Does It Cost Money To Put A Game On Steam

Gaming & Culture —

Want to get your game on Steam? $100 is all you need [Updated]

Recoupable fee to curb corruption without existence "bulwark to offset game developers"

Valve announced today that anyone volition be able to publish games on Steam through its previously announced Steam Straight programme for "a $100 recoupable publishing fee per game."

In announcing the direct publishing fee, Valve says information technology "wanted it to be as small as possible to ensure it wasn't a barrier to kickoff game developers, while also not being and then small as to invite easy abuse by people looking to exploit our systems." The visitor's "initial thinking" hovered effectually a $500 fee, the post notes, only eventually that number came down every bit "the community conversation actually challenged us to justify why the fee wasn't as low as possible, and to think well-nigh what nosotros could practise to make a low fee piece of work."

Valve's announcement doesn't go into details on how exactly developers will "recoup" the $100 fee Valve is asking for, outside of the usual 70 percent cut of Steam sales they already receive. The fee may end up existence used every bit a sort of advance payment on Valve's usual xxx per centum cutting of revenues, but it's unclear how that would work for completely free titles listed on Steam. [Update:A Valve representative tells us "we plan to render the $100 fee later on a game hits $1000 in sales."]

The move marks a huge difference from Steam's early days equally a pocket-sized, heavily curated selection of just top games. It's too a major change from the current Steam Greenlight standard, which asked developers for a in one case $100 fee to fifty-fifty get on a listing of titles considered for community votes. That required payment was controversial when it was announced, with some likening the arrangement to paying for a lottery ticket that only offered a risk at ever being listed on Steam.

Now Valve is working to "provide developers and publishers with a more direct publishing path and ultimately connect gamers with fifty-fifty more great content." To prevent Steam users from getting bombarded with a lot of low-quality games under the new system, Valve is relying on a mix of human curation and algorithmic Discovery options that highlight a specific mix of relevant, well-regarded games for each user.

To that cease, Valve also announced today that it is "going to look for specific places where human eyes can be injected into the Store algorithm, to ensure that it is working every bit intended, and to ensure it doesn't miss something interesting... nosotros believe that if we inject human being 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 Shop to amend serve anybody using it."

At that place are no announced details on precisely when the new fee-based arrangement volition exist rolled out for developers.

Source: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/06/want-to-get-a-game-on-steam-100-is-all-you-need/

Posted by: griffininlyrib.blogspot.com