Will you be selling on Steam next year? It’s a bit exciting to think about it.
Keith mentioned on the 2017 roadmap post that Beta is the earliest it would be on Steam.
Personally I’d like to see it on the ‘indie’ focused sites like Humble and GoG first then launch it on Steam when the game is essentially ready for pre-order. The dreaded ‘Mixed’ review rating too early would be brutal for INS.
Agreed. Early Access on Steam can kill a game. It would have a hugely detrimental impact on the actual release if everyone got their hands on it too early.
But yes, when it’s ready, Steam will be a good platform for distributing to the masses. I think INS will be better off making absolutely sure the game is completely ready first though!
Last I heard INS doesn’t want to give Steam that 30% they charge for their services, exactly why I think the devs should address this question.
I’m not sure what’s so exciting about Steam these days. It’s over populated, with no quality control. It’s become a place where very good games go to languish. It’s great for already established studios, or games that already have a ton of hype, but for indie studios with no record and no real publicity for its first game? Steam isn’t the opportunity it used to be for those companies.
We’ve already addressed this many times, the game will eventually be available on Steam, and as @selbie mentioned we’ve previously stated that the Beta would be the earliest we would consider releasing on Steam.
You make it sound like I speak complete BS, on Discord you were saying that 30% is too much to pay and that’s why you are building your own marketplace, now in the same sentance as eventually (aka a year after full release) and beta are in the same sentence?
For small games with no marketing budget, it can help by catching the eye of a tiny fraction of the immense userbase. The free game Zero-K, for example, has a viable playerbase only since their recent Steam release. “Viable” meaning “I can reliably find a game within the next minutes”.
We’ve always said that we’d release on Steam. Years ago we were talking about Steam. In fact we talked about releasing on Steam well before the game even went on Kickstarter. There has been no change of plans here, never ever.
Regarding the marketplace, we need it to be independent of any reseller. The game will eventually be released on various platforms - directly on our website, Steam, GoG, etc… - We cannot rely on a single provider, which is why we have to buid it in our own system. And of course, not having resellers take a huge part of the sale is a reason too.
I don’t understand what the fuss is all about. We’re doing exactly what Elite: Dangerous is doing, too.
Point being that Keith has spent more than 6 months working on the marketplace and the launcher/patcher, what he made in that time is a marketplace that doesn’t support purchases and a launcher/patcher that doesn’t do incremental patching. He will probably need to spend another few months on those systems.
You guys have two coders and can not compare yourselves to Frontier or Unreal with their hoard of employees, the point of releasing on Steam is precisely so that you don’t need to waste resources on making your own systems.
Yes but it’s not like he worked 6 months full time on this installer/launcher. He has a full time job, he worked on tons of other tasks, he handles all the support/e-mail requests too. The installer is only the top of the iceberg and he’s not even getting any Kickstarter money from all this work.
We have decided from the beginning that there was a number of tasks that would be investments for the future of the company. Yes, you’ve made your point, you believe we should produce a game, put in on Steam, and voila done, don’t care about anything else. That’s fine, I respect your opinion. But you’ve been whining, repeating over and over that you disagree. This discussion happened a year ago, 6 months ago, now it happens again. Time to move on, critic. We are not going to drop the launcher or the idea to sell the game directly on our own website. It’s a done deal, set in stone. Time to accept it, and focus back on more constructive topics.
There is still time to dump these systems, call it time wasted for now, release on Steam and come back to them once needed. It’s gonna save 3 months of Keith’s time in which he can make pretty fonts or something. Also seriously you guys keep bringing up the Keith is not really on this project, he takes no money, how the hell does $370k buy one coder…
See, that’s part of the issue, though. In order to get noticed on Steam, games with no marketing budget are now fighting a battle to the bottom by offering their games for free. It’s rapidly falling into the same trap that the mobile app stores did.
And simply being free won’t be enough in short order. It only provides meaningful exposure when the number of free titles is relatively low.
Critic, please stop. Seriously.
What ? If you take an average $35k/year gross salary and multiply it by 3 ( me+jan+kristian ) and add some extra $$/year for hosting, accounting, licensing, legal fees etc… you’re already at $120k/year.
We’ll see Flavien, doubt Keith has the time to finish the marketplace and patcher/launcher.
You should obviously fire Jan.
This one specifically is a free open-source game, so it is not a commercial project. But for tiny or small games, Steam’s reach can help, compared to, say, Itch.io.
I:B isn’t a small game, though, but a medium game. No idea how well Steam helps for those.
The big advantage of steam in my eyes is the easy installation and updating of games. I don’t see myself permanently having the launcher run in the background (I have no apps run in the background except the windows 10 system), so I will always have to update battlescape when I actually want to play it. Sure I don’t have steam running in the background aswell, but I think it is far more likely that people do that, than permanently running the battlescape launcher.
So purely from a user perspective I have to side with cybercritic, but I fully understand the reasons against launching exclusively on steam first and my guess is, that it is probably the smarter choice to be independent right from the start.
Good point, although I would argue that the benefit of Steam’s autopatch is highly dependant on the user’s download speed.
Huh. Cool. I will have to check this game out, then! Thanks for bringing it up.
For most games without pre-existing marketing or hype, Steam has become an ocean to get lost in. It’s been completely flooded with ultra cheap or free titles, and so much garbage, that sales are way down for most indie games. Getting recognized by the Steam community is now mostly winning a lottery, unfortunately.
It’s great if you have outside marketing or pre-existing interest from a community, but if you’re starting off, it’s a crapshoot with a pair of d1000s