Valve announced today that they’ll be putting an end to Steam Greenlight, their fan-curated system for allowing smaller games onto the Steam store, before implementing something called Steam Direct sometime this spring.
Greenlight was implemented in 2012 as a means for fans to vote on which submitted indie titles they’d like to see published on Valve’s service. Games with enough votes were then allowed into Steam’s larger library. The program, with which Valve stayed relatively hands-off, created a huge spike in the number of titles to be found in their digital store.
Now, with Steam Direct, developers will simply be required to pay a fee and fill out a series of digital forms instead of relying on Steam users to vote their projects in. Valve says this change is “intended to decrease the noise in the submission pipeline. The gaming behemoth says they’re still debating about the steepness of the fee, saying some developers have recommended figures spanning anywhere from $100 to $5000.
To read Valve’s entire statement on the change, you can visit the Steam store’s news page here.