Like most things in human history Steam Greenlight started off with a noble idea: to offer indie developers an easy way to gain an audience and eventually get their game onto Steam's storefront. Again, much like most things in human history Steam Greenlight ended up being a horrific failure once people realized they can game the system and essentially push through unfinished, unpolished, or just straight up copy-pasted 'games'. If you need an example of what exactly I mean, simply try browsing through the low-priced part of the FPS section and see how many times you can spot the exact same jungle map.

As such, I am very glad to say that Valve has now finally shut down Steam Greenlight! If you're a developer that still had a game in Greenlight when the big button was pressed, worry not as Valve will be manually going through all of the games in order to ensure any even remotely good ones get through unscathed. As for any future applications, those will be handled through the upcoming Steam Direct program.

The idea behind Steam Direct is to make things as easy as possible for the developers, while also ensuring that completely broken games don't flood the ecosystem. In other to do this Valve will only require developers to file some basic paperwork and make a $100 deposit per each game they want to bring to Steam, after which a quality assurance team will install the game and make sure it works properly. And yes, you actually read that correctly! Valve, the lords of automation, will actually hire real people to ensure that Steam Direct doesn't get gamed as much as Steam Greenlight did! Oh, and if you're an indie developer and you're a bit short on funds, don't worry as your $100 deposit will be returned after the game has sold $1000, which I must admit is pretty reasonable.

Steam Direct will launch on June 13th, and I genuinely do hope it will be just as good as it sounds. You can read a little bit more about it by heading to the announcement post.