After the transition to Steam Direct, many questions have to be answered, so rumors and conjectures arise among consumers and developers. As a developer who is very familiar with the Greenlight process since 2015 and has successfully passed it twice with Spooky's Jump Scare Mansion and HD Renovation (there are more than a million users in these games), I would like to talk about Direct and first impressions about it. It is worth talking about many things, including 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 a conversation with Steam Greenlight. It will be just background information, I will try to set it short. 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 for participation in Greenlight. The developer had to pay this fee only once, and then he could download any number of games to Steam Greenlight. Money back 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, useful links (for example, to a demo game) and links to social networking pages. . In addition, it was necessary to add to the page all involved in the creation (if there was someone else besides you), after which everything is ready to publish the page in Greenlight.



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

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New way: Steam Direct

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



After payment you need to fill in information about yourself: name, social security number, etc., so that you can be sure that you are really who you say you are. Valve also requires you to fill out a tax form and bank information. During the filling process, you will need to sign several non-disclosure agreements (NDA). After the completion of 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 did not have to be done until your page is given a “green light.”



When you figure it out, you will be invited to the Steam Developer Portal. Here you can download your game: files, achievements, collectible Steam cards and the like. It is necessary to pass on an almost complete version of the Valve game for testing so that the company will make sure that you are not trying to publish malicious software on the platform or something similar. It usually takes a few days. The same applies to Steam collection cards and other additional files for the game. Valve recommends doing all this no later than 30 days before the scheduled release of the game, so that all files are approved in a reasonable time, and no one had to panic. The term “game” does not have strict definitions, but Valve will spend a few days checking whether your game matches the description on the page. After Valve approval, you can release the game on Steam. Congratulations!

Price of fame

Yes, there are problems with this. The most important - before your game had to win a certain interest in the Steam Greenlight. In Steam Direct, you just need to pay, and that's all - you're already in business. The problem is that Steam almost turns into a 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, right? But in fact, this is the case, because Steam is already hard to find in the general pile of worthwhile games - 40% of games on Steam were released in 2016 . With Steam Direct, 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, which you should have taken.





Steam Direct adds a new continuous stream of games, but the search for games is also difficult because of user-added tags. Anyone, troll or not, can go to the game page on Steam and add tags to it. Often people add horror or scary tags to very low-quality games, even if it is not a horror. This may be a two-dimensional side-scroller about a unicorn collecting cakes, but if the game is of poor quality, then the trolls will add the label “horror” to it. If you search for new games with the label “horror”, you will surely find horror games or scary games, but there will also definitely be games 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 one of my opinions may be unpopular. I spoke with several developers and, like me, they believe that the price of publishing a game on Steam Direct should be a little higher than $ 100 . In my opinion, it should be no less than $ 500, especially considering that you get the money back by selling more than $ 1,000. Thanks to Patreon, the streaming channels of the developers on Twitch, and simply donations collected on the site, a good developer and a good game will easily get the right amount of money.



By the way, about payment: what about those developers who sell games for 99 cents or even for free ? They will not return their money, and if they do, for 99 cents you need to ensure a substantial amount of sales. The situation with free games is even worse, because when returning funds, in-game transactions are not taken into account. Someone may say: “Yes, why return the money? You get ADVERTISEMENT! ”. Or: “Why do you want to get money back? Do you make games just for the sake of making money ?! ”I can answer both of these applications that developing games is not always cheap. Well, when you get a return for your work, it helps to create new games.



An interesting (if not more) situation with developers who release 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 fair to them. Developers who make small profits may not get any money at all. My first game on Steam was free. I understood that I could not get the money back 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 free game developers. It may be worth returning money if they have X downloads, as if it were a paid game that earned $ 1,000.

And another topic: Steam Collection Card Abuse

A serious problem with Steam Greenlight was the abuse of Steam collection cards. The developers generated thousands of keys, transferred them to the bots that launched Steam games for pharming cards. Then they put a high price on the cards and got their percentage on their sales.



This problem exists on several levels, including it lies in our two favorite words - in the Steam algorithm. If you didn’t know: the more time a game is played, the Steam considers it more popular, therefore it advertises it more on the main page, recommends it to users, etc. It is clear that this is a serious problem. Steam shows us unpopular and low-quality games, because bots feeding cards break the entire system.



With the introduction of Steam Direct, Valve changed the approach: now the card game needs to achieve a certain amount of gameplay hours for all players, plus it must comply with some other indicators that Valve hides from us. As soon as the game reaches these indicators, the 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 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 not buying - if users cannot get the cards right away, this can be a problem. Even in the current system, consumers complain that the cards do not fall out. It hurts the store, the game hunters and collectors, and all for the sake of fighting a small number of people who farm cards for a living. But I am sure that even with such changes, the farmer of the cards will still find ways to continue their machinations.

Hey! This is my game!

The last problem that occurred to me was probably the most important of all listed. This is a problem with stolen works and DMCA locks. In the process of Steam Greenlight, attackers sometimes completely copied the page that already exists in Greenlight and published it in Greenlight. Why do I call them "intruders": the link to the game demo actually led to malware. Greenlight had fake pages that trick unsuspecting users into downloading malware.



This happened at least once with the original Spooky's Jump Scare Mansion in Greenlight. What should the 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, you could ask for a DMCA block, 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 will no longer be able to ask for a DMCA blocking until the game is released and it starts making money, and that scares me pretty much.



In the worst case, an attacker-developer can take someone's game, earn 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 to ensure that the solution to the problem is not too difficult for the developer, otherwise we will be overwhelmed with similar content.

Where to go next?

This is all the information that we still have, 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. She seeks to reduce obstacles to the development of developers, but I’m not sure that such a system is well protected from people trying to exploit it in order to “cut down” easy money.