Today was talking with some other developer friends about a “hot topic”. Steam, and the difficulty to get in it.<\/p>\n
If you’re an indie developer, at least once in your life you got a forum\/post comment saying “you should get your game on Steam!”. It sounded almost as an insult, like saying “you fool, why don’t you just use that?”. Yeah, like if Steam was an OPEN platform.<\/p>\n
Getting on Steam is really HARD, and for most indies they represent the main source of income, a bit like casual portals are for casual game developers.<\/p>\n
There’s really no rule (for Indies) to get on Steam. Many games look very similar, yet “some” are accepted, and others not. Their selection criteria aren’t really clear to be honest.<\/p>\n
Now, I came with a solution that I hope the Steam people will at least consider: why Steam doesn’t allow any indie to sell their games through them, as a sort of shareware vendor? We could add “Buy on Steam” button beside our usual vendors like BMT Micro, Plimus, Regnow, and so on.<\/p>\n
And those games wouldn’t appear on Steam. They would need absolutely to do NOTHING, except create an interface for developer so they can setup their products. They could even get away with a submission fee or a yearly subscription like Appstore does.<\/p>\n
Advantages would be for both sides: indie devs would finally be able to tell to the users who ask if they can buy from Steam “Yes, here is the link.”<\/p>\n
Steam could get “free money”, and honestly they would get the most advantages from this idea. They could also be surprised by how some apparently unknown games sells, and maybe “promote” the best selling “underdogs” on their main games catalogue.<\/p>\n
I see really no downside to this idea. Now I hope someone at Steam looks at this post, and at least takes in consideration this suggestion \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Today was talking with some other developer friends about a “hot topic”. Steam, and the difficulty to get in it. If you’re an indie developer, at least once in your life you got a forum\/post comment saying “you should get your game on Steam!”. It sounded almost as an insult, like saying “you fool, why […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,9,24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-774","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general-topics","category-indie-life","category-winter-wolves-games"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.winterwolves.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/774","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.winterwolves.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.winterwolves.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.winterwolves.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.winterwolves.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=774"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.winterwolves.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/774\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":775,"href":"https:\/\/www.winterwolves.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/774\/revisions\/775"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.winterwolves.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=774"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.winterwolves.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=774"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.winterwolves.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=774"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}