Depends on what kind of games you're doing, and the local time cost per hour ($1/hour is feasible if you know where to shop). Clearly volume isn't deemed to be working for Steam now, thus the paywall cash grab.
I can understand wanting to prevent the turnkey U.S. election-themed games that aren't indexed worth anything now (the "bodyguard Ronald Rump" puzzler probably would had have a large enough player base even with this paywall, but I'd guess most of the others didn't clear $1,000 in retail sales).
This is a complete showstopper for new rogue-likes (no more games like HyperRogue, Caves of Qud, or CogMind), and most definitely has ruled out my interest in the Steam marketing platform for the next few years.
Also, unless you're hiring Russians at the minimum wage, how the hell are you getting developers at $1/hour?Pretty much. Back when I was last on eLance (2011) that was a common hourly quote rate from Czechoslovakia.
If a dev can't shell out 100$ for their baby, wonder what machine did they even make their game on.Utterly normal for rogue-likes. I specifically named that genre because they're normally bootstrapped to a playable state on pure time cost.
I think it's pretty much just supposed to weed out some of the outright "scam" type stuff, i.e. not-really-games made to take advantage of the Steam trading card system or whatever.Agreed; Valve needed at least to kill Early Access, to stop competing with Kickstarter/IndieGoGo/....
Clearly volume isn't deemed to be working for Steam now, thus the paywall cash grab
If you can't afford $100 to put your game on Steam, put it elsewhere (http://lord-of-the-ocean-slot.com) until you get that money. You might even be able to patch it for the most common bugs before being on Steam. And if you can't get enough sales, maybe you shouldn't put your game on Steam then.If you want to receive some fee when you put your game elsewhere you will need to advertise it in some way to make people see your product, so it's not as cool as the greenlight was.
Also, wasn't the fee higher than that before Greenlight became a thing?
walled-garden approach of steam
I dont really follow - how is this any different from the old steam greenlight fee? (which iirc was also 100 dollars for the dev studio). This seems to be the same thing, just a marginally better way to avoid game spam that we were seeing.I'm glad someone mentioned this before I did. The new Steam Direct fee is identical to the old Steam Greenlight fee. This is not a change. From the information Valve has released about Steam Direct, games don't even have to go through a voting process to see if people might buy them. You just fill out the paperwork, upload the game so Valve can check that it's not malware or vapourware, and wait 30 days IF this is the first time you've put a game on Steam. This is, if anything, less hostile than Greenlight was, as long as your game is actually a game.
What about freeware games? I don't think anyone would even consider paying a 100$ just to release a game they're not going to have any income whatsoever from.