I have explained my reasons for not using steam time and time again. I have specifically replied to you to explain my reasons. I pointed you to another thread with more explanations. Have you not read or understood anything I've posted? I'm not asking that you agree with my reasoning, and I'm not trying to change your mind about steam. But to say that 'you're doing it for the sake of being contrary' or assuming that I'm simply wanting to have a DRM-free version to pirate it, when my reasons have been stated and are nothing like either of those is mind blowing. Why am I not allowed to have a different point of view about steam? Why will you not accept (or read?) any reasoning if it doesn't sound like "Steam is great, and perfect for gaming!"? Why does everyone in the world have to conform to your ideas of how they should think? Why, when I can perfectly easily accept and respect that people love steam for its convenience etc., can I not get the same respect for my position, when I've clearly got more than 'I don't like steam' behind my stance? Once again, saying that I don't have reasons behind my arguments is simply an astounding thing to say... Again, I'm not asking the whole world to suddenly jump up and say "He's right, you know! I'll never use steam again!" Whether you understand my reasons or not. Whether you agree with my reasons or not. It should at least be clear that I have thought it through and have a basis for my reasoning beyond a simple dislike of steam. To ignore that completely, and say that I have not explained myself... I thank those people who have taken the time and effort to read and understand what I've posted. I'm grateful for the fact that while you may not agree with what I write, you recognise my right to have a different point of view. Some of you have acknowledged that my reasoning is sound even when you don't place the same weight on the things that I do. Without those posts, I doubt that I would still be here. I find it sad that a well thought position can be so thoroughly rejected by a community.
I disagree with this statement pretty much entirely. I don't see what kind of problems releasing the early stages of beta only on Steam would cause as far as development is concerned. If you are referring to problems caused for the people that don't use Steam, then that is true to an extent but as for actual problems from a development standpoint? I don't see any. The only reason Option 3 gets a finished product in our hands sooner is because Steam is simply easier for the devs to work with as far as updates are concerned. They don't have to spend time, money and manpower to do work that is otherwise not necessary with Option 3. It's simply better for the development of the game for Option 3 to be the one chosen, even if it is inconvenient for some people. I just don't see any legitimate problems associated with Option 3 other than some eager people being left to wait a bit longer for their version of the beta because they simply do not want to or cannot use Steam. I'd also like to point out that even with Option 3, a DRM-Free version of the beta will be released according to Molly and those players will still be able to participate in the beta, just not right away. They'll just have to wait until the game doesn't require so many frequent updates and the game is in a more stable condition but they will still get it. If there are other legitimate problems that I'm overlooking with Option 3, I haven't seen any posted yet. Perhaps I'm missing something obvious? I don't know.
What is all this DRM-Free VS Steam Beta B.S.? Is your game Portable or not? It's like people don't realize what a portable game is and what the complaint of steam is in the first place. There is no difference from Steam VS a Vendor that takes my credit card information in that regard. They verify I purchase something, take my money, and usually have the products on display with sales information. The complaint is steam is used by SOME developers as a "call to home" client. A lot of early access games I own on steam use it like that, and a FEW use it as simply a distributor. There are ways to get around this of course. But also realize your game will be torrented and crack regardless. Before you get on my case as a nay-sayer, I've already purchased this particular game TWICE. So how is this game going to be using Steam, because if its portable none of this matters and you can update the game all willy nilly as much as you want through steam. EDIT: But now I see, the argument of using steam at all. Now this is a decent argument, why should someone be forced to use a third party service in regards to a game. No idea. They are ALL torrented regardless. And cracked. So I don't know. NWO gaming service probably.
Even the first part? I thought it would be a given that when people have a choice that mentally amounts to "Give me it now" and "Give me it later", they'll choose "Give me it now". I don't see what's so difficult about keeping drm-free versions up to date. If you wanted to be "lazy" about it you could just give it a check to see if it's the right version and to warn/error if not. That way the users could download the update from the site. It's not optimal, but it's better than nothing. The other option is to write an updater for it. That should take a couple of hours at most, and from then on it's plain sailing. The actual process of updating should take at very most 10 minutes on a bad day, so I don't see what people are complaining about when they say that updating the DRM-free version too will slow the process down. This is also a good point: what would the steam version have that the DRM-free version wouldn't, in terms of code? Edit, bonus point: I get the feeling that this is like rigging the poll. Stacking up three options and wording them in increasingly attractive ways. It's like those people that conduct surveys with "Do you agree that _____" questions in them and don't realize that the wording alone will introduce statistically significant bias. Edit 2 electric boogaloo: To stack options 1 and 3 against each other, it becomes a question of... Do you want: (1) Everyone who bought it to be able to play it when beta starts (2) A marginally faster development cycle I don't think option 3 is all that attractive under my interpretation of the situation.
