Less than five years after launching the service, Valve has decided to close down Steam's Greenlight platform and replace it with a more formalized process for developers to submit their games to Steam.

This is potentially a huge deal for developers because in the 4+ years since Valve debuted Greenlight, the number of games released on Steam every year has skyrocketed.

On the plus side, this has led to a game marketplace with remarkable diversity and scope -- visual novels and free-to-play shooters rub shoulders with interactive fiction and triple-A open-world games. But it also makes it much more challenging for devs to get their games noticed amid the crowd, and that's something Valve is hoping to address by replacing Steam Greenlight with a new system, Steam Direct, later this year.

The most important takeaway for devs is that Steam Direct is currently being conceived of as a system where you submit paperwork to Valve and then pay a fee every time you want to put a game on Steam. If your game sells, you recoup that fee; if not, no dice.

Today Valve published a blog post outlining how this change will work and why it thinks this is a good idea. The company sent around a copy in advance, and since the whole thing is worth reading if you're a developer who releases games on Steam, we've taken the liberty of republishing it below.