I am just curious about where Infinity Battlescape will be sold. I used to be a user the Digital Distribution Platform Steam - I am finding myself quickly using GOG more and more.
Here is why -
Curated Store front - Steam is quickly becoming a non-curated storefront much like desura. Allot of Garbage games such as Guise of the Wolf and Rekoil are getting onto steam. Heck Gabe Newell said that he wants to allow self publishing. Which I view as a bad thing for a massive platform such as steam. GOG has a curated store front which I support.
DRM-Free - All games on GOG are DRM free! If Steam goes down you lose all of your games.
Keeping the game alive for future generations - GOG every so often go back and revives older games for Newer Operating Systems. This will keep your game alive for future gamers.
Sales - I will just link this article from Gameasutra. As you can see GOG is a rising star albeit small but the second biggest competitor to Steam. This article is from early 2013 so thing could have changed.
TL;DR - I hope that you do a GOG.com release for Infintiy: Battlescape as well as a steam release. They have a pretty straight forward submission process. You can find that here.
The storefront of Steam is curated. The overall catalogue, however, isn’t. Also, stuff like new releases and most popular tend to have to be representative of the facts, rather than what Valve might prefer to be there.
A more valid concern, though it’s not likely that Steam will disappear any time soon. Besides, as long as you’ve downloaded and played your games at least once, you can still play them even if you can’t connect to the master server
Steam have done this as well, packaging Quake (and DOOM as well, I think) with DOSBox to allow them to run correctly on modern PCs, even going as far as setting up sane defaults for the DOS instance. There are a lot of older games on Steam, especially recently, when a bunch more turned up.
Criticism of what seemed like attacks on Steam aside, I’m fully supportive on Battlescape appearing on any digital distribution platform (even Origin) provided it is a non-exclusive deal. That being said, I do like Steam integration in my games, so I wouldn’t say no to that either.
I also quite like Desura, which tend to be heavily more indie focused to begin with. It might attract a better crowd to begin with.
I agree with you on the better community bit. Looking back they do look like attacks on steam… I guess I am tired of my games on steam being licenses not games that I own. Thinking back to the boxed game / boxed expansion pack days.
Does origin require an active internet connection to use or it will boot you off the service?
Just remember, every time a copy of a game is sold on Steam or otherwise, they a lose a fraction of that money to the distributor which otherwise would have gone directly to the developer.
This presumes that the developer has the resources (and the inclination) to host a secure payment provider and digital distribution system. If you’re making a fairly large game, it becomes impractical to be serving gigabytes of data off your own hosting when other companies build their business model around providing that service.
Plus, Steam does come with a bunch of cool goodies…
True. I would personally like the game on Steam. I use steam, and it’s a huge advantage for the players to have the option if they want to take advantage of it. But I understand if it’s not cost effective for I-Novae. I guess it just comes down to whether the cut that Valve takes is worth it or if we could buy our own distribution servers with the money saved.
The game will likely be available on both Steam and our website. We prefer it if you buy it off our website but obviously there will be plenty of people who prefer Steam.
There are some interesting points made. It is always good to have a drm free copy to show the game at your friend’s house. Then again I really like the Steam trading cards, both because it means extra money for the dev (and Valve), and because it adds something you can plaster on your profile page to show that you really like this one particular game.
Oh well, before all that happens, let’s first see how the kickstarter campaign goes, personally I am betting on a paypal option.
You can’t legally re-sell the game you bought on GOG.
GOG games are DRM-free, but the account on GOG is still a form of DRM - it manages digital rights. All games you buy on GOG are tied to your account forever.
BTW even if you bought a boxed copy 30 years ago in the pre-internet era, you don’t own the game, only a license. That’s how selling software works.
“Tied to your account”, feel free to elaborate. From my understanding, you need your account only to initially download the game, but anybody you give the downloaded game to can play the game … Unless the game itself has some type of drm integrated.
