Steam Under the Bridge

I wanted to talk a little bit about an issue which people often raise with us: why isn’t Determinance distributed on Steam?

The truth is, we’d love Determinance to be on Steam – we had Steam in mind when we first thought about distributing our game online. The reason it’s not there is that Valve didn’t want it.

Getting a game on Steam is not in any way straightforward. At the time we tried (September 2006), Steam was mostly geared around one thing: games which Valve wanted to have on there. They were apparently making approaches to devs and publishers, not the other way round. It took a significant amount of work and time to get a contact there, and he was, in the main, thoroughly polite and extremely disinterested.

Believe me when I tell you that the way we did this was to talk to Mark Healey who made Ragdoll Kung Fu. He was kind enough to reply to our emails – there wasn’t really a good reason for him to do this at the time: he was just being nice because that’s his nature. We then had to go through the rigmarole of endlessly calling two people at Valve before we got passed up to the right person. Direct approaches to Valve via their public email addresses yielded no response.

Now, things seem to be a little different, and they’ve broadened out their titles. However, when we asked, we weren’t given a reason why they decided not to distribute Determinance: it was just a no with a caveat that if we created other titles or “a substantial upgrade” then we should come back to them. It seemed to me to just indicate they felt the game to be thoroughly substandard, and it didn’t meet their baseline level of quality.

It was, obviously, incredibly demoralising at the time, and it’s given me no indication that it would be worth going back to them even though Determinance is now demonstrably successful. I would love it if people would contact Valve and tell them how much they enjoy Determinance, but I can’t give you a point of contact to do that because, well, Valve don’t want to hear from you.

The only thing that is particularly offensive about this whole affair is that people (interestingly not always Valve) hold up Steam as supporting indie development. Valve don’t want to take too many chances – they seem to want proven titles generally with publisher backing, titles their executives happen across at games conferences or IGF finalists- and that’s ok, but it’s not supporting grass-roots indie development in any way. Some indie titles don’t make the IGF (we didn’t), don’t go near a publisher and aren’t being toured around the conference circuit. And it’s odd because, hey, what have you got to lose? What’s the OVERHEAD for making a page on the Steam system and hosting some files on a server? Maybe it’s actually significant and too much bother – I would understand that if it could be proven.

If Valve would like to present themselves as supporting indie development (and, as I mentioned, I think this is not their particular intention with Steam) then they should have a page somewhere on their site which includes details on developer submissions. If anyone would like to show this to me, then I would happily agree that Steam is genuinely permissive pro-indie environment.

I’ve mentioned the problems we’ve had with using our time in the past – there’s no way I can do marketing when I’m doing testing, for example – and working with publishing partners seems to be increasingly the best way around this problem. It’s that or hire people to do PR and marketing, and frankly right now, we’d much rather hire people to do programming and art. Steam appears to offer an elegant solution: it’s a well-promoted portal with a great title library and a lot of awareness. The problem is, it’s still a closed shop to some people.

It is extremely hard to write a post about how you failed to achieve something without sounding like a whining child. I don’t bear the people we dealt with at Valve any ill-will whatsoever: as I said, they were polite and friendly to us. We’re still vexed about this situation, though: from the review scores we’ve received and from the response of those people who really love the game, we know Determinance has an audience. It’s a game which people like and it’s a product which can sell and excite people. Some people think it’s shit: that’s because it’s 1.) odd 2.) not a triple-A title BY ANY MEANS 3.) not an easily-forgiveable look-at-how-much-they’ve-accomplished experimental-gamplay indie title. It doesn’t fit into those categories. Are any of those reasons not to sell it? No: our entire business at this point in time says otherwise.  We’re taking the game to full worldwide retail and we’re using it as a springboard to launch our plans for the next two years – all that from a couple of computers in a little room in one of our houses: it’s a shame Steam won’t be along for the ride.  Yes, we won’t be looking at our two million PC units sold and going, “Ha, Valve totally missed out on that cash cow”, but was it ever supposed to be about the money?
Let it be said that I still use and enjoy Steam, and if we were offered a slot on there (most likely now this would come through a 3rd party) then we would certainly take it on reasonable terms. That said, it’s still going to be frustrating responding to, “Hey, this game is GREAT. You should put it on STEAM”, as if that process is simple and as if we hadn’t thought of that two to three years ago.

As Mischief Maker put it so well on our forums…

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This entry was posted on Monday, July 23rd, 2007 at 6:34 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “Steam Under the Bridge”

1. The Mode 7 Games Blog » Blog Archive » Help Get Determinance On Steam!:

   § October 2nd, 2008 at 12:54 pm

   [...] have had a very long and involved history of attempting to get Determinance onto Valve’s Steam download service, culminating in two [...]

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