Valve Settles On $100 Publishing Fee for Steam Direct Developers will be able to recoup the fee, which could have been as high as $5,000.

Back in February, Valve revealed that it would be phasing out its Greenlight program in favor of a new endeavor called Steam Direct. One of the key elements missing from the original announcement was just how much Valve would charge to put a game on Steam Direct. After much deliberation, they have settled on the rather low amount of $100.

Valve hadn't announced the price in the initial reveal because it had wanted feedback from users and developers in making its decision. Apparently, the fee could have been as high as $5,000. "We've seen a bunch of great conversations discussing the various pros and cons of whether there should be an amount, what that amount should be, ways that recouping could work, which developers would be helped or hurt, predictions for how the store would be affected, and many other facets to the decision," Valve said in a post on the official Steam blog. "There were rational & convincing arguments made for both ends of the $100-$5,000 spectrum we mentioned. Our internal thinking beforehand had us hovering around the $500 mark, but the community conversation really challenged us to justify why the fee wasn't as low as possible, and to think about what we could do to make a low fee work."

The company chose $100 to make it as easy on developers as possible, allowing them to recoup the fee through some as-yet-undefined process. It said that engineers will continue to work on features that make the Steam algorithm better at sorting through games, while finding places that human interaction can assist in the process. Valve said it would continue to monitor submissions to see how the new system is working before implementing new features, such as trading cards.

"We believe that if we inject human thinking into the Store algorithm, while at the same time increasing the transparency of its output, we'll have created a public process that will incrementally drive the Store to better serve everyone using it," the company said.

Valve also revealed that it would be making changes to its Curator feature since "it hasn't received the attention it needs to be a good solution" to having humans involved in the game selection process. "Since they're an opt-in feature, we've decided to give Curators more visibility throughout the Store as a whole, so if you're following a Curator, you'll see their thoughts in new places, and with higher prominence."

Steam Direct still has some iterations to go before it is ready for prime time. Valve expects to issue one more update in the next few weeks about Steam Direct and the passing of Greenlight, likely giving a release date at that time as well.