Tridus and Dale are correct, Steamworks is free.

Also, for people who didnt notice, Firaxis is owned by Take Two (2K) so both developer and publisher are same company.

As a holder of several advanced degrees from the School of Hard Knocks, the more I learn about steam the more it resembles an old man driving a windowless van, offering free candy.... errrrr.... free steamworks to every kid he sees -- and we're the kids he's targeting.

Right now we're in the free candy phase.  How that changes once he gets enough of us into his van and he closes the doors, we'll have to wait to see.

Nothing in life is free.  No deal is too good to be true.  Stay out of land wars in Asia.

The salient comparison from my line of questioning is how much Firaxis would make if they offered a DD civ5 themselves -- that's the apples-to-apples comparison.

The interest of programmers/players/publishers/whoever are all different, which is one of my points.  Valve just has to sell itself to Take2 and they'll bring along 2k and Firaxis.  The players are the tail end here.  As a player that's where my interest lies.

The FAQ is troubling in how it hints to Valve's selection criteria.  Once/if steam becomes the de facto standard, by virtue of which games Valve deems steam-worthy they'll affect what games we'll get to choose from.  In the 'old' days it was 'studios' (often 1 person like Garriott) who determined what games we'd see, then it was studios + publishers, now it'll be studios + publishers + valve between us and our games (unless/until Valve moves in on the publishers...).

You're comparing apples (big budget games) and oranges (small budget music).  Comparing similarly-sized projects in music and games and the difference is much smaller, enough that comparisons to the new models can be informative.  If I was Valve I'd be making your 'no comparison' argument as that best serves their interests.

 

Get off my lawn! My apologies for missing a time when I was a teenager and when people played the multiplayer games we made for my BBS they were well educated and if unbearably sarcastic and arrogant at least were respectful when they pwned you. It is a delicate balance of insolence and playful fake-cruelty that is lost on today's crowd.

Steam took the blame and was working with her to fix the problem. It only happens on steam on all games she has on steam and they're working on a fix for the last six months. Maybe you know more than they do as I don't know your pc expertise and since I used to do tech support ages ago I know most of us weren't the most knowledgeable but maybe things have changed.

The handful of times I decided to try Gamespy multiplayer on any of the previous civ versions it was terrible and terrifying from nasty racism to homophobia. Most gamers who are online may be adults but most multiplayer gamers are a younger demographic and they aren't upset and disgusted by the nastiness and take it for granted.

Are you considering these kids in their mid twenties adults? 26 is the new 18 or so I hear. Reading the average freshman or sophomore essay is enough to make me cringe. When you don't see a single glaring terrifyingly bad mistake and feel relieved it is a bad sign.

Jerks I can handle. I was on teh intertubes on my c64 and ran into jerks and eventually flame wars but a terrible insult back then wouldn't even phase someone today. Nowadays whenever I'm forced to interact with the popular "xbox crowd" it saddens and sickens me. Which is why I mention Left4dead which was a fine multiplayer for about six months until it became popular. I simply cannot play the game with random people. When I had my PS3 it was quite noticeable the lack of trolls, douches, and the young which was a major reason for buying it besides as a bluray player. There were a lot of jerks but that is ok as every group has jerks but I never had people telling one of my best friends that they were going to tar and feather then skin him alive just because of his skin color on PS3. That is the one really major negative about user friendliness and ubiquity of the internet and products that use it.

When you had to be a nerd of some sort to be online you might have had autistic/ausperger's savants being dicks but it was very rarely malice behind cruelty but more social incompetence which is much more forgivable as everyone is ignorant about something.

Your actual question was if they'd make more money by doing all the stuff Steamworks gives them for themselves. Since Steamwork costs $0, I've pretty well established the answer there is no.

This isn't much different. How much would it cost Firaxis to set up their own DD store, download servers, and so on? Considering they'd have to support it for an indeterminate number of years while people who buy Civ 5 from it come back to download the game?

That kind of infrastructure is not cheap, especially when your usage of it is fewer then one game a year. Comparatively, Steam, Impulse, etc do it with lots of games for a fixed cost to the developers.

You see some companies trying to go their own way on this, and the results are usually awful. Ever tried the EA store? That thing is just terrible, and if that was the only place offering Dragon Age I would never have bought it.

You're the one who brought up music originally. There is no similarly sized project in music, you don't put together a team of 100 people to create a CD. The big expense in music is in marketing. The big expense in games is the game.

