![]() This is a big advantage for all customers.Īlso, do not forget that Valve, the company that operates Steam, has a direct financial incentive to maintain the platform in the future and keep it as attractive as possible. Steam creates a financial incentive for developers to update their games long after release and to bring it to as many Steam platforms as possible. It is much more likely, in fact, that a game you own on DVD will not work anymore at some point in the future because:Ī) The last available version of the game does not run on whatever the latest hardware or Windows version is.ī) You may have switched to a different operating system or even a new type of hardware for your living room PC (read about BIG PICTURE below).Ĭ) Or maybe the DVD is no longer readable. (sidenote: We do provide a "no-steam.exe" for our games for exactly this extremely unlikely case. What if Steam goes out of business in the distant future? Maybe I will not be able to play my games then. One argument commonly heard against Steam on our forums is that people are worried that they are dependent on Steam's existence in the long term. I can not overstate how the above two points as reasons to consider giving Steam and the company that operates, Valve, a leap of faith. This even works if you bought a game for windows in the past and the developer adds support for another operating system later. You buy it once and you can play it on all operating systems that the developer supports. Steam encourages all developers to turn their titles into so-called "Steamplay" games, where versions for all operating systems are part of just one product. Steam's solution to this problem is quite radical and customer-friendly. Unfortunately these externally developed ports had a number of problems for us as a developer as well as for our customers:įor the customer: Should you ever switch to a different operating system and want to continue playing our games, you had to buy the game again.įor the developer: Since the porting is not based on a single set of source code, it gets increasingly expensive to develop updates for all platforms. External partners ported our games over to MAC and Linux and sold them as a new product, sometimes for a different price. For some time already, both Mac OS and Linux have become valid alternatives. Today when we talk of "PC Games", we no longer ONLY mean Windows. ![]() Without Steam we would not have been able to provide this service an advantage not only for us but for all our customers. We have seen that even such an old title as X: Beyond the Frontier (1999) still finds new fans on Steam, and we have been able to develop the updates to make a game from 1999 run on Windows 7 64bit and Windows 8. This service is only affordable for a developer who is still making money from old games.Įvery developer who did not sell all rights to a publisher, but is in the fortunate position to sell directly on Steam has a huge incentive to continue to support their game in this manner. Developing updates for a game long after its original release, however, does cost money. Among other things, these updates also allowed our games to continue to run on new versions of the operating system or on more modern hardware (this patch, for example, was needed to make XBTF run on fast machines) ( XBTF patch for Win64). But now lets get to the main reason for this mail:Įver since the first X game, we have released free updates for our games. Every time you want to switch from one machine to another, you have to be online for a moment before you can switch that machine back into "offline" mode. Another important fact: you can install our games on multiple machines, but you can not play on multiple machines at the same time (just like with a DVD). You can play games without being online through the so called "offline mode", but yes you do need to install the Steam client and have to be online when you install the game on a new machine. The most common misconception is that people believe they have to be online to play our games. Here is a link to our FAQ to help those of you who want to know what Steam really is and what it does and does not do: Since I take these concerns seriously, I would like to respond to the main criticisms from my perspective as a game developer, and make an important announcement at the same time. After our move to make Steam a mandatory requirement for activation and updates of X3: Albion Prelude at the end of 2011, these discussions heated up and some of our fans turned away from our games in protest at this step. ![]() Ever since 2006, when our games became first available on the Steam platform, there have always been critical discussions about Steam in our community. ![]()
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