238 replies to this topic

[Fear Radick]

Thorn Hallis, on 06 July 2012 - 05:37 AM, said:

'Mechs are powered by fusion reactors, so steam is out of the picture.

And the winner of the thread is,.......

[Derek Icelord]

Been discussed. Russ stopped in the previous thread and said they may consider it, but (for the developer/publisher) Steam is a serious investment.

[Fire for Effect]

Hopefully no; since the STEAMing pile of refuse grabs a not so small part of the much needed revenue....

[MaxFool]

Thorn Hallis, on 06 July 2012 - 05:37 AM, said:

'Mechs are powered by fusion reactors, so steam is out of the picture.

vettie, on 06 July 2012 - 07:48 AM, said:

LOL I suspect that STEAM will be present should the mech get really hot and move into water or under a waterfall (maybe even some hard rain). Overall, I think steam will be minimal in the game...

Arbalister, on 06 July 2012 - 08:29 AM, said:

Not so! PPCs, Flamers and Lasers all generate heat, firing them into water should cause billows of steam. Not to mention wading a hot 'Mech into a lake. At the very least steam should play a role in reducing visibility. What a great tactic - boil up the lake, dive into the steam cloud for cover...

You guys ignored much more obvious answer: steam turbines to create power. When I looked it up, I was suprised to find that it actually wasn't the primary source of power generation from Battlemech fusion reactors, but it still is secondary system.

From http://www.sarna.net...Mech_Technology

Quote

The second way of generating power is purely secondary and is called regenerative cooling. Regenerative cooling uses waste heat to generate power. Usually this is done with a closed-cycle gas or steam turbine. In a small way this is a part of the 'Mechs cooling system, even though this is not a part of the heat sink system proper - these are the "free" heatsinks in the engine. While the regenerative cooling machinery is very different from purpose built heat sinks, it still benefits from the materials and technology advances that have made "double strength" heat sinks possible. The regenerative cooling system adds negligible volume to the engine, due to its using the existing plumbing of the engines cooling system. It would be quite useful if all the waste heat from an engine could be soaked up by these so-called "integral heat sinks," but practical limitations mean only so much energy can be extracted from this lower-quality source. Bigger engines make more waste heat and can have larger regenerative cooling systems, but most 'Mechs will use some conventional heat sinks placed elsewhere to handle the excess.

So the correct version would have been: Mechs are powered by fusion reactors, so steam is very much in the picture.

[Adm Awesome]

Ok I have the counter-arguement to the apparent, expensive/major investment issue that you guys for some crazy reason believe that Steam is. Indie. Steam is getting to be known as the best thing ever for Indie games. It's really giving a breakthrough for the small, new developers to get out there and release their games to the masses. Now if your arguements were correct about how much of an investment it is for a decent sized company, then what makes you think a tiny group of like 10 guys could ever afford to make that kind of investment? If it was so costly and such to put your games on Steam, then Indie developers would go with a publisher instead of publishing their own stuff on Steam. Really I wish some of you people thought for a bit. Valve and Steam has done so much for the community, both the gamers AND the developers, that there shouldn't be any reason for anyone to have ill thoughts of them. Go look at their business model for pete's sakes, they are one of the most amazing companies I've ever seen. Their new employee pamphlet was leaked a few months ago, go read that and still tell me that they're the mischevious, tricksters that you believe they are.

[NeonKnight]

Thorn Hallis, on 06 July 2012 - 05:37 AM, said:

'Mechs are powered by fusion reactors, so steam is out of the picture.

Sadly, Fusion (and Fission) reactors work by boiling water to produce STEAM which then drives turbines to create electricity.




And a Fusion Reactor:

Quote

Here's how the process will work:


Magnetic-confinement fusion process

• The fusion reactor will heat a stream of deuterium and tritium fuel to form high-temperature plasma. It will squeeze the plasma so that fusion can take place. The power needed to start the fusion reaction will be about 70 megawatts, but the power yield from the reaction will be about 500 megawatts. The fusion reaction will last from 300 to 500 seconds. (Eventually, there will be a sustained fusion reaction.)
  
• The lithium blankets outside the plasma reaction chamber will absorb high-energy neutrons from the fusion reaction to make more tritium fuel. The blankets will also get heated by the neutrons.
  
• The heat will be transferred by a water-cooling loop to a heat exchanger to make steam.
  
• The steam will drive electrical turbines to produce electricity.
  
• The steam will be condensed back into water to absorb more heat from the reactor in the heat exchanger.

