A $100 lottery ticket: Indies discuss Steam Greenlight's new fee

Want your game to be considered alongside these? Be ready to make a $100 donation...

When Valve first announced Steam Greenlight back in July, the company said it hoped introducing the new section would "increase the volume and quality of creative submissions" to the service. Users would vote for which developer-submitted games they want to see distributed on Steam. But the hundreds of game projects that streamed in for consideration in the first few days after the section's launch last week included plenty of entries that clearly didn't meet that quality bar. There were obvious fakes ("Half-Life 3"), obvious offensive trolling ("Best WTC plane simulator"), obvious jokes (one "game" project consisted solely of a photo of an unnamed teenager), and obviously unlicensed versions of copyrighted games (ranging from Command and Conquer to Mass Effect 3). These submissions were threatening to crowd out the legitimate games developers put up on Greenlight.

So to help "cut down the noise in the system," Valve announced late Tuesday that it was immediately instituting a one-time-per-developer fee of $100 to gain access to the Steam Greenlight submission system, with all proceeds going to Penny Arcade's Child's Play charity (so Valve doesn't make any money directly from the new rule). "It was obvious after the first weekend that we needed to make some changes to eliminate pranksters while giving folks in the community the ability to focus on 'their kind' of games," Valve UI designer Alden Kroll told Ars.

The new $100 fee is similar to the $99 fee Apple charges to get yearly access to its iOS developer program, the $99 fee Microsoft charges for yearly access to the XNA development environment (used by Xbox Live Indie Games), and the $95 fee the Independent Games Festival charges for game submissions. Nonetheless, many indie developers immediately took to the Internet to express their disappointment with the charge. Proteus developer Ed Key tweeted that the decision "seems pretty gross to me" and suggested that a two-step crowd-filtering system might have been a better fix.Dys4ia developer Anna Anthropy tweeted that the $100 fee just wasn't feasible for developers like her and her partner, who "have to survive on $2000 right now."

Many developers took issue with the fact that the $100 fee only gave developers a small chance at Steam distribution, rather than the full marketplace access offered by the iOS App Store or Xbox Live Indie Games. Others said the new rule would limit Greenlight's appeal by crowding out hobbyist developers that might have a great game idea but lack the will or ability to risk $100 on Greenlight's outside shot.

Attracting serious developers

"$100 might not seem like a lot to someone in the US, but in some countries that could be a substantial amount of money for an indie developer," Zeboyd Games' Robert Boyd told Ars when we asked about the issue. "I think a smaller fee would probably be a good idea... say a $30 fee to start an account would be enough to keep most of the non-game garbage off the service while being less of a drain on actual developers."

That said, Boyd said he didn't think the new fee structure would be a significant deterrent to someone who is devoted to making a living at making games. "I think if you're really serious about turning indie game development into a legitimate career, you're going to find a way to pay the fee, whether that's by using your own money or borrowing some money from friends or family or asking for donations from fans."

That was a common theme among the independent developers we talked to about Greenlight's new fee structure. "Making a game for somewhere like Steam, that people are going to want to pay for, is a lot of work," Braid developer Jonathan Blow told Ars. "If someone is able to do that much work, it's hard for me to think they can't come up with $100. Maybe you can think of some extreme case of someone in the developing world who is using a computer they got for free or something, but I think if you show someone like a publisher, Indie Fund, or a site like Kickstarter a strong game, it is pretty easy to get $100." And even in cases where the developer can't pay the fee, Dejobaan Games and a number of other more established indie developers have already pledged to loan the $100 fee to promising projects that want to get on Greenlight.

World of Goo developer Ron Carmel particularly sympathized with Valve's need to do something to prevent a glut of free submissions that were obviously not suited for Steam. "When we had an open submission process for Indie Fund, we were also flooded with submissions, the majority of which were very far from something we'd consider funding," he told Ars. "Requiring a developer to donate a hundred bucks ensures that people think twice about submitting a game, and I'm sure it will raise the quality of submissions significantly.

