Valve Moves Ahead With $100 Steam Developer Fee

When Valve announced that it would be getting rid of its Steam Green Light system for approving video games for a paid alternative, people lost their minds. It seems Gabe Newell and his crew weren’t perturbed and decided to go ahead with the new setup that asks money from developers for their games to be featured on the platform. On that note, it will only cost $100 and is meant to weed out garbage titles.

Developers were most worried about how much they were going to need to pay the developer fee when it was first announced since reports indicated that it could reach thousands of dollars. Fortunately, it seems Valve decided that it was enough for the games to go under human scrutiny to discourage abusers, Engadget notes.

Now, it’s worth noting that the $100 fee is only applicable to indie developers since they would be the ones who will have the hardest time paying to have their title added to Steam’s list. The company is also betting that those who have made it a practice to simply dump garbage games on the platform will be hesitant to pay $100 every time for their games to be accepted.

In any case, even if they are willing to fork out the money, they would have to actually make a half-way decent attempt at creating a video game. Nothing less would allow them to put the title through the human screeners that Valve will be using.

According to the announcement post that Valve put up, the team deciding the amount was actually thinking about going for $500. The backlash from the community was the main reason why this did not come through, which at least indicates that Valve is interested in what its consumers and developers had to say. More to the point, the $5,000 limit was never a viable option in any case.