[Dhimmi]

Kay Wolf, on 06 July 2012 - 06:55 AM, said:

Those of you who use Steam, check your frame rates and your registry. You'll find a fall off in the former, and you'll find a completed screwed up mess in the latter. DO NOT USE STEAM, it is evil, it's just as bad as Norton, it puts its tendrils throughout your computer and takes control of it. A friend of mine has had to replace his computer -fortunately, it was under warranty each time- three times, now, because of Steam; the ***** won't quit using it, so I've stopped caring what happens to his machine, so it may be more than that, by now. We loaded Steam up on my desktop, and my son's desktop, about six months ago for some TF2 action, and had to reload the computers about three months later, right after vacation. Not thinking it had anything to do with Steam, since that's "just a game service", the boys loaded up Steam, again, and now we're looking at reloading the systems, almost on time, five months after loading it on.

As well, if PGI uses Steam to launch F2P, it has to be an exclusive deal and they can't go anywhere else. I dare say they will lose two-thirds of their customers if they go to that piece of garbage service. I wanted to play New Vegas and Skyrim, and those morons at Bethesda/Zenimax took their games to Steam; I had already heard bad things about this highly intrusive service -you may only need a username and password, but they get all of your information through background programs you don't know load onto the system- before, so when that friend who uses Steam and has had to replace his computer so many times GAVE me a copy of New Vegas, I toyed with the idea for several months before giving it back to him. Now, my fears about Steam have been fully realized, and as soon as we reload these computers, I will never touch the service, again.

Anyone with half-a-brain will learn to leave it be, as well. Let it die, find a new way to organize your friends and communicate with them, there are other means out there, but get away from this God-forsaken program. If MWO is put on Steam, I will demand my Founder's money back, and I will scuttle my mercenary unit, and I am not bull-******** about this.

i doubt the descripted things are only the work of steam, i use steam like i said it has/had its issues and it does indeed affect performance. BUT it is a lot less invasive as a lot of other DRMS on the market, The only DRM to date that "destroyed" my system on 2 occasions was Ubisofts DRM. which i stay very far from ( same with Origin) My point is that nowadays you cant get around DRMs the moment you buy your software legally ( and unless the indfustry sees the flaws in that approach DRM is going to stay...

So in a scenario of a choiche between two evils steam is certainly the lesser one.

[Lokust]

I can't imagine that anyone who is bashing on Steam has used it in the last 5 years. It used to be pretty garbage, but now I buy more games on Steam than anywhere else. I love being able to load Steam on any computer I own and install my stuff on it without dealing with discs. I love that is non-restrictive DRM that doesn't do crap like limit my installs and use one up if I upgrade to an SSD or change my video card.

Edited by Lokust, 06 July 2012 - 09:54 AM.

[WardenWolf]

Russ stated the following:

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.

In this thread:

http://mwomercs.com/...lable-on-steam/

From that, it seems that the concern for the Devs is how it impacts their income. I imagine they put some pretty serious restrictions on micro transactions, and probably take a good portion of the proceeds... if that applied to folks who installed MWO *outside* of Steam as well, then it would be a huge loss to PGI's proceeds.

Edited by WardenWolf, 06 July 2012 - 10:03 AM.

[Furniture]

I've noticed that most of the people who don't like steam can't offer a coherent explanation on why it's so bad. They just say that it is bad without any supporting arguments. The people who use and like steam will often offer sensible, logical explanations supporting it. That makes me think that the people who don't like it have never used it. It is clear whose argument is more convincing.

[Gallowglas]

Gamers are an opinionated, knee-jerk, anecdotal lot. As a result, gamers generally either praise Steam as the best thing since bacon, or denounce it as the end of western civilization. I've had very positive experiences with the service, as have many of my friends. I've discovered games I would otherwise have never tried were it not for Steam.

Yes, usage of the service definitely comes as a cost to a developer, but there's also a huge upside. My guess is that their decision to use it or not will depend on the economics involved. However, as someone else pointed out, it WOULD bring a large player base to the party. There are a lot of people who, for whatever reason, don't have this game on their radar, despite its polish. Actually, I see that that is exactly their standpoint from the quote in the post above me.

Honestly though, there are games which utilize Steam which also have non-Steam versions. I don't know why it has to be all-or-nothing. I personally would appreciate it happening.

Edited by Gallowglas, 06 July 2012 - 10:05 AM.

[Latriam]

Teirdome, on 06 July 2012 - 08:02 AM, said:

Hasn't Brian Ekman already stated that they won't be using steam? I can't remember where he stated it, but at launch they're not looking to have steam support.

The estimates are that Valve takes 20 to 30 percent of purchases. What it seems like a lot of companies do is release their F2P game without steam to get a good influx of cash. Then when they have a moderate player size and have been able to purchase hardware to support the influx of steam players they'll add it to steam.

