Valve won’t manually curate Steam because it dominates PC gaming

Valve is evolving how developers can get onto its Steam store to sell PC games, and one of the reasons it’s doing that is because the company is uncomfortable choosing which games you have access to.

The Steam platform controls a significant percentage of the PC gaming market — 50 percent to 70 percent of all PC game downloads happen on Steam, according to some reports —  and Valve says that its near-monopoly was a contributing factor in its decision to start the new Steam Direct program. Late last week, Valve revealed it is killing the Steam Greenlight program where Steam customers vote on whether or not they want to see games from unknown developers on the platform. In its place, Valve will offer the Direct model that enables anyone to publish a game on Steam after filling out some paperwork and paying a recoupable fee.