My line of questioning is how it'd be if Firaxis went it alone, which includes DD sales themselves (that's part of how the net is changing the old model).  Your response "Firaxis is almost certainly still making more money even with that 30% cut [using steams' DD] then they are off retail copies..." compares store-bought vs steam DD -- apples&oranges, not firaxis DD vs Steam DD -- apples&apples -- which is my line of questioning.

Which has nothing to do with your apples&oranges store-bought vs steam DD point.

Again, you're comparing apples&oranges.  If you refuse to accept the premise of my question that's fine, but don't change it then claim you're answering it 

I use Steam.  I like Steam.  Frankly the latest version of impule might be better but, at least for me, Steam was in the right place at the right time.  Now all my friends are there and I prefer to play my games on Steam.  I also love the games that Stardock makes. 

Ultimately I want to log into one place to find all my friends.  I would rather see Stardock and Valve play nice.  I don't dislike Impulse in any way...but its really hard to get my friends to migrate once all their games are on Steam.  Steam has critical mass.  If Stardock REALLY wanted Impulse to be THE digital distribution platform I think they missed the boat.  Valve made the deals.  I personally prefer a Stardock that focuses on great games but ultimately it may be the digital distribution that pays Stardock's bills and I understand why they want their share of it.  I understand the corncerns about DRM but have never encountered any DRM related issues. 

I would prefer to give Stardock my money because I prefer their principles but in reality I buy most games on Steam because that is where my friends are.  I'm not sure how Stardock solves this.  I'm certainly gonna buy Civ V and I will probably buy it on Steam because, again, that's where my other games are and where my friends are.  Unless Stardock gets similar deals for major games that forces all my friends onto Impulse as well I probably will continue to buy on Steam. 

...but I would like a reason to buy more games from Impusle...

So you're saying that Steam is the better product; has lots more people using it - and Impulse is only for old men with beards?

 

EDIT:  For the record, it doesn't matter if a game comes on Steam or Impulse:  I use both. 

Having said that:  Impulse's UI for purchasing games is frankly crap - It's the reason 99% of the games I buy are on steam.  I hate trying to find a game via the catalog.  More people use steam because their UI is better (even tho I had issues with their lastest UI release).

Oh, and prepurchased Civ V a long time ago - soon as it popped on Steam.  Don't care about DRM or anything else - I want the game and have never had a problem with DRM.

Because obviously with steamworks integrated in, you can use civ5 without steam...

Other than Stardock games and software, it's unlikely that you will see many "Impulse exclusive" games or software, simply due to Frogboy's views on monopolies. Sure, games that use Reactor are required to sell on Impulse in addition to whatever other vendor the publisher chooses, but that doesn't mean that Impulse is required. I could go out and buy Elemental from Walmart, uninstall Impulse from my computer, and never use my Impulse account to log in to multiplayer, and, assuming I::R operates as advertised, never need to install Impulse to update Elemental. Can you say the same of a steamworks game?

When someone says "buy on steam" they don't mean add it to their steam games list. They mean buy it from steam store which is definately NOT the only place to buy civ5.

Secondly the only real difference in major functuality between steam and impulse (steam is better than Impulse in most ways btw) is that steam has its store tied to its service. That means the store needs to be running as well as steamworks to play the games.

Thats a really good business decision and Brad would have made it too if he wasn't competeing (and therefore needs to offer something steam dosn't).

First of all, I also answered that in my last post.

Second of all, how is it apples & oranges? You have to sell the game somehow. Most sales are still at retail. Saying Steam's cut is bad when it's smaller then the retail cut is flatly absurd. Why would it be bad if Firaxis makes MORE money off Steam copies then off retail copies? More money to the developer is what we're all after, isn't it?

It's also almost certainly true that they make more by selling on Steam then by setting up their own store. If setting up your own store was easy and cheap, everybody would be doing it. But doing it well is not cheap, and keeping servers and bandwidth for years because you sold someone a game once is an endless drain on the bank account. Steam takes care of all that for a known up front cost. It's not a bad deal.

No, you're bringing up comparisons and then changing them when you don't like my reply.

You're comparing steam DD (apples) with brick&mortar boxes (oranges), instead of steam DD (apples) with Firaxis DD (apples).  As that was the comparison my point is predicated upon, it's the salient one.

Picking your apples&oranges instead of an apples&apples is the fallacious Argument By Selective Reading -- cherry picking the worst case example to make your chosen point, ignoring valid comparisons.

That's an amazing ability you have, knowing what others are asking better than they do.

