Exclusive to Steam? - A Faint Hope

[Ryika]

more money for devs => bigger the future budget and better the next game
one can tolerate inconvenience for that. but personally i dont meet any inconvenience and i never wanted anything like refunding.

Well, it's not even said that the devs would earn less in an open system. If platforms have to compete with each other then the cut they take from games would inevitable be part of the haggling as well. Or in other words: They CAN take as much as they do now simply because they have a pseudo-monopoly. If there are multiple big platforms, one which takes X amount, and one takes X amount +10, then devs will by default release on both platforms but probably try to push as many people as they can towards the first platform, which would be really bad for the second platform if that happens for a longer period of time, and they'd need to start competing with the first company, or otherwise their userbase will slowly start shrinking. Devs would get haggling power that they currently lack.

and if a platform isnt good enough devs wont stick to it

The devs go where the players are. Otherwise consoles would long be gone.

 

[killmeplease]

Well, it's not even said that the devs would earn less in an open system. If platforms have to compete with each other then the cut they take from games would inevitable be part of the haggling as well. Or in other words: They CAN take as much as they do now simply because they have a pseudo-monopoly. If there are multiple big platforms, one which takes X amount, and one takes X amount +10, then devs will by default release on both platforms but probably try to push as many people as they can towards the first platform, which would be really bad for the second platform if that happens for a longer period of time, and they'd need to start competing with the first company, or otherwise their userbase will slowly start shrinking. Devs would get haggling power that they currently lack.

you are speaking of some hypotetical situation in the future but if we look at the current moment steam has given a better offer to Firaxis than enyone else. (well presumably, its not confirmed right?). ok lets boycott steam exclusives other than civ, i'm all for it

temporary monopoly is one of the prizes which drive innovation. i'm ok with that. just dont allow gabe to push a law in congress UN world congress which would make steam an only option

 

[MadDjinn]

more money for devs => bigger the future budget and better the next game
one can tolerate inconvenience for that. but personally i dont meet any inconvenience and i never wanted anything like refunding.

steam sales hurt that argument. The dev make very little off the mass sales.

and if a platform isnt good enough devs wont stick to it

Generally true, but there are other considerations. Like why Firaxis kept the Gamespy part of MP going for long after Gamespy was considered a viable MP tool.

Well, it's not even said that the devs would earn less in an open system. If platforms have to compete with each other then the cut they take from games would inevitable be part of the haggling as well. Or in other words: They CAN take as much as they do now simply because they have a pseudo-monopoly. If there are multiple big platforms, one which takes X amount, and one takes X amount +10, then devs will by default release on both platforms but probably try to push as many people as they can towards the first platform, which would be really bad for the second platform if that happens for a longer period of time, and they'd need to start competing with the first company, or otherwise their userbase will slowly start shrinking. Devs would get haggling power that they currently lack.


The devs go where the players are. Otherwise consoles would long be gone.

Developers like coding for consoles because they are set hardware configurations and therefore they can improve their game engines for them with each release.

anyways, I think there's a generalized blending of 'store' and 'platform' and 'evil DRM' going on in this thread.

Store wise, CivVI is not exclusive to Steam. Yes other places sell steam keys, but that's not the same as 'exclusive' sales.

Platform wise, it's probably exclusive due to MP, Workshop, patching, Community, etc all being there. Devs won't code for multiple platforms unless it's worth it because that stuff is effort driven with little results (no gameplay impacts and therefore nothing the customer will 'see').

There's not another PC based platform, independent of other Publishers (Origin owned by EA) that has those things and the popularity to code for.

Plus, as seen with Ashes and some other Stardock games, There's no interconnectivity between Steam players in MP and players that bought the game without Steam attached. Which means you're breaking the community into parts.

'evil DRM' wise... menh.

 

[Ryika]

you are speaking of some hypotetical situation in the future but if we look at the current moment steam has given a better offer to Firaxis than enyone else. (well presumably, its not confirmed right?). ok lets boycott steam exclusives other than civ, i'm all for it

temporary monopoly is one of the prizes which drive innovation. i'm ok with that. just dont allow gabe to push a law which would make steam an only option

I'm not talking about a hypothetical situation in the future, I'm just pointing out the downsides of a steam monopoly.

