Current [POLL] Would you use Steam for Rebirth?

[CBJ]

This really isn't going too well, is it? If things don't move on from discussing the validity of the poll and other people's opinions about it pretty soon then we will have no option but to shut down the thread and have a moratorium on Steam polls as a whole.

[EmperorJon]

I think we should just have a moratorium on Steam discussion as a whole, CBJ. We all know it's not going to change, we all know some people do/don't like the system, we all know nobody's opinion is actually being influenced one way or the other. It's just arguing.

[CBJ]

How does that differ from any other discussion on any internet forum anywhere?

The point is that we don't want to stop discussion of Steam, but we do want to stop the increasingly personal bickering that seems to go with it.

[EmperorJon]

Agreed. We should close the internet. It would solve all of humanity's issues.

[Sam L.R. Griffiths]

Steam Exclusive. Using Steam to market a product makes excellent business sense. Using Steam exclusively does not. Show me a publisher who sold titles without Steam before going Steam Exclusive, and show me where they say it's improved their sales figures

Show us a publisher who decided to use Steam, show us where they say the decision turned out to be disastrous for their sales figures.

I thought the point of this poll was to discuss the pros and cons of the Steam adoption from OUR perspective not Egosoft's business case for adopting it.

[Ebany]

Discussion without the pointless criticisms would be nice, in fact this happened for the few pages ....... but human nature apparently states there can be only one winner, if only they could remember what they were fighting about.

Look, I'll help steer the conversation to a better topic.

Apple sux, it sucked 10 years ago and it sux now!

[Ebany]

Steam Exclusive. Using Steam to market a product makes excellent business sense. Using Steam exclusively does not. Show me a publisher who sold titles without Steam before going Steam Exclusive, and show me where they say it's improved their sales figures

Show us a publisher who decided to use Steam, show us where they say the decision turned out to be disastrous for their sales figures. I'm not greedy, I'll settle for just one example.

So your having difficulty thinking of examples and need me to do the leg work for you
I was hoping it was obvious but I'll do what I can to help.

Firstly; You seem fixated on any negative Steam comments, but the point I'm trying to make is;
going exclusive with any company is bad for business.
I can see you've little interest so I'll keep it short and won't be filling pages full of links.
However its in my nature to be helpful and hope for the best in people so I'll give you the ideas and let you do some research, that way the conclusions are yours. The information is on the net for any who care to look.

Portal 2, Team Fortress, Half-Life, Counter Strike. These are games made by Valve yet they are sold by everyone. Christ, I even have Half-Life and Counter Strike which don't even require Steam to install or run, so apparently even Steam doesn't go "exclusive" on it's own!

Probably need a bit more *sigh*

Exclusiveness is not new, it was tried and tested thoroughly on consoles like Nitendo 64 & PS2. Reasons why it fails/failed;

*Reduction in audience. e.g. lets say you have Nitendo, Xbox, and Playstation. A game released exclusively for one means you've automatically reduced your audience by 2/3. Imagine if you start adding others like Steam's console, Nvidia's console, Android consoles .......

*Read this US Gamer article about console exclusive games, its an eye opener.

Still more?

The Last Remnant (by) Square Enix did so badly it ended up been released through multiple stores and across multiple platforms. Originally it was to be released as an exclusive Xbox title.

Last one.

EA trust Steam so little you can even port your titles (i.e. Dragon Age, Mass Effect, Sims, Crysis, etc.) from Steam to Origin which we all know acts as a Purchasing, Validation and Download tool ..... unlike Steam which is DRM oppressive.

This article on renown site Rock, Paper, Blam is an excellent read. I currently have three (3) Steam accounts with thousands of $$ invested in them. You don't understand helplessness until your account suddenly becomes banned or is lost due to corruption.

And a quick quote from Gamesbrief which sums up what I'm attempting to say in many of my reply posts.

"Aren’t Valve the good guys?

To be clear, I’m not saying that Valve is doing any of these things right now. They are a great developer that has created, from scratch, a dominant digital distribution platform, mainly through making it so damned good that consumers don’t want to use anything else.

I am pointing out the risks of letting one company completely dominate a market."

Steam Exclusive. Using Steam to market a product makes excellent business sense. Using Steam exclusively does not. Show me a publisher who sold titles without Steam before going Steam Exclusive, and show me where they say it's improved their sales figures

Show us a publisher who decided to use Steam, show us where they say the decision turned out to be disastrous for their sales figures.

I thought the point of this poll was to discuss the pros and cons of the Steam adoption from OUR perspective not Egosoft's business case for adopting it.

Ever helpful is my nature, I do what I can to alleviate peoples pain

[krait_daoc]

Apple sux, it sucked 10 years ago and it sux now!

Now THAT is something I can agree with

[Cycrow]

Portal 2, Team Fortress, Half-Life, Counter Strike. These are games made by Valve yet they are sold by everyone. Christ, I even have Half-Life and Counter Strike which don't even require Steam to install or run, so apparently even Steam doesn't go "exclusive" on it's own!

you do relise that Half-Life and counter strike were released before steam even existed right ?

so of course they didn't require it

[elexis]

The entire business world has gone almost exclusively for microsoft, it hasn't been that bad a move. (until the latest wave of the os).

Steam is not a drm tool, and steam is not valve, get your semantics right.

Every Valve game that was released since half life 2 requires steam regardless of where it was purchased. The rest don't because steam didn't exist before then.

