Stumpokapow
listen to the mad man
It's not really a matter of wether or not you can afford 100$. It's still a $100 that could have been spent on more important stuff, like beer. Having to pay a bunch of arbitrary fees is never very nice, and they're really just punishing the serious applicants because others are misusing the system. A 10$ or even 1$ fee would still have dissuaded 90% of the trolls, or they could just have moderated the service better.
I think $1-$10 would easily knock out the russians submitting Minecraft or Battlefield 3, as well as the trolls, but probably not the "my first game" hobbyist types.
Personally I don't think the fee is 100% necessary and the problem would have probably solved itself over time as people got a sense of how the process was and they worked more on the discovery stuff, but as long as the fee is there, I think it accomplishes the stated objective in pretty much the most elegant way possible.
They should make it so any submission that gets accepted and has already paid the $100 fee shouldnt have to pay it ever again. Sure someone could submit "tits: the game" and get enough troll votes to get it accepted, but it would happen so rarely that Valve could easily manually work around those kinds of problems.
I sort of feel like this should be true, fee or no fee. Someone who has a game on Steam ought to be able to put more games on Steam without any kind of review process unless their account has been specifically flagged for one.
There aren't many developers who rise to the professional-type level and then shrink back to the hobbyist level.