Of course overall steam is a good platform and I'd much rather have Valve take the monopoly than some shady company such as EA take that spot, but that doesn't change the fact that exclusives, even on steam, are generally not a good thing for gamers and should not be praised as such.

 

[killmeplease]

Platform wise, it's probably exclusive due to MP, Workshop, patching, Community, etc all being there. Devs won't code for multiple platforms unless it's worth it because that stuff is effort driven with little results (no gameplay impacts and therefore nothing the customer will 'see').

There's not another PC based platform, independent of other Publishers (Origin owned by EA) that has those things and the popularity to code for.

Plus, as seen with Ashes and some other Stardock games, There's no interconnectivity between Steam players in MP and players that bought the game without Steam attached. Which means you're breaking the community into parts.

good points
actually it would cost Firaxis to deal with multiple platforms if there were several Steams

 

[Leathaface]

I first got into Civ in 2009 when I bought the CD version of Civ IV, which didn't require Steam to play. I moved into an apartment that didn't have an internet connection and the landlord wouldn't let me install one.

I do hope there will be a CD version of Civ VI which doesn't require an internet connection, however 99% there won't be. Which is sad, cos if Civ IV required Steam I wouldn't have played Civilization in the first place.

 

[killmeplease]

I'm not talking about a hypothetical situation in the future, I'm just pointing out the downsides of a steam monopoly.

you say steam is monopoly and its bad, but what alternative there is?
e.g. banning exclusives will intensify competition but in the future, which is hazy - will there be distribution platforms in their current form at all?
while at the moment we'd get a costlier civ or less money for civ7.

 

[Ryika]

you say steam is monopoly and its bad, but what alternative there is?

No, as I said three times now I'm just pointing out the downsides of steam exclusives, giving a possible answer to the original questions:

Yeah, what's your problem with Steam? Looking for trouble mate?

Agreed, not sure what their problem is with Steam.

It's like I'm saying: "If we eat too much ice-cream we become fat." and you say: "What do you have against ice-cream?!" I have no problem with ice-cream. but still, if we eat too much ice-cream, become fat.

 

[killmeplease]

complaining about ice cream making you fat is odd
especially if you state no alternative like fatless icecream or such

 

[Ryika]

And you're still not making any sense. ~_~

Goodbye.

 

[4N4C0ND4]

I first got into Civ in 2009 when I bought the CD version of Civ IV, which didn't require Steam to play. I moved into an apartment that didn't have an internet connection and the landlord wouldn't let me install one.

I do hope there will be a CD version of Civ VI which doesn't require an internet connection, however 99% there won't be. Which is sad, cos if Civ IV required Steam I wouldn't have played Civilization in the first place.

Well, you can still install CiVI on steam with an internet connection from somewhere else, then play CiVI at home with steam offline (You won't be able to get achievements though ).

It's not that big of a problem imo. And you would still need an active internet connection to patch things out, being on steam or CD hardware.

 

[[to_xp]Gekko]

It could be released on GOG once the "O" will be actual (surely after Civ7 or even Civ8 release). What's your problem with Steam?

simply put, it has no features that are useful to me and I don't want to have redundant software standing between me and my games

since I believe in voting with my wallet, I don't purchase games that are only available through Steam

 

[Eagle Pursuit]

Ed was very evasive when the German interviewer went on and on about porting Civ VI to consoles. It may not be available for PC anywhere but Steam, but it's quite possible it could be on Playstation or XBox at some point in the future.

 

[stealth_nsk]

It being unavoidable doesn't mean people aren't allowed to not like it.

Beyond that, these arguments often get very subjective, very quickly. Some people dislike Origin for petty reasons, some people dislike Steam for petty reasons. Others have valid reasons for both. It's difficult to generalise, even fairly. I like and use both, and personally there are aspects of both that could do with improvement.

Yes, I understand this, but I really like to hear what's wrong with Steam, even subjective arguments. So far I only heard monopoly=bad, which is not argument itself. It's not sarcasm, I'm really curious. Steam works just fine for me and it's the best DRM I ever met.

 

[Hail]

Their [Origin] language-locking policy is terrible. Steam is totally ok.

Steam cannot let Origin get ahead!

