67 replies to this topic

[ScrapIron Prime]

perfectblue, on 02 July 2012 - 12:18 PM, said:

Would you mind expanding upon this a little further? What sorts of cost's are associated with using Steam as a platform?

Steam doesn't discuss these details publicly. They work out pricing with each game's owner on a case by case basis.

That said, putting MWOnline through Steam could easily cost 20 percent of the game's revenue as overhead to Valve. That's a major consideration that would cut into the profit margins (and therefore the viability) of the game.

[Easily]

Russ Bullock, on 02 July 2012 - 12:12 PM, said:

We cant answer this at this point. Obviously steam's community and reach is amazing. However it also comes at extreme expense on the games revenue stream.

Obviously Valve takes a part of the profit.
The question to be answered however is: "Will the loss of that bit of profit be compensated by the big increase in sales generated by putting MWO on Steam?"

Personally, I think it'd be great to have MWO on Steam. It will attract new players, the advertising will reach many more potentional customers, you can use their servers as download locations (which are easily able to max out even my 140mbit connection while serving up to tens of thousands of people downloading the same thing at the same time) and as an added bonus cheating, hacking and trolling will go down as people will be afraid to lose their Steam account.

[TLBFestus]

Russ Bullock, on 02 July 2012 - 12:12 PM, said:

We cant answer this at this point. Obviously steam's community and reach is amazing. However it also comes at extreme expense on the games revenue stream.

If you don't mind answering this Russ, what kind of bite do they take out of you?

[Chillybill]

humm I don't understand all this computer stuff but it was my understanding that MMO was going to be mostly server based which I understood was to better control the game, cheating, etc. but don't that also mean a smaller download and not really downloading the game itself rather like a plug in to play the game or something, someone explane it to me

[phinja]

Russ Bullock, on 02 July 2012 - 12:12 PM, said:

We cant answer this at this point. Obviously steam's community and reach is amazing. However it also comes at extreme expense on the games revenue stream.

BenEEeees VAT GROWN BACON, on 02 July 2012 - 12:17 PM, said:

When negotiating with Gabe, bring along some nice cake!

And hats as a peace offering, and ponies, i heard he's into those.
Also be prepared to do a dance.

In all honesty i could see MW:O going to them eventually once it builds up steam.. er, i mean gets going. That's like advertising to every PC gamer in existence.

[Mech Wrench]

who cares, just show me a download button! Its only 4gb, i'm sure we'll all manage fine no matter what distribution method they use.

Edited by Mech Wrench, 02 July 2012 - 12:45 PM.

[BenEEeees VAT GROWN BACON]

phinja, on 02 July 2012 - 12:41 PM, said:

And hats as a peace offering, and ponies, i heard he's into those.
Also be prepared to do a dance.

In all honesty i could see MW:O going to them eventually once it builds up steam.. er, i mean gets going. That's like advertising to every PC gamer in existence.

OMG Mechwarrior themed hats for TF2 and DOTA 2!!! HOW AMAZING IS THAT?!?!!?







I keed I keed, put down the pitchforks

[Grimarch]

goddam just assumed it was, but if its costly for the dev guys then fine, will we be able to download it from one of their servers, i dont even have a dvd/cd anymore in my pc!!!

[LogicalTightRope]

I say this blindly, without having the slightest idea of what kind of gashes Valve will make in your wallet, but I think that putting this on Steam would be well worth it. Your audience will suddenly be fivefold larger. Or more.

Plus, think of all the people that would download and try it out if you gave 'em an Atlas head for their heavy in TF2!

[Grimarch]

ChiiliBiill its a server based game but all the graphics and stuff needs to be "fat" i.e. installed on your PC, its not a Web game like those on facebook etc. Average install for these games is 2GB to 4GB so would take 5 mins or so to download so not an issue...problem is Piranas servers wont cope with everyone downloading so hopefully the founders will get a nice download link early on with the game not working until the correct date..hint hint....

[Easily]

LogicalTightRope, on 02 July 2012 - 12:44 PM, said:

I say this blindly, without having the slightest idea of what kind of gashes Valve will make in your wallet, but I think that putting this on Steam would be well worth it. Your audience will suddenly be fivefold larger. Or more.

