Steam Greenlight introduces $100 submission fee

Greenlight, Steam's community-driven game approval service, will now require an up-front fee in order to discourage trolls.

Since its launch on August 30, Greenlight has seen a number of inappropriate submissions, including sexually explicit content, a "WTC plane sim" and hopeful entries like Half-Life 3. Valve has been kept quite busy knocking them down.

"There is unfortunately a significant amount of noise and clutter being submitted, either as a joke or by fans not fully understanding the purpose of Greenlight," Valve's Alden Kroll said in a Steam Community post, probably more generously than the perpetrators deserve.

As a result, developers will now need to pay a one-time fee of $100 on each submission to Greenlight. All proceeds will go straight to Penny Arcade's Child's Play charity.

"We have no interest in making money from this, but we do need to cut down the noise in the system," Kroll said.

Developers who have already submitted will not be retroactively charged.

Happily, this isn't the only discoverability measure Valve will implement; it's also personalised Greenlight queues, so that upon logging in, community members are presented with a mix of new and popular games which, importantly, they haven't yet rated.

Greenlight is a community-driven approval system for developers hoping to get their game on the world's most popular PC distribution service.

Thanks, Kotaku.