Very Itch-eresting, Vol. 1

Valve, the gaming corporation behind the PC gaming platform Steam, recently announced that Steam Greenlight, the current method for non-traditionally published games to make their way onto Steam, will soon be phased out in favor of a new system, called Steam Direct. Rather than the complicated and obtuse method of combining votes, money gathered via crowdfunding, apparent quality, and a host of other reasons which Valve somehow used to determine what did or did not make it onto Steam, they will instead simply charge a fee. If you pay, you get on. The actual amount of the fee has yet to be determined, but Valve says they are asking developers for their thoughts and have received recommendations ranging from 200 dollars, twice as much as it took to put your game onto Steam Greenlight, to 5000 dollars.

5000 dollars, it should go without saying, is a lot of money, and would most likely prevent many smaller developing studios, and especially solo developers, from being able to get onto Steam. Some don't see this as a problem, however: if the game is worthy of being on Steam, the largest and most visible PC gaming platform, then 5000 dollars should be easy to recoup. If they don't happen to have a spare 5000 dollars just lying around, well there are other places to sell their games, such as perennial weird-game favorite, Itch.io.