Spoiler :

Yeah, plus it gives a lot of features for devs, starting from DRM. I still remember some DRMs of 10-15 years old, they were a nightmare.

wat? DRM is now a feature? along with unstacking the cities and EUREKA moments?

steam sales hurt that argument. The dev make very little off the mass sales.

the bulk of the income a game will generate is through sales and consequent public exposure and interest.

I need not find the article I was looking for (as it has nice graphs). anyway, from here:

Spoiler :

The sale ended at 12 noon. I checked the data…$6,000 sold, a nearly 6x increase from yesterday. That’s pretty darn good! Wait…that’s only the data from 4 to 5am. As I kept refreshing, the sales kept rolling in. Thankfully I had to leave the house with visiting family to do some stuff, which kept me from frantically clicking the refresh button.

We stopped by Schlotzsky’s later that day for lunch, which was great since I don’t own a smartphone, had my iPod with me, and they have Wi-Fi. My sister and I stood in line as I quickly connected online and got to the sales page.

Over $50,000 gross was made in just under eight hours. Over 20,000 copies sold in that timeframe. 20,000! My last game, the Oil Blue, has yet to break 1,000 copies sold in the last three years since release.

I am disappointed, MadDjinn.

 

[Thormodr]

more money for devs => bigger the future budget and better the next game
one can tolerate inconvenience for that. but personally i dont meet any inconvenience and i never wanted anything like refunding.


and if a platform isnt good enough devs wont stick to it


i think its more a tradeoff (like everything in our life, yin yang and all the stuff), development of what would you want best. if you are for some game, like civ, steam exclusiveness is more beneficial to you than not. if you think games are good enough but internet trade platforms are lacking, exclusives are of course evil.

More money for the company could mean more money for the shareholders who always want a greater return on their investment.

 

[thecrazyscot]

If multiplayer utilizes Steam features as Ed Beach strongly implied, there is very little chance of a non-Steam PC version.

Just as an FYI also, there are quite a few Steam games you can launch without going through Steam. Just because a developer sells through Steam doesn't mean they use the DRM features. It's just quite simply the best place to sell games right now.

Of course, it's highly doubtful Civ VI would allow that.

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SM-G900A using Tapatalk

 

[MadDjinn]

the bulk of the income a game will generate is through sales and consequent public exposure and interest.

I need not find the article I was looking for (as it has nice graphs). anyway, from here:

Spoiler :

The sale ended at 12 noon. I checked the data…$6,000 sold, a nearly 6x increase from yesterday. That’s pretty darn good! Wait…that’s only the data from 4 to 5am. As I kept refreshing, the sales kept rolling in. Thankfully I had to leave the house with visiting family to do some stuff, which kept me from frantically clicking the refresh button.

We stopped by Schlotzsky’s later that day for lunch, which was great since I don’t own a smartphone, had my iPod with me, and they have Wi-Fi. My sister and I stood in line as I quickly connected online and got to the sales page.

Over $50,000 gross was made in just under eight hours. Over 20,000 copies sold in that timeframe. 20,000! My last game, the Oil Blue, has yet to break 1,000 copies sold in the last three years since release.

I am disappointed, MadDjinn.

yeah, there's a pretty big difference between Indies making bonus money from steam sales, when they get some form of attention they don't usually have, and AAA game companies not. Also, profit margins are vastly different.

 

[Gorbles]

Yes, I understand this, but I really like to hear what's wrong with Steam, even subjective arguments. So far I only heard monopoly=bad, which is not argument itself. It's not sarcasm, I'm really curious. Steam works just fine for me and it's the best DRM I ever met.

Alright, this is even on-topic for once so here I go

People dislike Steam through Valve for historical arguments. Much like EA gets flak for historical arguments. I even cite them myself because I'm tired of people holding other publishers to bygones while insisting Valve are "based Gaben" perfect. I'd love for any and all historical points to be dropped, but there you go.

Historical arguments range from "Steam was absolutely terrible when it was launched so why can't we let competitors at least evolve to a similar state before slamming them" to "look how Valve butchered these games for their platforms, so why can't other distributors". People made a huge hoo-hah about EA pulling games from Steam to sell them on Origin, but nobody ever batted an eyelid about Valve games being (to this day) Steam exclusives. As a more recent example, nobody has really picked up on how Steam enabled DotA 2 to be a success because the F2P game is placed in everybody's Steam Libraries by default. As is Team Fortress 2. No non-Valve F2P game gets this privilege.

