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Question on reddit. Anyone feel strongly about this? Pros and cons?
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One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie. -
A reminder of the thread where you have discussed this... http://angband.oook.cz/forum/showthread.php?t=8064“We're more of the love, blood, and rhetoric school. Well, we can do you blood and love without the rhetoric, and we can do you blood and rhetoric without the love, and we can do you all three concurrent or consecutive. But we can't give you love and rhetoric without the blood. Blood is compulsory. They're all blood, you see.”
― Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead -
I think putting Angband on Steam would be good for building the community; there are players who would play Angband if they knew about it, but who basically ignore any games that aren't on Steam. However, it would split the community -- Steam provides its own forums, mod management, achievements, etc. that don't synergize well with our own community's forums/ladder/etc. So there'd be multiple places for discussion of the game -- likely the Steam forums would be pretty dead, which doesn't look great to new players.
It's not clear how we'd leverage the Steam Workshop (modding system) if at all. I don't know if variants can really qualify as mods, seeing as they generally work by being a completely different binary and set of resources.
And of course all of these features require dev work to integrate Valve's libraries, and I don't know how feasible that would be for such an ancient codebase -- are the libraries C-compatible? I would assume so, but it's something someone would have to investigate. We'd need an extra build flag for "is building with Steam" to enable achievements (e.g. #ifdef STEAM register_achievement(our_game_id, "this player just beat Morgoth with a shovel"); #endif).
Also, someone would have to take point on "owning" the Steam release. A single stable point of contact who can be responsible for managing API keys, communicating with Valve, handling releases, etc. The obvious choice would be the Vanilla maintainer, but what happens when Nick finally goes insane and runs gibbering into the wilderness?Comment
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“We're more of the love, blood, and rhetoric school. Well, we can do you blood and love without the rhetoric, and we can do you blood and rhetoric without the love, and we can do you all three concurrent or consecutive. But we can't give you love and rhetoric without the blood. Blood is compulsory. They're all blood, you see.”
― Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are DeadComment
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Thanks. It's good that there are people here whose memories cover more than the last six months.
Looks to me like the arguments for not are still pretty good.
Thanks for the vote of confidence in my current status. Unless you're referring to my inevitable introduction of wilderness into V
One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne
In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.Comment
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“We're more of the love, blood, and rhetoric school. Well, we can do you blood and love without the rhetoric, and we can do you blood and rhetoric without the love, and we can do you all three concurrent or consecutive. But we can't give you love and rhetoric without the blood. Blood is compulsory. They're all blood, you see.”
― Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are DeadComment
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i'm divided. the game is already easily accessible (just google and download) and nobody notices stuff on steam unless it's advertised in some way.
Steam also without fault brings the worst gamers out, people with a massive sense of entitlement, who on top of this are ... i really can't express my feeling fully but lets try MASSIVE IDIOTS IN ALL CAPS to give you an idea.
i think the only real result you would get from publishing on steam is an endless stream of 1. How do i save the game 2. My game doesn't save 3. Please Add Save Game feature, threads to the forum, all sprinkled generously with various hate filled insults.
consider that:
i play with steamies daily, through Blacklight, and somewhat less through QuakeLive and Reflex; they cannot manage basic "walk AND shoot", demand stuff for free from the older players, hackuse everyone of hacking, and won't even bother to play a tutorial. when we say thinsg like "hey level 1 guy, you have accidentally joined a ranked clan match, can you please change lobby" the answer is always, always *some weird flavour of the day insult* because that is apparently how they communicate.
steamies download (free of paid, it doesnt matter) games for 10 minutes of "WOW i own this" enjoyment and then never play the title ever again.
they have a massive sense of entitlement and really do not care about the game, the community of the game, or the people who also want to play the game.
this obviously has more weight in an online, multiplayer experience, but the same would happen on the forums.
there isn't a day when i don't say "hey guys, you should try Angband" but i "target my marketing" to people who actually might enjoy this. Angband is a complex tactical game with many intricacies and it is not suited to the ADD-pill-popping crowd of teenagers who populate steam. I doubt you would get a conversion ration of 1000:1 if you went on steam. Sure, people will download it, but they won't play it more than once, which means probably 30 seconds for most steamies.
honestly, i'm just relying what i know from experience. not trying to be presumptuous or anything."i can take this dracolich"Comment
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The steam platform?
Oh we can't post images. Absolutely proprietary memeComment
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