If you are going to link articles about legal issues with steam please also address things more recent. Steam can't legally ban you from a service you have invested money in without providing a reason, this is not in the EULA because almost every consumer law in the world will override it anyway.

The thing about an X-Box exclusive is that it has a $300-400 overhead + $15/month if you want multiplayer. There are also many games that have had no problems at all being exclusive (and which I firmly believe would have sucked if they were ported to pc).

Reduction in audience doesn't work even remotely like you say. Games on Wii are targeted to a demographic, of which a significant majority own that device. Where is the benefit of spending money on a port to other consoles when they might only increased the % of the demographic reached by a marginal number for each port. It makes no sense. These splits in demographics, as well as the fundamental difference in architecture are also why you cannot use them as an arguing point when talking about steam. They just don't have anything in common. Steam console you say? -don't even mention it until we have proof it exists.

At least valve don't have shareholders behind them.

[Slashman]

So was;
Lehman Bros (Worth over 600 Billion at time of Bankruptcy)
*Delphi
*General Motors
*Enron
*Washington Mutual (worth over 300 billion before bankruptcy)
*The list goes on and on.

Maybe you're missing the point here. It wasn't that successful businesses can't go under. In the eyes of everyone in the games industry, Steam is a very solid and desirable platform to release on.

Why would a company have worries about releasing on it when it has consistently proven to be the best digital distribution platform around with the largest user base?

Firstly, your looking at polls all wrong.

So 77% of the people who voted in the poll aren't a majority by a decent margin?

Secondly, if we are using polls to help evaluate the "Steam Exclusive" decision, then they should be worried. If you can't see this then nothing will convince you ..... though study some of the stories in the companies listed above, it's insightful, sad, and funny all at the same time.

Again, why? Amplitude studios went Steam exclusive with Endless Space. They sold more than 500K copies within the first year. Did well enough to fund 4 free expansions and then create a paid expansion pack.

I recall seeing a bunch of anti-Steam stuff on those forums as well.

Steam Exclusive. Using Steam to market a product makes excellent business sense. Using Steam exclusively does not. Show me a publisher who sold titles without Steam before going Steam Exclusive, and show me where they say it's improved their sales figures.

Bethesda Softworks. Publisher of the Fallout and Elder Scrolls series. They have now firmly decided to stick with Steamworks for their games. Skyrim is one of the most successful games ever. Steam exclusive. No complaints from them so far.

Deep Silver also seems to be keeping most of its titles as Steam exclusive.

2K Games. Publisher of the Borderlands series.

Bohemia interactive have decided to go Steam exclusive.

If Steam exclusivity was honestly a detriment, I find it hard to believe that not only large publishers, but so many indy devs as well would continue to go this route. And even harder to believe that none of them would say that it hurt their sales. Larger publishers I could understand. But none of the smaller indies? They are more vulnerable to lost sales.

What evidence has this poll produced? This I feel is a question we should ask ourselves. According to some people this poll is worthless, most people would laugh and move on so then why did they feel the need to stay and vote if they felt that way?

What more do I want? I want votes! I want reasons for the votes like the following exceptional examples;

I'll leave it there before I fill too much space, but when you ask "what do I hope to achieve by this poll?", I say "more of these!"

Well in that case: Good luck!

[Ebany]

Portal 2, Team Fortress, Half-Life, Counter Strike. These are games made by Valve yet they are sold by everyone. Christ, I even have Half-Life and Counter Strike which don't even require Steam to install or run, so apparently even Steam doesn't go "exclusive" on it's own!

you do relise that Half-Life and counter strike were released before steam even existed right ?

so of course they didn't require it

I do indeed, like I said, I own them. I also got Steam when it first came out 10 years ago, it was the patch delivery system if memory serves. Awful and full of bugs, but revolutionary.
However I have friends who made these purchases after Steam became common and they still don't require Steam for install or activation.

Also I was doing a great deal of editing at the time, and in reflection I could have modified or deleted that. Still, the point I was trying to make is Valve doesn't sell it's product's exclusively through Steam, and at one stage they didn't even require Steam.

[Ebany]

Steam is not a drm tool, and steam is not valve, get your semantics right.

wtf? Steam is DRM, Valve developed Steam ........ and I don't understand the semantics part?!?

Firstly, your looking at polls all wrong.

So 77% of the people who voted in the poll aren't a majority by a decent margin?

lol, really? You claim to be representing 77% of the people here? When presented with these types of facts, I'm really not sure how to reply ....... I so wanna say it but was taught never to demean "special" people

Almost as good as the first one about semantics.

Edit: Didn't come out the first time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_software

[EmperorJon]

No, he claims that 77% is a majority by a decent margin. Which is true. Stop changing/purposefully misinterpreting what people say to continue the argument...

[CBJ]

It seems even the OP doesn't want this thread to stay open. I'm not sure which part of not insulting people who disagree with you they didn't understand.

[Kantazo]

I had in the past a really, really bad experience with Steam so I refuse to use Steam in any of my games but by reading these forums seems like I have no choice but to have to use Steam if I want to play Rebirth?

[GebürtigerTerraner]

I had in the past a really, really bad experience with Steam so I refuse to use Steam in any of my games but by reading these forums seems like I have no choice but to have to use Steam if I want to play Rebirth?

Yup.It is likely a no-steam.exe will come,but a few month after release.

[wizaerd]

This is fast becoming the norm for PC games, unfortunately. Yes, if you wish to play this game, you must use Steam.

[shea]

Yes you do need to use steam for X rebirth

[Kantazo]

Oh boy, +