As we announced in our blog post last week, Steam Direct is now available! This new submission path is designed to provide a streamlined, transparent, and accessible route for new game developers from anywhere in the world to bring games to Steam.

The rest of this post will discuss some details regarding the closure of Steam Greenlight and provide some information for developers seeking distribution via Steam Direct.

With the release of Steam Direct today, we have a couple of new pieces to the process. It's worth reading the full Steam Direct Overview page to see what the process looks like and what to expect. (Note: If you have non-game software, please see Distributing Non-Game Software for information on supported types of software)

In general, the process for developers of games and VR experiences involves a few key steps:

1. Digital paperwork. We need to know about the person and/or company that we will be doing business with. So the digital paperwork includes all the expected information such as company name, address, and contact information. There is also a brief tax and identity verification process that a developer will need to go through once to get set up.
   
2. The app fee. There is now a $100 recoupable app fee for each application to release on Steam. Steamworks developers will pay this fee once as part of the initial paperwork, which will unlock the first appID. Once all the paperwork has been completed, and the developer is set up in Steamworks, additional appIDs may be purchased for $100 each. This fee for each appID is returned in the payment period after that game has at least $1,000 in Steam store or in-app purchases.
   
3. Review processes. Building a release pipeline to support thousands of developers and millions of customers is a delicate balance. We specifically don't want an onerous and detailed certification process that makes it difficult for developers to release games, but we also want some level of confidence that games are configured correctly and aren't going to do unexpected things to customers' computers. So we have a couple of brief review periods where our team plays each game to check that it is configured correctly, matches the description provided on the store page, and doesn't contain malicious content. These processes shouldn't take more than a day or two unless we find something configured incorrectly or problematic.

Along with today's release of this new path, we're also rolling out an entirely overhauled documentation system to detail the Steamworks APIs, tools, features, and best practices. In this new documentation system, developers will find a much better organized layout, including an expandable table of contents, updated search, as well as an entirely new section on the Steamworks APIs themselves.

Additionally, we've been piloting a new help tool for Steamworks developers that have specific questions or that need help with the configuration of a game. This has been helping us provide better information and faster support to Steamworks developers.

Last week, we disabled new submissions and voting via Greenlight and have been reviewing the remaining submissions. As of today, we've greenlit many of the remaining 3,400 titles that were remaining in Greenlight. There are a number of titles that we could not Greenlight, due to insufficient voter data or concerns about the game reported by voters. Titles that are not ultimately Greenlit may still be brought to Steam via Steam Direct, provided they meet our basic criteria of legality and appropriateness.

If you are a developer with a submission in Greenlight that was not Greenlit, you may be able to request a refund if you meet the following criteria:

• If your current submission in Greenlight is your only submission, and it has not been Greenlit, or
  
• If you have more than one submission and none of them have been Greenlit.

If one of these situations applies to you, please visit the Steam help site and select the "purchases" category to find your Greenlight submission fee purchase and request a refund.

With this transition to Steam Direct, we'll be keeping an eye on new submissions and making adjustments as necessary. We aren't quite sure whether there will be a lot more new submissions, just a bit more, or even fewer. It's most likely that there will be an initial surge of new submissions and then a new rate somewhat higher than what was coming through Greenlight.

Our analysis suggests that quite a bit of the previous volume of submissions to Greenlight was motivated by trading card abuse, which we detailed in our blog post Changes to Trading Cards. With the changes detailed in that blog post, we expect there is a category of game-shaped objects that are unlikely to be worth someone paying even $100 to bring to Steam. So that will likely lower the rate of incoming new titles somewhat. But, Steam Direct also intentionally provides a more transparent and predictable path for new game developers, which is something we heard held back many developers, especially in non-Western countries.

After Steam Direct has been up and running for a while, we'll share some analysis of what (if any) changes in volume of submissions or behavior of developers. We also appreciate the scrutiny and feedback from developers and players (such as Lars Doucet and Sergey Galyonkin) that keep holding us accountable, making smart suggestions, and digging into our changes because this whole wonderful platform exists to serve you.

We also have work well under way for more improvements and new features to expand and improve the Steam store.

We're in the progress of completing some major updates to the Steam Curator system as detailed in our previous post here. We're also quite a ways into rewriting the core of our recommendation engine to better predict which games any given user might find most exciting. And we're also in the process of updating various sections of the Steam store that haven't received as much recent attention as the home page.

Future blog posts in this space will detail our progress or announcements on these upcoming features and improvements, and we look forward to sharing more news soon.

-Steam Team