Comments on: Introversion talk Steam

By: Andy Simpson

Andy Simpson — Thu, 20 Jul 2006 14:25:19 +0000

Ubi are still likely to make more profit on a Steam purchase than at retail, because they’re still cutting costs, even with Valve taking a slice of the pie. I can’t imagine them having an arrangement where they’re getting less money on Steam purchases.

By: demm

demm — Sun, 16 Jul 2006 19:44:51 +0000

I think the fact that MM:Dark Messiah is released on steam was some clever bargaining from valve. Dark Messiah uses the source engine and i believe that valve used the licensing fees as incentive. like: “we let you use the source engine for half the normal licensing fees, but you have to let us publish it on steam”
i don’t think a big publisher like ubisoft is particulary happy releasing its games on steam as well. publishers are greedy companies and selling games on steam means less retail sales.

as for valves strategy for steam it seems to me that their most important goal is to sell their own games. the rest doesn’t really matter. look at the lineup: it consists mainly of some indie games, a few mid-level games (70-80% ratings) and other games based on the source engine. it seems valve didn’t really go shopping for some bigger titles. (altough i admit that this is not an easy thing to do because all the bigger games are already signed to other publishers)

By: wizpig64

wizpig64 — Sun, 16 Jul 2006 06:44:39 +0000

I would love to see Splinter Cell on Steam.

By: Maverick

Maverick — Sun, 16 Jul 2006 05:05:41 +0000

As Jobye said, this deal with Ubisoft is one of those make it or break it things. They better make sure the release goes as smooth as possible with as little problems down the road.

If the release is solid, flawless and draws gamers not only to the Steam platform, but to the entire idea of digital distribution, then the entire project would have been a massive success to Ubisoft and Valve where Ubi may decide to put more games up and make more profit, and Valve gets a major player in the Video Game Developing business as an affiliate and a tie. As consequence this will allow other developers to gravitate towards Steam and this is where Steam will set itself apart from Triton, where Steam begins to sell top notch titles and Steam becomes selective having a taste of all the greatest games for everyone’s individual game preference.

By: ironclad

ironclad — Sun, 16 Jul 2006 02:32:31 +0000

The switch to TCP from UDP, from my limited understanding, would be persistent online sessions, allowing map matchmaking etc. And I thought that now it is steam 2/3 that is running know. Please correct me if this is wrong, afaik.

By: Jobye

Jobye — Sun, 16 Jul 2006 02:21:30 +0000

Well, it seems Dark Messiah: Might and Magic is being released on Steam and the publisher for that game is Ubisoft. So, this is pretty big for Valve, it could potentially bring more Ubisoft games on Steam or maybe show other big publishers that Steam is a good place to distribute games.