Plus, think of all the people that would download and try it out if you gave 'em an Atlas head for their heavy in TF2!

Think of what happens if MWO ends up in one of those Steam Holiday Sales.
Last Christmas, the servers of the overwhelming majority of those games just plain crashed because of the gigantic surge of people signing up and trying out the games.

Millions of people (possibly / probably over 10 million?) tried those games.

I think it'd do MWO really, really good if they put it on Steam.

Edited by Easily, 02 July 2012 - 12:50 PM.

[ScrapIron Prime]

Chillybill, on 02 July 2012 - 12:40 PM, said:

humm I don't understand all this computer stuff but it was my understanding that MMO was going to be mostly server based which I understood was to better control the game, cheating, etc. but don't that also mean a smaller download and not really downloading the game itself rather like a plug in to play the game or something, someone explane it to me

This is going to be a graphics-intensive PC game with a central login server. You have all the graphics and everything handled on your PC so the install will be rather large. The server keeps track of positions, conditions, hit/miss, cash, stuffz, XP, etc, while your PC renders everything. This keeps the bandwidth low for even hi rez stuff.

Edited by ScrapIron Prime, 02 July 2012 - 12:52 PM.

[Remf]

From MWLL FAQ:

Quote

An estimated twenty-five million people have played a Battletech or MechWarrior RPG or read a Battletech or MechWarrior novel, and at least ten million people have played the Battletech-based computer games. More than eleven million copies of MechWarrior PC games and a similar number of MechWarrior: Dark Age Collectable Miniatures Game figures have been sold to date. Over three hundred and fifty different Battletech/MechWarrior game and toy products have been produced to date; several products, such as the Technical Readout series, the core rulebook and base box set, have been in continuous print (in one form or another) since publication. More than five thousand World Wide Web pages have been created to date by the online Battletech community.

So there's certainly a large potential player base... just need to make sure it's both easily accessible (pro: Steam) and affordable to both the players and the publisher (con: Steam). Totally not sure how all that would work; I'd love to see it on Steam, but I'm more concerned that it is long-term viable. Guessing it's going to be a Can->Will, Can't->Won't type decision that we'll never see the details of.

Edited by Remf, 02 July 2012 - 12:54 PM.

[Teirdome]

I haven't bought an item in an f2p on steam. Do they make you use the steam wallet for all in-game purchases or something?

[Easily]

Teirdome, on 02 July 2012 - 12:56 PM, said:

I haven't bought an item in an f2p on steam. Do they make you use the steam wallet for all in-game purchases or something?

Yeah. You load money onto the wallet whichever way you want (Credit Card, PayPal, even bank transfer iirc) and then you can use the credit in your wallet to do the microtransactions ingame (Dota2 and TF2 do it this way at least).

[SmoothUK]

TLBFestus, on 02 July 2012 - 12:38 PM, said:

If you don't mind answering this Russ, what kind of bite do they take out of you?

I think it would be something like 30% of all revenue from users who play via steam. It doesn't make much sense to expand to using something like steam until you're own player-base growth begins to slow.

[dezgra]

If you have ever had an issue with your steam account, you will be like me and "just say no".

[Endless Ike]

Nay on Steam. BattleTech has a huge built in following. This is not a new IP or a fringe existing IP, where the exposure will drive sales. People know BT and will find it once its up and running. There will also be a lot of pub once its released. I think MWO will have a sustainable population off the bat and can grow organically without having to hitch its cart to Steam.

[JP Josh]

i dont know if they can or not but if they do and they allow us to use our steam wallet in game then i think 50 percent profit that goes from our steam wallet into the game should go to steam and the other half to piranha. if the client downloads from MWOs main sight however then steam wont recieve 50 percent profit from that client when they spend money.

just my 2 cent for rough drawn business model

that way if steam wants to and they agree to this piranha willstill be able to make evenue and have more advertizing out for free and make a 50% more profit.

Edited by JP Josh, 02 July 2012 - 01:07 PM.

[Kobold]

Why would I want PGI to give any more at all to Valve when they could be spending that money on devs producing more content, or server hardware, or any of a billion things?

I also absolutely loathe cross-platform social crap. XBox live added some new messenger thing which seems to exist only for allowing spam bots to send me sex ads.