DW: Universe in top 10 sellers @ Steam!

[Athelas2211]

I've been saying this for ages, get it on steam...finally.

anyway, I bought it, on the matrix store no less, but how do I transfer it to steam account???

The Code serial numer I got through purchase, doesnt work on steam????

PS Is the login for forums same as matrix store login?

[Bingeling]

Check the stickies on the matter.

[Rahal]

I think steam (download service and store) is convenient. Steamworks drm (which requires you to have the client resident) is something else.

The latter has broken some of my games.

[Spacecadet]

I went to register on Steam yesterday just so I could answer some questions, and it turns out it was required to install the Steam Client just to validate my email Address - yeah, right [8|]

[Kayoz]

Stats are looking good. I hope the sales numbers are as good... or better..

[Darkspire]

ORIGINAL: Spacecadet

I went to register on Steam yesterday just so I could answer some questions, and it turns out it was required to install the Steam Client just to validate my email Address - yeah, right [8|]

I am in the same boat, I jumped through all the hoops and waited for days only to find out unless you succumb to the dark side and install the Steam app you can't post.

Darkspire

[pycco]

ORIGINAL: Darkspire

ORIGINAL: Spacecadet

I went to register on Steam yesterday just so I could answer some questions, and it turns out it was required to install the Steam Client just to validate my email Address - yeah, right [8|]

I am in the same boat, I jumped through all the hoops and waited for days only to find out unless you succumb to the dark side and install the Steam app you can't post.

Darkspire

why do you guys hate steam with such passion? just curious no flame war please.

[Darkspire]

why do you guys hate steam with such passion? just curious no flame war please.

I build (and blow up quite often) my own systems, I deal with any hardware and software problems under my own Steam (see what I did there?)

I like the idea of having your games easy to access, I just do not like the way that it is implemented, having to install an app to access my games for management of my game library isn't really a problem either but with the Steam app it just takes the protection to far, If I buy a game I do not want to have to stay online or be online to use that game or to activate it, I do not want my system accessed without my authority or control and most importantly if the company I bought my games from goes bust I would like to still be able to install and use the games I have paid for, with the way Steam is now if they go bust you will lose every single penny you have invested, there is no insurance against it and if they were in receivership do you really think they are going to write code for every game so that it can be used offline?

If Valve really valued the customer opinion then we would be playing Half Life 3, not watching them make squillions off there game app by milking every one who can not be bothered to do things themselves or care about the risks that sort of intrusion from an online source can cause.

Darkspire

[Bingeling]

There are pros and con of every way of distributing games.

Is steam evil spyware? What happens if they decide they want to take your games away from you? Is it a good idea to have "all the eggs in one basket?". But of course steam also rocks, it is smooth, it is convenient...

Online activated games are pure evil! If they turn off their servers I can't play. If they require internet to launch, but you don't use any internet feature, you depend on a service (internet) that should not be needed.

Matrix rocks. I can just store serials and installers and nothing can stop me. Apart from a total disk crash, flat burning down. Matrix sucks for those that lose email accounts, installers, especially if matrix has gone belly up. And their site is clunky...

Physical format rocks! Apart from cluttering my desk. And having evil DRM that can bug on a specific reader. And can stop working if scratched...

The Matrix serials and installers are good for those that like to keep care of their own stuff. Maybe they are the doomsday preppers of the gaming world?

I enjoy my folder on the NAS with the matrix installers and serials. I also like the convenience of steam as long as I pretend I don't notice their social networking stuff. I hate physical stuff, I got too much physical stuff and I am not god at throwing it away. And if I throw it away, any benefits of physical games kind of disappear...

[tbrass]

I, for one, have been playing my Steam downloaded copy of DW:U on a computer that is disconnected from the internet and doesn't have Steam installed. No more difficult than using an installer (easier, as I don't need to remember my serial number) and I don't need to keep an installer on any of my fallible hard drives.

I am delighted that so many new people have discovered DW and hope that Steam is a positive experience for Erik & Elliot moving forward.

[Gregorovitch55]

ORIGINAL: pycco
why do you guys hate steam with such passion? just curious no flame war please.

Don't want to speak for anyone else, but as a former Steam-phobe myself who now uses it I feel i can comment on some of the main reasons. The main headings under which people hate Steam are:

1. Control: Steam rather than you yourself controls when and if you can launch a program you have bought on your machine. This is a gross trespass onto private property - nobody has the right to police your computer, tell you what you can and cannot run on it.

