Valve Now Charging Developers $100 to Submit to Greenlight
Those who submitted false entries on Greenlight have ruined it for everyone else.
A few days ago, Valve announced that Steam Greenlight, a community-driven effort to streamline the approval process for indie games to make it onto Steam, was finally live. The developer was probably too optimistic about Greenlight to see the hazards of hosting open submissions with relatively few stipulations. Within a matter of hours, Greenlight was flooded with fake content, including the ever-elusive sequel to Half-Life 2.
In order to beat back the tide of false submissions, Valve's tweaking Steam Greenlight's policies a bit. Now, developers will have to pay a $100 fee, which Valve will donate to the charity Child's Play, in order to submit an entry onto Greenlight. Considering the costs to develop a game, $100 isn't wildly expensive for an indie developer to pay, especially when it comes with advertising to the Steam community. The fee will also deter those submitting Half-Life 3 as a joke.
It's sad to see that those who decided to abuse a useful free service have ruined it for legitimate indie developers looking to get their content onto Greenlight. $100 isn't a heavy price to pay, but it's quite a bit heftier than free.

That's why we can't have good things I guess, stupid people everywhere.
1) Less than the average American spends on gas each month ($177)
2) Less than the average American family of four spends on groceries each week (around $150)
3) Less than the average American makes during one day of work ($176)
4) About the same as the average American spends on cable TV each month
5) About what you'd make working a part time, minimum wage job for a week.
$100 isn't exactly chump change or the kind of money you find in a pair of jeans you haven't worn in a while, but it's not a massive barrier to entry either.
That's why we can't have good things I guess, stupid people everywhere.
100 dollars for advertising... yeah that's humongus.
ps: 10 bucks is way too low
It costs a LOT of money to develop a game. $100 is nothing when you've gone through the trouble of development. Especially for the possibility of getting it on Steam.
On the other hand, $100 is a lot of money to make a joking submission of HL3, or a "wishful" submission of Metal Gear Solid, of which you have no rights to.
1) Less than the average American spends on gas each month ($177)
2) Less than the average American family of four spends on groceries each week (around $150)
3) Less than the average American makes during one day of work ($176)
4) About the same as the average American spends on cable TV each month
5) About what you'd make working a part time, minimum wage job for a week.
$100 isn't exactly chump change or the kind of money you find in a pair of jeans you haven't worn in a while, but it's not a massive barrier to entry either.
because believe it or not there are other country's outside the US, i mean come on you can't even extradite the owner of megaupload!
Because you have to prove damages in court, and how do you damage something that's free?
Why not just charge people to submit their games to keep the super intelligent people like you from posting fart app's...
apple charges the exact same thing?
The price is simultaneously quite a bit and not very much. If you are already developing an indie game for the public, this is a small hurdle that you can probably overcome. But knowing that you will have to pay $100 to put it up may deter your neighborhood geek from deciding to make a cool game for Steam. So paradoxically, the price is too high and too low.
But here's an idea: make it a requirement to submit a functional demo of the game. Legitimate developers would be able to produce this with ease, whereas pranksters would have to submit a fake demo, which the community would frown upon and downvote. Seems fair to me, but Greenlight is still foreign to me.