Steam Adding $100 Fee For Greenlight Submissions
When Valve first announced Greenlight for Steam, many people saw it as a revolution in how games come about. After all, here you have a program set up that would allow the people who actually play games, not board room executives, decide what games should be funded and created, and which games shouldn’t. Truly it was a utopian vision.
Unfortunately, like most utopian visions, real life reared its ugly head and showed why that might not work as planned. After releasing Greenlight on August 30th Valve noticed that while there are plenty of legitimate submissions, there were also a ton of crap to get through as well as trolls started filling up the pages with joke submissions. Because of this little problem, Valve now requires aspiring game designers to pay a $100 fee in order to post to Greenlight.
It’s not exactly a huge amount of money, and if somebody really wants to get his name out there it won’t be that big of a deal to pay it. At the same time, I don’t think many trolls on the internet are going to be so inclined to shell out 100 bucks in order to make a crappy joke. While some people are mad about the new requirements, rest assured that Valve isn’t doing this to make a quick buck: indeed, they’ve made it known the the proceeds are being donated to Child’s Play.