2. Surveillance: The Steam client can do what it likes and look at what it likes on your machine. It can phone home any time it wants and download and upload anything it wants, clandestinely to boot if it wants. This is a gross intrusion of your privacy.

3. Monopoly: Steam has attained far too much power and influence in the PC gaming market. Monopolies are always bad for everyone apart from the monopolist. Period. Additionally a lot of games require steam to play, thus forcing you to either submit to them or forgo playing a favourite title. This strong-arm tactic epitomizes why monopolistic power is inherently evil, a gross perversion of the free market.

4. Steam doesn't let you resell your old games. That is a gross infringement of your basic consumer rights and rights of ownership.

There is a great deal of merit in these arguments, because they are true. In principle. If Valve are an evil company hell bent on using every trick in the book to squeeze the last drop of blood out of every consumer and game developer on the planet, they have all the necessary tools at hand to do so. If on the other hand they are more like Google (or perhaps like how Google would still like to be perceived and once, possibly, were) then we are in benevolent dictator territory, and there are other factors that can be argued to balance, or mitigate, these charges.

1. Steam has transformed the position of the PC as a mainstream gaming platform. Without it is likely the PC would fade away, along with the kind of games that can only really be run on it, and the quality and flexibility it brings.

2. Steam is great leveler that enables AAA titles to sink without trace if they are no good and propels good indie titles from new dev talent nobody has ever heard of to the top of the charts in the blink of an eye. No marketing budget or distribution deal wielded by a multi-million dollar corporation can frustrate this process. Quality and community feedback are what counts.

3. By replacing the second hand PC games market with Steam sales valve have opened a long term revenue stream to developers that wasn't there before. Money that previously went to third party retailers now goes to the game devs themselves (or about 70% of it does) and players pay less via Steam sales than they did previously for second hand games via retailers.

My own perspective is that these positives outweigh, just, the crimes listed above. This is because I consider Valve to be as passionate about games, game developers and game players as they are about their business and that they are instrumental in preserving my beloved PC as a viable gaming platform. Should I turn out to be naively looking at this through rose tinted glasses I will change my mind, and I hope everyone else will too by turning elsewhere are sinking them. But for now I see them as benevolent dictators - the PC gaming market is thriving and I give Steam credit for that.

[Spacecadet]

Darkspire, Bingeling, and Gregorovitch55 have pretty much covered my feeling on it.

What really gets me is why do Steam users think their games are so secure?

Have they ever thought about the bigger picture?

Let me throw out some real world facts :

- Servers, Bandwidth, etc. have a continuing cost.
- Steam has over 75M Subscribers.
- Steam has been approached as a buyout target in the past

That last one, why would someone want to buy Steam?
75,000,000 Subscribers

Now, since your games are essentially held hostage, the new owner could easily implement a trivial $1/mo fee to maintain your account (could easily be more).

75,000,000 x $1/mo = $75,000,000/mo . . . or nearly $1B per year ($900M)


The DRM that is Steam, has you locked in to this very real scenario - Gabe is not going to be doing this forever.

[Bingeling]

I should add that I have a few games on steam, and don't worry about getting more cheap ones there...

They earn money doing what they do, they have no interest chasing their users away.

[Firov]

ORIGINAL: Spacecadet

Darkspire, Bingeling, and Gregorovitch55 have pretty much covered my feeling on it.

What really gets me is why do Steam users think their games are so secure?

Have they ever thought about the bigger picture?

Let me throw out some real world facts :

- Servers, Bandwidth, etc. have a continuing cost.
- Steam has over 75M Subscribers.
- Steam has been approached as a buyout target in the past

That last one, why would someone want to buy Steam?
75,000,000 Subscribers

Now, since your games are essentially held hostage, the new owner could easily implement a trivial $1/mo fee to maintain your account (could easily be more).

75,000,000 x $1/mo = $75,000,000/mo . . . or nearly $1B per year ($900M)


The DRM that is Steam, has you locked in to this very real scenario - Gabe is not going to be doing this forever.

Frankly, this is conspiracy theory garbage. Yes, in theory, this could happen. In theory a cosmic ray born in the final moments of a star's death hundreds of years ago could also flip a bit in the control chip of my hard drive, irrevocably erasing all of my locally stored games.

