News Valve sets Steam Direct publishing fee

This does nothing to address the concerns of Steam users, it just makes Valve more money from Russian troll developers.

 

So, the same situation as with Greenlight's crapware flood, but now with even less restriction on the flood?
Well done Valve, you've managed to make your problem even worse.

 

$100 is fine as long as they stick to their word and have good oversight on the games they allow on steam. If they throw manpower at it and are consistent with their rules they'll be fine.

I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. They acknowledge there's an issue and are taking steps. Charging indie devs $5000 to get a foot in the door wouldn't stop the serious scam artists but would certainly hurt innovation.

 

They said they will make other changes as well, like for example cracking down on the exploitation of the retarded trading card market, changing the store algorithm to hide crapware etc...

Jim Sterling talks about that in the video he did after his visit to Valve:

 

Greenlight caused Steam to turn from a respected platform into something...ugly.

There are a few gems though. Black Mesa springs to mind, but it was already a well respected mod before going on Greenlight.

 

Honestly, I always thought Greenlight had very little impact. Because it was where games went to die. It didn't matter how good your product looked or how much interest it attracted, there was almost no way to get out of Greenlight, and the games that WERE approved seemed to be chosen at random in spite of the much-hyped voting system.


Which was all very disappointing, as I rather liked the promise of the Steam storefront being available to smaller developers that didn't have triple-A budgets and huge publishing contracts.