Today Valve announced that the fee for submitting to Steam Direct will be $100 per game. That’s right. For $100, anyone will be able to put a game on Steam.

This is a huge relief for many indie developers. Before this announcement, the only information we had was that the fee would be anywhere in the range of $100-$5,000. That is an incredible degree of uncertainty. Speaking as an indie dev who literally started this year, the $5,000 price tag per game would have been a huge kick in the teeth for us before we even got our feet wet. The announcement of the rock-bottom $100 fee is nothing short of amazing for us. However, a lot of people have major concerns.

Open the floodgates!

Hooray! Anyone with $100 can sell on Steam!... Oh, crap. ANYONE with $100 can sell on Steam! It’s no secret that for various reasons (cough, cough, Steam trading cards), absolute garbage games get through Greenlight. Now those developers will be able to flood Steam with their crappy, lazy, cash grab games. Valve has promised some major revamps to improve curation. If they can successfully weed out terrible games whilst showcasing the gems, Steam Direct will be awesome. For the sake of argument, let’s assume the curation system will be awful. We still want the low Steam Direct fee. Why?

Driving your own traffic to Greenlight sucks!

I’m not in the business of blaming Greenlight for Intrusion Protocol’s (which you can vote for now *wink* *wink*) slow Greenlight performance. I accept we made some missteps. We launched on a Friday evening. For the first few hours our branding image was dark and dull. We did not build a following ahead of time. You live, you learn.