Steam isn't perfect, I agree. But claiming that it's a plot by "the man" to take away all of your games is laughable. What you're suggesting would instantly kill Steam, and it's not in any business' interests to instantly alienate 100% of their user base.

As for "Steam DRM", people need to realize that Steam is nothing more than an extremely convenient distribution system. The DRM, "Steamworks", is separate, and not included in all Steam games. Indeed, I've got local backups of a number of Steam games that work perfectly without the Steam client even installed, for example, Kerbal Space Program and Red Orchestra : Darkest Hour. Plus, at least Steamworks provides some value to the user, unlike most other DRM systems, by allowing you to tie in with Steam's extensive social features, achievements, multiplayer lobbies, and mod workshops.

Even with games that require Steamworks, and by extension, the Steam client, you have the option of running the client in offline mode. You may complain of system resource consumption, as some people have in this thread, but unless your system is several years old and has two or fewer cores you're not going to notice a difference, since the vast majority of games don't support the full number of cores (or RAM) that modern systems contain. As such, the resources required to run the Steam client is going to come from the un-utilized cores and RAM.

If you want to continue hiding under your blankets from the "evil Steam", that's your prerogative, but don't expect others to blindly accept your conspiracy theories anymore than people are going to accept that HAARP was meant for mind control.

[pycco]

about the re sale of pc games, being one that has bought used pc games and not been able to use them this due to the code already being used i dont get this one. steam has a trade option as well.

most the the other dislikes i totally agree with, the monopoly things is a bit exaggerated but i hear what you are saying.

lets not forget steam not uninstalling games at all, most of the time it just removes 1 folder and takes it out of your steam library. -_-

[Gregorovitch55]

ORIGINAL: Spacecadet

Now, since your games are essentially held hostage, the new owner could easily implement a trivial $1/mo fee to maintain your account (could easily be more).

Well, no, they couldn't do that, not in the sense that they could force anyone to pay such a fee to play their games in practice, nor in the sense that doing so would be anything other than suicide for them.

Steam do not hold your games hostage - they distribute games on behalf of and and the behest of publishers and developers who which to use it as a distribution channel and who are free to also sell their games via any other channel they wish, including Steam-free versions if they so desire (like DW for example). Publishers and developers are not tied to the Steam system in any way.

There would be a furor of unprecedented proportions over such an attempt leading to legal challenges (Steam is a retailer, essentially, not a subscription service, so it doubtful whether charging people for something they already own would be legal) and an exodus of furious players and developers from the platform. Developers would simply make steam-free .exe files available to existing Steam customers in all likelihood.

[Spacecadet]

I never said Steam/Valve would do this, I said the new buyer could :

Valve Software Reported In Buyout Talks With Nexon and NCsoft - http://www.ibtimes.com/valve-software-r ... oft-796775

or a Community favorite :

Valve Employees: EA Attempted Buyout for Over $1 Billion - http://gamerant.com/valve-electronic-ar ... t-billion/


Look at Microsoft, they're moving to Cloud based subscription services, and are already doing so with Office, and are looking to do the same with the OS.

I'm just throwing this out for consideration, I'm not likely to change anyone's mind, nor is that what I'm trying to do . . . this is just an additional reason I have no use for Steam.


This has all gotten totally off topic though.

I'm glad that the exposure on Steam has garnered extra attention/sales for DW, and I'm glad it's doing well.

[malkuth74]

Distant worlds deserves to be considered one of the best 4X games of all time. So it should be in the top 10.

So glad that Universe will bring the game to people that might not have been able to afford everything at once.

[histgamer]

IDK when it got back into the top 10 but DW is back up to 6th after falling down to around 15th. I don't know what would have caused that but I would love to think the coverage by Quill18 helped with that. I don't know if any other big youtubers covered it but he's the largest channel I've seen cover a Slith product at 150k subs and he was very impressed.

[pycco]

ORIGINAL: flanyboy

IDK when it got back into the top 10 but DW is back up to 6th after falling down to around 15th. I don't know what would have caused that but I would love to think the coverage by Quill18 helped with that. I don't know if any other big youtubers covered it but he's the largest channel I've seen cover a Slith product at 150k subs and he was very impressed.

sweet, notice the correlation between them fixing the fonts and the sales?