Valve has a right to be proud of their Steam platform. After all, it's become an essential part of any gamer's tool belt. Even if one does not buy games on the Steam store directly, many games require it as part of their DRM to activate and launch, and you will end up with Steam on your system anyway. Recently, Valve has been looking into ways to make their system more accessible to smaller companies and Indie Developers, and until now, Steam Greenlight has been the main way to allow for this.

Under Greenlight, for a fee of $100, a developer could put up as many games as they desired into the Steam platform, but they are not immediately put into the store. Rather, they are voted on by the community and only games that do well are allowed in. Steam Direct differs from this in that it gets rid of the community voting process and allows developers to publish directly for a fee that is paid for each title. This opens a new can of worms that depends entirely on how large this fee is. Valve is currently talking in the range of $100 to as high as $5,000 (based on a survey among developers).On the high end, indie developers will be largely excluded from the Steam Direct process short of doing something like crowdfunding, and honestly, I have a feeling that backers would much prefer their crowdfunding money went towards developing their game, not to publisher fees. On the low end of pricing, anyone can afford to push software out that may or may not be of quality or even in some cases, amount to nothing more than shovelware. The idea is to find a middle ground, but where should that middle ground be? Additionally, how does Valve's excellent Steam store refund policy play into this? Can we justify shovelware if you can get a refund for it? Does having the Steam store "spammed" in such a way still become a nuisance?

To be honest, I feel both sides. I was an indie developer once who you've never heard of precisely because he never got published, and on the same token, I hate seeing 1 billion "Rock Simulator" titles populating a genre I actually like, but it's an interesting question: Where do we draw the line? Or more particularly, what dollar amount is the magic number? More to the point, can a magic number really fix this at all?

Personally, I feel that this has the potential to break more than it fixes, and that the bulk of the "fix" we see here could simply be had by making each Greenlight title need a separate application fee, rather than a "one time entrance" fee. We still need the Steam community to sort garbage from gold, as ultimately only the consumer truly knows what he or she is willing to buy. Why eliminate that in a "direct" publishing method that is only driven by money? It makes no sense to me.

Please, feel free to post your thoughts on the matter below.