Valve has decided to kill its controversial Greenlight community game publishing platform.
Greenlight was hailed as a platform to democratize game publishing by allowing the community to choose which games are worth getting to the Steam storefront. The platform sure helped many indie games get released. Greenlight also increased Steam's diversity and scope by housing games of less popular and controversial genres. According to Valve, there are now over 100 Greenlight titles that have made at least $1 Million each, and "many of those would likely not have been published in the old, heavily curated Steam store."
On the other side, Greenlight quickly became overcrowded with low quality games and unimaginative clones which made it very hard for earnest developers to get their games noticed. According to the data collected by Steam Spy, more than 38% of all Steam games were released in 2016 and there is little doubt that most of those were of borderline spam.
In order to address Greenlight's shortcoming, Valve is superseding it with Steam Direct.
Steam Direct is not fully charted yet, but it is currently being conceived as a system where developers submit their games to Valve and pay a fee for each game. This fee is later returned to the developer, but only if the game passes a certain sales threshold. The system is basically designed to "decrease the noise in the submission pipeline" as developers would think twice before betting their money on low quality games.
Steam Direct is set to launch in Spring 2017. In the meanwhile, you can find more info on Steam's official blog.