Unfortunately, I think the problem is that when you ask this question, you get a lot more responses from the anti-DRM people than is really representative of their actual prevalence among prospective users. People who care about DRM want to talk about it, people who don't . . . don't bother talking about it. Steam has never caused me problems. I don't even think of it as "DRM". I don't care about the version people are going to put up as a torrent so their friends don't have to pay for the game. So my vote is: Steam, all the way. Their framework has become the central infrastructure of legitimate PC gaming, and I'm perfectly happy to rely on their well-established, reliable systems for updating both the beta and the game proper. I don't care when pretentious anti-DRM hippies get their updates.
"Screw everyone else if it works for me!" Steam isn't perfect, and on several occasions it's just flat-out refused to work for me. It'd be nice if the entirety of gaming didn't go down when steam barfs.
In regards to the Give Now/Later idea, they wouldn't be spending as much time setting up the updates on option three. That leads to your second idea, and my second response. The time needed to make an updater is not a small amount, as it would take from a few days to upwards of a week or two trying to set something up when you could be bug fixing or updating. The downloading from the site may not be reliable due to the fact that not everyone checks for updates, leading to outdated bug reports. Yes, they could make a small script to alert the user of a new update. But then you take into mind the fact they they would need to compile two different packages for steam and the homespun updater, which takes more time. And then the fact that they will be updating very frequently, with updates having a chance of coming several times a day. That means even more packages to compile for the updaters and that's even more taxing on the developers. Tl;dr : It's complicated.
I wrote a 115-line (allman-style) updater in C when I was 16, it may have been pretty terrible but it worked, and didn't take anywhere near that amount of time to make. I would be very surprised if it took somebody a week to write an updater, and there are probably even pre-built or open-source solutions out there for this kind of thing. Even so, if it did take a week to write, what's in a week? As for compilation time, I would hope that's separate from development time. If they have a spare machine they could probably whip up a script to SSH into that machine, update the source repository on some stable branch, build everything, and then publish online to whatever extent that's possible. That way they can work on and even commit to the code while developing. Even so, if they need to compile locally it will still only minimally impact their ability to code or come up with new ideas for features or how to solve bugs in the mean time (which is arguably more important than the code itself).
This, again, has a lot to do with HOW the program uses steam. There are games on steam just call on it to download once and work with or without steam.
IMO it boils down to one simple question. Which option is the best for the development of the game? Nothing else even remotely matters. If releasing the beta only on Steam is what's best for development, then that should be what is done. If releasing the beta DRM free alongside Steam is what's best, that should be done. Hands down. It's not a question of what do people want, it's a question what is best for the game. It seems obvious that Option 3 is what's best for the game. Not because it gets us the game faster, that's just a byproduct of circumstance. The simple fact is that Molly spelled out quite nicely in the original post is that Option 3 allows more time to actually be worked on the game as opposed to managing updates. Simple. Option 1 seems to be the only remotely other viable option but it seems to cause too many issues with the devs focusing more on managing updates and less on actually working on the game. Option 2 is just throwing DRM free players a bone where they'll have an outdated incompatible game they can play around with, but otherwise will not be able to contribute much worthwhile to the actual development of the game since their versions will be outdated. I'm okay with Option 2 since that would allow everyone to experience the game, but most people would have to realize that at that point they wouldn't really be participating in a beta but rather playing an extremely buggy demo. However, since it's such a minority of players that would be using the DRM free version and the vast majority would still be using Steam, I'm okay with Option 2. All that being said, I don't know what's involved with developing a patcher for DRM free players to use. If it's as easy as some make it out to be where it's just a few hrs of simple programming and voila, it's now on par with Steam updating, then I don't see why that would be an issue. However, if it was that simple, why wouldn't they have just done that in the first place? Why bother with creating this thread at all? I have a feeling it's not quite as simplistic as some are making it out to be. I'm no programmer though, so I can't say. If it really is that simple, why are we even wasting time discussing it? I however believe it isn't that simple or Molly wouldn't have worded Option 1 that way. DRM free updating sounds like it will require more maintenance than building a simple patcher for it. Beyond that, I can only speculate. TLDR: Pick the option that's best for the development of the game. Nothing else matters.
For all intents and purposes, if they can be launched outside steam while steam is not running and not working, then I'd consider it DRM-free at least with regards to Steam-based DRM. Tell that to the guys I work with. They wrote a 200-line buggy pair of functions to badly emulate the behaviour of something that's already in the language's standard library. A problem can be really, really hard if you make it hard for yourself (or if you don't know how to approach it)
Not true, steam can tell where it downloads your games and what versions those game's files are, and what files should be there. The game developers can tell their game to either - Require Steam to launch, or - Launch independently from steam. I'm thinking a lot of people anti-DRM, pro-DRM and everywhere in between are failing to see what DRM is. We have DRM, but how much is what should be focused on. Regardless, a game can still use steam even if it launches without steam. Steam can verify the files for that specific game, and the game can still have steam functionality inside of it. But without steam turned on its disabled.
This I can agree on. Requiring steam to manage/install the game, if that's what it takes, is an acceptable amount of DRM. It's not invasive DRM, it's simply narrowing your choices for where to download it from and how. It also obviates most of the disadvantages of more invasive forms of DRM. Edit: it's 3am and my sentence structure is really going down the toilet, good night.