Another thing to consider is that the most successful F2P game is League of Legends, which is no longer available on steam because Riot didn't want to give Valve the cut of their revenue.

+1

[Tavarish]

Couple years back, little after Borderlands came out, Steam got accused of money grubbing and ripping even small developers off. Randy Pitchford, from Gearbox, got good laughs from it. Statement was in the lines that if Steam is all about money grubbing and ripping off developers then Gearbox want to be abused by Steam. "Why?" you may ask. Randy answered to that by saying that they have never got so so much of straight income never before and welcome that kinda abuse any day of the week from Steam.

Thats why I'm always curious that how much Steam is grubbing from transactions? Almost seems like that cut is rather small and they push truck loads of cash into laps of developers of good games. Sure they need income for maintaining infrastructure of Steam servers and also turn some profit, but those few developers that have spoken out loud have stated that Steam is best thing that has happened to them income wise.

Why is that?

I hope that MWO comes into Steam because I personally prefer using Steam as gaming platform instead of multiple different installations and folders Tribes: Ascend just landed into Steam, F2P FPS, and from what I have been seeing from they are doing fine in Steam. Many of my friends instantly grabbed it and some went for Starter Pack on top of that. MWO would gain nice visibility boost through Steam for sure and would be seen as increased sales in in-game store for sure.

[Ironstrom]

As someone stated Earlier they couldn't understand how I got 30% actually 30% is a low cost value for the digital sales game market Desura for example asks for 40% and its teams up with steam often to provide keys vice and versa, and several other mmo's have mentioned why they wouldn't want to be connected to steam cause of the cost values associated with it an example would be the mmo Firefall.
So when f2p mmo's find's it to painful to even start on steam you can understand why even with a big market they'd only really want to go there if they're player base wasn't good enough to support them from the start, or they just really wanted to expand to a large user base asking for steam support. I'm work around games media news and spend at least 8 hours a day being privy to the information of the market on a daily basis so the figures are not fluff. But on ocansion publishers may have variable values and long term support with steam would probably lighten the load obviously values are bound to change between a company and steam based on your success values. In the least when an indie game partners up in steam they tend to take the 30-40%.
I have nothing against steam and I use them myself however I find they're news presentation to be abit variable suffice to say I won't go into to much detail here right now.
*Edit* "steam doesn't provide servers in most cases's to games, so what your paying to steam is the ease of download and update and in rare cases communinity ease. in which the publisher/developer could do themselves for a lower cost.

Edited by Ironstrom, 06 July 2012 - 10:33 AM.

[Tavarish]

Ironstrom, on 06 July 2012 - 10:28 AM, said:

In the least when an indie game partners up in steam they tend to take the 30-40%.

From where does these figures come from? 97% of given statistics are made at the spot of saying them etc. or do you have some documentation and links to back that claim up?

[Woska]

Do not want Steam to be involved in this project.

They don't provide any useful service in my experience. And having them involved in games just makes things more complicated. I had to get a steam account in order to play an off line game. How stupid is that? And then my Steam account got hacked and I got to spend a couple of days trying to jump through all the hoops to reclaim an account for a service that I didn't want or need.

So, if Steam is involved, I don't want it to be required.

[Ironstrom]

Steam does not list they're cut publicly when you query them with a game demo build or otherwise they'l get back to you with a value they evaluate from your game however you'l find on the Indiedb forum the site linked with moddb/desura one of the larger websites for smaller studio's you'l find peoples price comparisons and offers, the values are between those as stated values. The 2nd value i pulled out of a Firefall Q A of why they will not be on steam, and other like wise mmo's.
The 30% is pretty damn common minimal its been carried across from the forbid me not archaic sales of retail the retial pre cut was around the same value as such now they're are no distrubtion loses or cases of whoops we bought to many copies of this unpopular game however they is still a "great guys your game sold we'l be taking 30% off the top"

[Gallowglas]

You can talk all you like about how greedy 30% is (if that's even accurate), but if a company ends up with 35% more players as a result, then the math says it's still a good investment. It's as simple as that.

[grimzod]

EGH, on 06 July 2012 - 05:35 AM, said:

steam is the greatest thing to ever grace computer gaming and if it can bring more players to the game i would be happy if it was on.

It is also a money sucking vampire from the devs point of view....

[grimzod]

Furniture, on 06 July 2012 - 10:03 AM, said:

I've noticed that most of the people who don't like steam can't offer a coherent explanation on why it's so bad. They just say that it is bad without any supporting arguments. The people who use and like steam will often offer sensible, logical explanations supporting it. That makes me think that the people who don't like it have never used it. It is clear whose argument is more convincing.

