There’s a reason lots of mid-size devs are tying themselves to Steam. It’s because it’s apparently a great set of services and APIs tied together that makes developing and patching easier and quicker. Baldurs Gate is an exception in that regard, and that’s not Steam’s fault. You can argue that this is short-sighted, but apparently many devs are finding the long-tail risks are outweighed so far.
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Speaking of which, at least from a development perspective having the game on Steam has paid off already. Earlier today we tracked down a bug where the game was crashing on non-English versions of Windows, and posting a fixed build took all of two minutes. In the old days making an update like this required hours of tedious, error-prone work. This, my friends, is why every game is going to Steam!
Steam provides a stub batch script you fill out to specify what files are included when someone downloads your game. Running the script packages everything together and uploads it to Steam’s servers. From there you just go to your Steam dashboard via web browser, select what uploaded build to use and boom! You’re done.
Within a few minutes everyone’s copy of the game auto-detects the change and downloads the update. Even better, because Steam breaks everything into smaller hashed chunks that can be requested independently, the download size for these updates is nearly always trivial. Very, very slick system.
Greenlight is still a huge improvement over “Valve randomly rejects games for no explained reason”, which was the policy beforehand. It could also be a lot better, of course.
I think that’s it. It is extremely benevolent (right now), e.g. the Jon Shafer quote a few posts up, as well as the extreme convenience for users. And I certainly don’t think I can tell a developer to not use Steam or even release a non-Steam version as well when every bit of extra labor hurts in a tough market. I also certainly find Steam very convenient as a consumer, and have a good number of my games there.
But there’s no way that this can be a good long-term direction for the industry. The best we can hope for is that whatever comes along next happens before Steam goes “evil” (cough sold to Gamestop cough), and that it learns from all the truly wonderful things that Steam does right.
For what it is worth Desura’s key distribution is growing massively right now. Not trying to self promote, just noting there is at least one other growing key based service out there.
Do you really miss the days where you had to go to every game’s site (if it was still maintained), or download sites to get the latest patch? You can turn off updates and mod games (for example, I know Vampire Bloodlines has a thriving mod community).
Steam has already said that in the case of them going down, they already have a thing programmed into it that will turn off checking of the games…
I just went through the painful Steam association process. It took me over an hour of trying to run XCOM and then pressing Shift Tab and bringing up the Steam browser and trying to associate my Steam account with Humble Bundle through that, even though the Steam browser doesn’t seem to run scripts and kept crashing.
(I couldn’t do it through the normal browser because I don’t remember what random ass difficult password I chose 3 years ago for Steam, which I haven’t needed since).
Anyway, every time I would Alt-Tab to Firefox and copy and paste the direct link to allow Steam permission into the Steam browser, it would let me get to the part where I could Allow or Deny Humble Bundle, but when I hit “Allow”, the Steam browser would crash every time.
I got so frustrated, I wrote a scathing email to humble support asking for my money back. But then I tried it one last time, and it worked. Steam browser comes through!! Yay! Now hopefully I’ll never need to do that again.
This is a relatively inexpensive way to transfer all these Pinball FX2 tables that I already owned on the 360 to the PC.
Would that hour have perhaps been better spent recovering your Steam password? I mean, at some point your current PC will fall over and you’ll need the password to install Steam on a new machine.
I don’t see why devs are so lazy. Democracy 3 self-updates outside steam, or through steam if steam is present. It has mod management built in outside steam, and uses steam workshop if available. None of this stuff is rocket science, especially if a lone dev like me can do it, shy cant bigger companies?
WE WON!! THE ZEALOTS HAVE WON!! (Indirectly, sure, but we won.)
The freedom of keys has returned. (And I agree; fuck resellers - but that issue can be significantly reduced via not allowing more than 2-3 purchases per payment method, and other such measures.)
A little over a year ago, we launched OAuth Steam key redemption, creating one-click Steam key redemption for games purchased through Humble Bundle. However, Steam is removing support for OAuth, so we’ll be returning to the system we used before, which requires you to manually redeem your Steam keys.
Oh, and they better work out a deal whereby existing gift links keep working. If not, they just opened a serious legal issue.
Humble Bundle Old purchases are not going away and currently redeem using the old system, unused keys are not being deleted or removed, previously gifted links should still function like normal. This announcement is for purchases from this point forward and if any other updates are made regarding the redemption system we will keep you posted.
Wow. I wonder why Steam is killing off OAuth support? I actually grew to LIKE the OAuth system, and it seems like it’s been adopted by most of the legit bundle sites (BundleStars, IndieGala, IndieRoyale, etc). It’s nice to be able to bring up a single webpage and simply click through the games in a bundle, adding each to my Steam account with the click of a button. I recently gave away a crapton of Steam keys via gift links as well and didn’t have a single person say that they had any issues redeeming.
Returning to cutting and pasting keys into Steam’s interface is a big step backwards for me. I certainly don’t feel as if I’ve WON anything.
A negative thread seems like the right place for this news. Humble Bundle laid off 12 people last week (about 20% of staff) due to incorrectly projected growth.
“Unfortunately, last week Humble Bundle was forced to let go of some of our employees,” confirmed co-founder John Graham, in an email to Polygon. “Despite strong revenue, and our community surpassing $65 million raised for charity to date, our past hiring was too ambitious and we had to make a hard call last week.”
