DCS 2.1 on steam

Because update frequency has nothing to do with steam, and comparing different games on different engines is like comparing apples to orangutans. CAP2 is built on Unity, which is a easy to use, widely known commodity. FSW is using the FSX engine ran through Unreal, and is frankly older than a few people I know.

If you pay, say, 30% cut on your sales but you don’t think you can get 30% more sales out of Steam then yes, it doesn’t make sense. If you also have to pay people to run your own distribution (your own hosting costs, IT man power etc) then it doesn’t make sense. Bohemia Interactive, Bethesda, Creative Assembly etc all made more money than they lost because 125+ million active users may of helped? Are those companies dumb or not big enough to have their own stores? There must be something very special about a flight sim, right?

You also seem to have zero empathy for someone buying NTTR on Steam today and then only later finding out they actually have to wait for Normandy for ‘some time later’. I guess they could just buy it again though, as in stupid new user, that’ll teach them? That extra 30% ain’t gonna fly if poor new users then swears never to try a flight sim again.

Because that would be against the Steamworks partner terms of service and get your titles removed from Steam? One of the few rules is that you sell what you like, but you have to provide an even playing field if you do so. If you don’t offer the same deals and availability without good reason then (in theory) you can get kicked off the store. Valve don’t really police it, especially for small markets. They sigh a bit but then go back to sleep on their huge pile of money.

Untrue, but a common misconception repeated ad nauseam. Updates are not reviewed by Valve. It’s up to the depot publisher to manage their own updates and is not something monitored by Valve. A new store entry is reviewed, but less extensively than your first.

That’s an incredibly generous assumption? To cut to the chase, it’s probably about refunds. Steam offers an unconditional 2 hour played refund on purchases and that doesn’t fit with how DCS modules are sold, or rather ED have to pay for Starforce (that ‘sales percentage’ 3rd party people are good with though?) serial keys and then manually synchronize back the invalid refunded ones. It was a loophole for a while in that people would buy on Steam, get a refund and then still play stand-alone. So, are people here are against steam refunds now then, but just for DCS? How corporate. :slight_smile: The loophole is closed now the Steam store doesn’t offer ‘CD Keys’ that were uploaded Starforce keys anymore, i.e. all Steam for the latest stuff.

Using Steam with your own key mechanism is like being partially pregnant - you’re just swimming against the tide and neither the customer or the vendor are getting the potential benefits. No workshop support (ARMA!), no key resellers offering better competitive deals, no instant refunds, no family sharing ability, no fast updates of the latest versions.

If you’re in a games niche where you are so worried that the commission paid will be more than the additional sales you’d get in a 125+ million person marketplace then you might just be dead already. Smaller niches than flight sims have made it work though.

Anyway, I think DCS is fine on standalone, but I just get fed up with the reasons I often read for how the Steam parts seems to be rumors and misinformation that’s just repeated. Valve would never comment and ED won’t correct people (it’s not their job, and the terms of Steamworks are NDA’d) so people seem to have fallen into some odd assumptions.

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Actually I think it might be. I thought I had read developer posts (other games) stating this but I can’t find anything to back that up. Same with the previous statement about publishing pain and delay - as memory serves, patches and such were uploaded to Steam but there was a delay before they were made public, which may certainly not have been Valves fault but it was indicated as such by the developer.

The other potential myth that I had heard was that during those Steam sales, the sales price was determine/dictated by Value and the developers did not have a say. Probably another misconception that I have about the service.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not knocking Steam or Valve. They are a valuable market chain for the industry and I think that they get a bad rap. And I am learning that some of the things that I thought I knew a wrong 
 which is good :slight_smile:

My point was that it’s not Steam at fault here as stated by some.

BTW from where did you get your info about CAP being built on Unity and FSW being FSX ran through Unreal? Just curious?

Following this logic DCS World isn’t new either, since it was in developement since 1995 :grin:

http://www.mobygames.com/company/eagle-dynamics

Often it’s the case that the developer has a local build and then has to rerun the steamworks packager manually locally and then go upload (via FTP) all the files. The Steamworks CDN can take about 6 hours to update as well. They delay is often a dev one to make their workflow better with something they didn’t write themselves. DCS actually has a pretty nice build system where they have automated this. I think a lot of the reluctance to put patches up on Steam is to have to cope with new people whigging out and demanding a refund or then writing a bad review. People using the ‘2 hour window’ like a demo is fairly hostile if you are a developer and have your own (keys cost money) mechanism.

https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/sdk/uploading

They pick what cut they waive for the sales, or rather they get to cherry pick what gets promoted more importantly. It’s a lottery, or rather a bit more dodgy than that, as something like front-page slots can make or break a title on sale. The price gets suggested by the Steam account manager but it’s sort of a mafia request rather than a friendly hug. No-one is allowed to talk about these things btw.

Well we probably should, they are a double-edged sword, in that benevolent dictators are fun while they are benevolent, but less so if not. Valve is privately owned and has a powerful market dominance, and is in the weird ‘I like my eggs in one basket’ vs ‘Oh no, all my eggs are gone!’ sort of market dichotomy. I see it a bit like Windows or DirectX, in that mono-cultures can actually move things forward (Consoles long ago figured this out) in that a ‘games OS’ like Steam has huge upsides and huge downsides. Generally I think they have been both a net positive for gamers (cheaper stuff) and a net positive for game makers (more gamers, more stuff sold). I can completely get why someone would loath them though.

As a huge fan of flight sims I wanted DCS to succeed on Steam as it brings lots of new people to the genre. I kind of kneejerk when people just say ‘Use standalone new user because reasons I heard!’ as it is probably creating enough friction to make people go play something else instead. It’s like we want to deliberately thin out the herd, like we enjoy being a market with no customers and can’t see where that leads.

I don’t have any problem with what ED have done at all, in that throwing peanuts from the gallery is easier than getting from Market A to Market B while not throwing people overboard is hard and complicated and full of history. A lot of what gets repeated is not quite right though, which gets my eye twitching
 :slight_smile:

Anyway, DCS 2.1 on Steam is a good thing, but what would be great would be even more new things get put on that market at the same time as the ED store, just to make sure the Steam people didn’t inadvertently buy the ‘wrong’ version.

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