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Brace yourself, games are coming. Steam Greenlight has been officially closed as of today and Valve has announced Steam Direct will launch on June 13th.

Before Steam Direct, Valve will be going over games on Greenlight, with the aim of releasing one last batch of titles from it. They are offering a refund of the fee for games that don't make it in this final batch, so that's nice.

Greenlight was an interesting system, but it ended up a mess. Developers would promise all manner of things in exchange for votes, which obviously made some games suddenly get surges of votes, even if they wouldn't sell much, or actually be any good.

Developers will now need to pay $100 per game and once they hit a threshold of $1,000 they will be able to get that money back. I think that sounds pretty fair to me, considering deals with older publishers would likely end up costing smaller developers a lot more.

Developers will have to go through banking, tax and identification checks, so it might actually be enough to deter some of the more questionable developers. Well, that's what I hope anyway, but I'm sure some people will find a way to fudge the details somewhere to pump out crap. However, Valve also say that new developers will have to go through a vetting process of 30 days while Valve essentially do checks on them to understand who they are letting on their store. On top of that, developers will be required to all put up a coming soon page prior to release. I'm liking the sound of all of this for sure.

What's interesting, is that Valve say that for the past year they have been installing each game, to verify it matches how it's described. I guess they don't do that when a developer releases it on a new platform (like Linux) due to the amount of times we get broken releases, so it would be nice if they rolled out that bit of quality control to new platform releases too.

I said it before and I will say it again, this makes websites like us even more important. It's likely the amount of games getting released will steadily increase, even with the waiting time, developers have a little less of a barrier on waiting for votes and for Valve to then approve it. The process can get rolling as soon as they submit all that is required.

Read more here.

What are your thoughts? Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Tags: Greenlight, Steam
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11 comments
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niarbeht Jun 6, 2017
Could improve things.

Could make them worse.

We'll see.
razing32 Jun 6, 2017
Besides the questionable devs with fragile egos , the system was being gamed for trading cards.
Voting groups would vote for the asset flips and get free copies.
Then they would leave fake reviews.
The dev gets the game sold and the voting groups and "dev" make money of the cards.

Couple of videos I would like to share on the topic:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjoYaJWzylI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6tPLibNqNeE
Tchey Jun 6, 2017
Quoting: niarbehtCould improve things.

Could make them worse.

We'll see.

Or the opposite !
HollowSoldier Jun 6, 2017
Hopefully it helps stop ultra low-quality games flooding Steam.
Salvatos Jun 6, 2017
Quoting: razing32Besides the questionable devs with fragile egos , the system was being gamed for trading cards.
Voting groups would vote for the asset flips and get free copies.
Then they would leave fake reviews.
The dev gets the game sold and the voting groups and "dev" make money of the cards.

Couple of videos I would like to share on the topic:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjoYaJWzylI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6tPLibNqNeE
Oh, clever. Reprehensible, but clever.
dubigrasu Jun 6, 2017
Quoting: Tchey
Quoting: niarbehtCould improve things.

Could make them worse.

We'll see.

Or the opposite !
I disagree.
lagh Jun 6, 2017
Quoting: dubigrasu
Quoting: Tchey
Quoting: niarbehtCould improve things.

Could make them worse.

We'll see.

Or the opposite !
I disagree.

I agree.
natewardawg Jun 7, 2017
Quoting: lagh
Quoting: dubigrasu
Quoting: Tchey
Quoting: niarbehtCould improve things.

Could make them worse.

We'll see.

Or the opposite !
I disagree.

I agree.

Or we could all just agree to disagree... or was it the other way around?
mas886 Jun 7, 2017
I completely agree, once I saw a developer who released a game per 2 months(he had liek 4 or 5 and any of those was playable), those "games" were basically tutorials from youtube with free assets, they would get greenlighted promising free game copies and of course all the games had trading cards.
Eike Jun 7, 2017
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Quoting: razing32Couple of videos I would like to share on the topic:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjoYaJWzylI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6tPLibNqNeE

Thanks for these tipps!
The videos both were interesting.
The central point that I didn't get is in the first video at about 4:00: Cards of worthless games, probably worthless themselves, can be converted to gems and these can be sold or converted to valuable cards.
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