After launching back in August 2012, Steam Greenlight has today been closed by Valve to make way for the new service which will be launched later this week on June 13th in the form of Steam Direct.
In a blog post this week Valve has explained more about the closure and the launch of the new Steam Direct service which will provide developers with a way of reaching the wealth of gamers that use the Steam Games Network.
Right from the early days and throughout the life of Greenlight, we have been continually surprised by the hits coming through. In just the first year we saw titles such as War For The Overworld, Evoland, Rogue Legacy, and Verdun move through Greenlight and go on to become hugely successful. We found it was easy to explain afterwards why some titles turned out to be big hits, but when we forced ourselves to predict beforehand, we weren’t nearly as accurate as we thought we were going to be. Those early years also saw huge growth in some categories of games that we had previously considered extremely niche, like visual novels. Whether you love or hate visual novels (In which case you can customize your preferences here!), they have gone on to form a huge following on Steam. Even today, we still see surprising smash hits come through Greenlight, such as the recent releases of Dead Cells and Blackwake.
Now, five years since Greenlight started, we’ve seen over 90 Million votes cast on submissions in Greenlight. Nearly 10 Million players have participated in voting in Steam Greenlight, but over 63 million gamers have played a game that came to Steam via Greenlight. These players have logged a combined 3.5 Billion hours of game time in Greenlight titles. Some of those titles, like The Forest, 7 Days to Die, and Stardew Valley, are in the list of top 100 selling games ever released on Steam.
For more information on the retiring and closure of the Steam Greenlight service jump over to the official Steam Community website via the link below.
Source: Valve
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