Valve will let developers pay a refundable $100 fee to have their games listed on Steam in the future.
The company said it initially wanted to set the fee for the Steam Direct service at $500, but decided a lower fee was more suitable.
A combination of human curation and algorithmic discovery will be used to highlight titles most relevant to users, and prevent gamers from being bombarded with poor-quality games.
Valve also announced that it is looking for specific places where it can use human intervention in its game discovery algorithm to ensure it is working as it intended.
“We believe that if we inject human thinking into the Store algorithm, we’ll have created a public process that will incrementally drive the Store to better serve everyone using it,” said Valve.
It said it is currently looking at refunding developers’ $100 listing fee after their game reaches $1,000 in sales. No launch date for the new system was announced.
This article first appeared on MyBroadband and is republished with permission.