Here are five reasons:

http://voices.yahoo....k-10772649.html

to whit:

Quote

Top 5 Things that Makes Steam Suck


Ashton Usher, Yahoo! Contributor Network
Jan 6, 2012 "Share your voice on Yahoo! websites.






If you're a PC gamer and you don't know about Valve's digital distribution platform, Steam, you may need to come out of the age of 1989 IBM computers and get with today's program. Steam is the largest digital distribution service in the world, and they cater to a huge variety of gamers with a catalog of games that spans countless titles from just about every big-name publisher in the gaming industry.
While Steam is hailed by many as the best in the business and it offers many great deals and services, there are a few things about Steam that also makes it suck...royally. Now this isn't just some bash-e'm-up list, but these are the top 5 things that really do make Steam suck.

No. 5: Auto-Updates
This is a pretty cool feature: all your games are automatically updated to stay fresh and current with whatever new changes a developer adds to the game. Awesome right? Sort of.
The biggest problem with auto-updating is that Steam doesn't give you the option to ask whether you want some games to auto-update or not. For some titles that may rank as a favorite it's nice to know that it's already up-to-date but it would be nice if Steam asked you before just automatically updating. For some games with custom mods an auto-update can sometimes result in replacing custom files.
A more viable solution would be if users actually get to see what's being updated and more importantly, why. I don't know about anyone else but before I let Windows do any updating I'm always curious to see what it wants to dump on my PC and why it wants to dump it there.

No. 4: Downloads Auto-Pause When Starting Another Game
I'm used to having multiple things running on the PC at any given time. And oftentimes I'm trying to blast through one game in order to get to the next, so there's always something downloading. I imagine I'm not the only one who does this. So why on Earth does Steam automatically pause all downloads once you enter a game?
While it makes sense to pause a download for an online-only game, or maybe to pause the download while you're watching a video through the Steam browser, it never made sense to me why Steam would pause a download unless I wanted it to. Basically, it means users have to stay vigilant and Alt-Tab back to the Steam browser to resume downloading.

No. 3: Steam Client Launching When Running The Native Exe
Why is it that when it's time to run a game without Steam the native .exe for the game still opens the Steam client? It's understandable that the desktop icon opens up the game and the Steam client but is it too much to ask for that when running the game from its directory to maybe not open Steam?
Technically this is tied to the whole piracy/DRM thing, and removing the need to open the Steam client while running the native .exe for a game would basically mean that anyone could copy and paste the game's executable and run it from any PC. At the same time, though, trying to run a game without the Steam client seems to be more of a hassle than what it's worth.

No. 2: Not Being Able To Choose Installation Destinations
Game's these days are huge, there's no denying it. While console versions of most games (or at least Xbox 360 versions) are compressed and optimized like most people wouldn't believe, the PC versions of games are not compressed and rarely ever properly optimized, leaving gamers with mammoth sized products that vary anywhere between 4GB and 25GBs worth of data.
As most gamers can imagine, having more than a handful of games exceeding 10GB can fill up the hard disk space rather quickly. The only problem is that if you get all your games through Steam there's the problem of having to keep all the games within the Steam directory. This means that if the drive with Steam on it starts filling up then you'll either have to play hard-drive-Tetris with the games installed or move the entire Steam directory onto a new hard disk.

No. 1: Not Being Able To Play While Another Game Is Launching
This is probably the one thing that makes Steam suck more than anything else on this list: not being able to run or launch any game installed through Steam when another game is installing, launching or actively updating.
If a game is synching with the cloud, preparing to launch or installing some other feature you're basically at the mercy of said updates. It once took about 10 minutes for Steam to do some sort of cloud synching (again, there was no way of knowing exactly what it was doing or why, but it took about 10 minutes for it to synch a Half-Life 2 update) all the meanwhile there was nothing to do in the meantime. When trying to launch games Steam quickly notified me that another game was updating and that playing a game while another game was updating was not possible. When trying to execute the game from its native directory it tried running through the Steam client once more, with the same notice popping up.

If Steam isn't going to tell users what it's updating it should at least ask first whether gamers want the update at that very moment. Auto-updating isn't bad but when it impedes on playing other games then it starts to get annoying.
Given that Valve seems to continually add new features to Steam (albeit slowly) maybe a few of these peeves will get resolved for those of us who like having a little choice in how programs run on our computers.

Oh, and they charge the devs 30% of net? Thats some crap aint it?

Gallowglas, on 06 July 2012 - 10:44 AM, said:

You can talk all you like about how greedy 30% is (if that's even accurate), but if a company ends up with 35% more players as a result, then the math says it's still a good investment. It's as simple as that.

Not if theyre leeches. 75% of WOTs userbase pay NOTHING.