To Carmel, having a completely open submission system is actually worse for everyone involved, including developers that might be short on cash. "When you have 750 submissions in such a short time, you're wasting developers' time in creating these submissions, the Steam community's time by asking them to review them, and Valve's time because they review them as well." Charging a fee for submissions is a way "to tell developers only to submit their games if they really think they have a chance of getting onto Steam, not just because they want to play the lottery for free," he said.

Project Zomboid is one of the highest rated titles on Steam Greenlight so far, but it has a built-in audience from its previous downloadable release.

Why not $1,000?

While some balked at paying a $100 fee to get games in front of the Steam Greenlight voters,Vlambeer's Rami Ismail thought Steam might actually consider raising the fee substantially, to $1,000 (a thought experiment he and fellow developers discussed in depth on a recent podcast). "$1000 is more of a [traditional] software development kit expense, and that would put Steam... right in the middle. It's not as open as iOS is and it's not as closed as Xbox Live Arcade is, and I think that would be a lot better place for Steam to be eyeballing."

With a $1,000 entry point, Ismail said, first-time developers would definitely have to think twice about trying to submit their rough first efforts to the service before they were ready for the potentially lucrative marketplace of Steam, where they'd have to compete directly against a lot of high-quality, well-established titles. "The core problem for Steam Greenlight is that it sets expectations for starting developers that getting your game onto Steam is a viable target for your very first game," Ismail said. "For a select few that might be true, but for the majority of game developers it's not."

Even at that inflated price, Ismail argues that Greenlight wouldn't be out of reach for truly quality efforts. "For a starting developer, if a game is good, if you have something worthwhile, you'll be able to raise $1,000," he said. "If you want to be serious about game development, it's going to cost money," Ismail continued. "It's the same thing in every form of being a company ever. If you want to go painting, you don't complain about the cost of painting gear either."

Diluting Steam's curated model

The real problem with Steam Greenlight, according to some developers I talked to, isn't the new $100 fee so much as the way Greenlight confuses the purpose of Steam itself. "It messes up our view of what Steam is," Ismail said. "It used to be a really curated platform with high quality games. Now it's not that, but it's not quite open either with Greenlight, so it's all been a little bit weird."

Bit Pilot developer Zach Gage thinks the somewhat confusing messaging when Greenlight was rolled out has diluted the idea of Steam's actual purpose. "They sort of put it out there that everybody could have their game on it if it had enough votes, but now they're putting up some barriers. Well, what is it? Is it the free-for-all thing that anybody can get their game on if it's good enough, or is it a curated system?... I think that's one of the things that's causing the trouble with the $100 charge."

Gage also worries that Greenlight has turned Steam into a kind of two-tiered system, where companies that are already established on the service are able to work directly with their Valve contacts to get more games up, but games from less well-known developers will be forced to go through the effort of rounding up Greenlight voters.

Kroll admitted that "an unknown [game] from an unknown [developer]" will indeed have to attract votes on Greenlight if they want access to Steam going forward, but that "after lots of thought, we couldn't come up with another scenario that ultimately didn't turn into making guesses, which is something we hoped Greenlight would help solve." He also argued that having Greenlight as a way to promote lesser known indie games doesn't interfere with the carefully curated selection of games on the service proper.

"Basically, it's attempting to be a place where they can build a relationship with as many of the 40 million folks on Steam as they can by whatever means possible," he said. "Hopefully, this helps them find a fan base and promotional momentum that continues wherever they sell their games."

It's hard to judge how important the new fee structure will be to Steam Greenlight's eventual success regarding those goals, especially considering that we haven't yet seen a single game promoted from Greenlight to the Steam marketplace. Still, the controversy surrounding the move does seem to be a rare off-note for a company that can usually do no wrong in the eyes of most gamers and developers.

"The whole Greenlight thing isn't quite working as Steam would have hoped," Ismail said. "All we know at this point is that Steam seems to have underestimated the Internet as a thing, and that they tried to fix it with a thing that in my mind doesn't really fix it."