This is Valve's perogative, absolutely. But it's a factor that makes people uneasy.

Actual arguments around the platform:

1. Offline Mode has historically been terrible, and Valve only made efforts to fix it when Origin launched with a fully-functioning offline mode. In beta. I was personally affected by this for most of my uni days.

2. It's getting to the point where sales-based culture could arguably be a bad impact on certain demographics of games publishers / developers. Sales in some form are great for the consumer. Permanent sales at set times of year mean that people aim to buy games around those sales for a pittance of what they're actually worth. This is problematic and in my opinion will have a correlation in how publishers design their DLC strategies for modern games.

3. The UI. Still absolutely all over the place. Origin's is nice apart from not having a darker colour palette and that god-awful bubble UI everywhere.

4. Steam Guard. Still doesn't work right.

5. Mobile apps; Android went un-updated for two or more years, only getting updates to force Steam Guard / 2-factor auth through the app that you had to enable to use it. 2FA is a good principle, but should never be forced because tying everything to a single mobile phone is ironically Bad for when you inevitably lose your phone because:

6. Steam Support is still terrible. It's a wasteland.

7. Arbitrarily locking functionality behind Steam Account "levels" (that resulted in some people having their Friends List cut at the time) to push their XP-related Steam Sales minigames.

There are probably more but these are arguably the least-subjective issues people have had, and do have, with the platform.

 

[Verrucosus]

The purpose of the opening post was really just finding out whether anything explicit had been said on the subject yet. I did not mean to revive the debate from the early days of Civ5. However, since the inquiry was motivated by my persistent lack of enthusiasm for Steam and members keep asking for reasons, I'll just say that Steam makes me feel like I'm not really in control of my own game.

During the time when I still played Civ5 once every couple of months (2011/2012), the offline mode was unreliable and kept forcing me to go into online mode whenever I hadn't played for a few weeks. Then the Steam client would update itself, then it would update the game, and it could be 20 minutes until I actually got to play. That's not a long delay, I've learned how to disable game updates, and the offline mode is apparently working better now, but the point is that eventually (for example when installing Civ6) I'll have to go back into online mode and at that point Steam will update itself to whatever version will be current then. If that should introduce any new inconvenience to my ability to play the games that are working fine in offline mode right now, there is nothing at all I will be able to do about that.

Steam means that whatever mechanism it provides that allows me to play these games can be changed at somebody's else convenience.

I don't like that one bit. It's bad enough that Windows Updates can interfere with my games. I accept that for security reasons, but a gaming platform? Speaking of Windows Updates, there's no guarantee that 15 years from now when the industry has moved on to another platform and looks at Steam in the same way it looks now at game CDs, some genius at Microsoft won't decide that the Steam client poses some security risk and disable it. That's pretty much what happened last year with the CD copy protection of games like Civ3 or even the vanilla version of Civ4. The publisher's reaction: "Sorry, we cannot help you with a game that has passed its life cycle. Get a Steam version!" For someone who keeps going back to older games (I still play Civ1!) that is not good enough. These days I have most of my games on an offline machine, safe from Microsoft interference. With Steam games, that won't work.

Of course, all of this is highly subjective. It's a matter of personal preference. My preference would be to be able to install the game to an offline machine and apply patches only if and when I want them. However, unlike Gekko, neither I nor most other people sharing this preference would go as far as to boycott a game just because it requires Steam. The publishers predicted that quite correctly when they put their own convenience first and introduced the Steam requirement. I find it interesting that the "they'll buy it anyway" attitude coincided with releases (Civ5 and Empire Total War) that had some serious problems completely unrelated to Steam.

So far, the Steam requirement did not deter me from getting games that I really wanted to play: Civ5, Empire, and Europa Universalis IV, but it was a strong factor in deciding to skip Beyond Earth, Shogun 2 as well as all of the expansions for Civ5 and EU4. On the other hand, the availability of a traditional disk version that does not require Steam would be a strong factor in favour of Civ6 and could overcome doubtful feelings I might get from screenshots or from its sticking with some problematic Civ5 mechanics.