaming channels, and simply donations collected on the site, a good developer and a good game will easily gain the necessary amount of money.

Speaking of payment: what about those developers who sell games for 99 cents or even free? They will not return their money, and if they return it, then for 99 cents it is necessary to ensure a substantial amount of sales. The situation with free games is even worse, because in-game transactions are not taken into account when refunding. Someone might say, “Why return the money?” You get ADVERTISING! ” Or: “Why do you want to get the money back? Do you make games just for the sake of earning ?! ”I can answer both of these statements that game development is not always cheap. Well, when you get a return for your work, it helps to create new games.

An interesting (to say the least) situation with developers releasing free games. I sympathize with those who want to put the game on Steam, make it free and at the same time do not get anything with this new system - this is not very honest with them.Developers who make a small profit may not get any money at all. My first Steam game was free. I understood that I could not return the money, because: 1.) This is impossible and 2.) None of the developers will return their money. If Steam Direct systems were introduced then, I would envy those who returned their money, because I would not be able to do this. I hope there will be some kind of system that helps such developers of free games. It might be worth refunding if they have X downloads, as if it were a paid game that made $ 1,000.

And another topic: Steam Trading Card Abuses

A major issue with Steam Greenlight was the abuse of Steam Trading Cards. The developers generated thousands of keys, passed them to bots that launched Steam games for farming cards. Then they put a high price on the cards and got their percentage on their sales.

This problem exists at several levels, including it lies in our two favorite words - in the Steam algorithm. If you did not know: the more time you play the game, the Steam considers it more popular, therefore it advertises more on the main page, recommends it to users, etc. Clearly, this is a serious problem. Steam shows us unpopular and low-quality games, because farming cards bots break the whole system.

With the introduction of Steam Direct, Valve changed its approach: now, playing cards requires reaching a certain number of hours of gameplay for all players, plus it must comply with some other indicators that Valve is hiding from us. As soon as the game reaches these indicators, cards begin to fall out. After that, all players who have played time in this game will receive cards. Sounds cool, right? Well, not quite. Especially when you consider the fact that we do not know the indicators that the game should achieve. Not to mention the fact that Steam collectible cards are a serious reason for refusing a purchase - if users cannot receive the cards right away, this can be a problem. Even in the current system, consumers complain that cards do not drop out.This harms the store, the hunters of achievements and collectors, and all for the sake of fighting a small number of people farming cards for money. But I'm sure that even with such changes, card farmers will still find ways to continue their fraud.

Hey! This is my game!

The last problem that occurred to me was probably the most important of all those listed. This is a DMCA stolen job and lock issue. In the Steam Greenlight process, attackers sometimes completely copied an existing page in Greenlight and published it in Greenlight. Why I call them “intruders”: a link to a game demo actually led to malware. Greenlight had fake pages that tricked unsuspecting users into downloading malware.

This happened at leastonce with the original Spooky's Jump Scare Mansion in Greenlight. What should a developer do when he sees this? On Steam Greenlight, the developer and the community could complain about the page with a copy of their game, in addition, they could ask for DMCA blocking, and if the game received a sufficient number of complaints, it was blocked. The same applies to fan games and games with replaced resources. What about Steam Direct? How carefully will the search be conducted so that no one steals your work or replaces resources in it? When using Steam Direct, you can no longer ask for DMCA locks until the game is released and starts making money, and it scares me pretty much.

In the worst case scenario, a malicious developer can pick up someone’s game, make money on it and disappear.Such people can even take games from free sources (for example, on itch.io or gamejolt) and pass them off as their own. I hope Valve is very careful that the solution to the problem is not too complicated for the developer, otherwise we will be inundated with such content.

Where to go next?

This is all the information that we have so far, plus my thoughts. We just need to wait for the details to conduct a more accurate analysis, to decide if this is a good idea or not. I understand what Valve comes from when making such changes. It seeks to reduce the obstacles for developers, but I’m not sure that such a system is well protected from people trying to exploit it to “cut” easy money.