Me, not having your remarkable skill, when told that I'm misconstruing, I take them at their word and ask for clarification, then accept said clarification.

Next time I have a question I'll be sure to ask you what it is. 

Then you'll have both the question and answer and I won't have to post at all

A while ago there was a thread linking to an article that detailed Kotick's philosophy in regards to activision-blizzard and games.  I ran across some reports from DICE1009 where Newell gave the keynote address which gives some idea of what his philosophy is.  Sources are Geek.com, MTV Multiplayer, and G4TV.com.

"Valve has hired an experimental psychologist to come up with new ways to excite users with pricing models and sales. He suggested one in 25 users that buy Left 4 Dead get another Valve game for free."

"Newell added that Valve has hired an experimental psychologist to explore more unconventional sales tactics. He joked that the move was “turning us to the dark side of B.F. Skinner...”

"Valve aims to touch its customers in some way every three weeks, not every three years when a new game is shipped."

"As far as privacy goes, Gabe believes that people are willing to give up system and personal information if they feel it's being used to get a better service. Steam's hardware survey is an example of this. Rather than spying on users for nefarious reasons, Gabe believes things like its hardware survey helps with better sales of products and service. As long as companies are transparent, he feels that customers will accept this."

"By using the service’s strengths such as extensive data-mining capabilities, the company can be given a competitive advantage. Newell warned, however, that intrusive measures must be transparent and can be proven to give the customer better service or better games."

"With Team Fortress 2, Valve shipped the game as a service and not a product."

"Right now, those two social networks [Facebook and MySpace] are sources of interesting features, but not quite right for a partnership currently."

"Perhaps Newell’s grandest vision of them all was the evolution of game companies into more general “entertainment companies.” He reckoned that most consumers were similar to Harry Potter fans, who are fans of the entire franchise and not just the books or just the movies. To that end, Newell intends to take Valve in the “entertainment” direction. The studio tested the waters with Team Fortress 2 animated shorts using the game’s characters. The house that made those shorts will be making TF2 comics in the near future, Newell announced."

"the winner of the next-generation console war won’t be whichever box has the best graphics, but rather which machine allows game companies “to have this relationship with your customers.”

"Video game companies acting as "entertainment companies": Newell said he is "obsessing" over gamers' expectations for "what kind of entertainment company they want us to be." They are fans of properties, not forms of entertainment, fans, to use his example, of Harry Potter, as opposed to just Potter books or just Potter movies. As a result, he said he is moving away from thinking of Valve as a video game company. One example is the introduction of "Team Fortress 2" video shorts made by Valve. The next will be that same team's "TF2" comics."

---

Positive news:
"During the Holiday sales... At 75% off, they are making 15% more money than they were at full price."

---

From all this it's clear that steam being required even for single-player offline Civ5 games isn't an 'accident', but it's the goal, so steam/steamworks was made to be taken as a whole and not to be divided up to allow choice of what to include.  Steam needs to be installed and running in the background as often as possible for valve's desired goals as described above -- extensive data-mining, offering us advertising as often as possible, 'touching' us at least every 3 weeks, becoming an 'entertainment company' not merely a video game company, possibly a partnership someday with the likes of Facebook and MySpace, etc.

Newell's goals seem similar to Kotick's, which makes sense from their perspective.

Same here. I've been discouraged by changes at both Valve and Blizzard lately. I am beginning to understand why the designer of Portal left and why a large chunk of Blizzard's talent departed around 2004 to form ArenaNet (Guild Wars 2 is looking awesome, by the way).

You sound as if you think any business man like Gabe should be working for the betterment of mankind rather than their shareholders, the companys bottom line or thier own pocket.

Why would he be doing anything other than kotick? (trying to take over the world improve thier profit margin).

This is the fallacious argument Hyperbole.

How does my pointing out Newell's philosophy -- some of which I don't care for, some I do, and some I have no feelings on either way -- suggest to you that I think "..any business man like Gabe should be working for the betterment of mankind rather than their shareholders, the companys bottom line or thier own pocket."

Because all the things they do are good business decisions. If you don't like his business decisions you either think they are not going to make enough money or you have some kind of 'ethical' objection.

Thus, "you sound like you have an ethical objection to steams pratices of making as much money as possible by growing thier market share agressively by trying to force thier platform via atractive well proven systems that developers have little other choice but to accept." which is the plain version of what I said.

This is the fallacious False Choice -- if I don't like his business decisions then X (not making enough money) or Y (moral objection).  Here's what you're ignoring:

Newell has his priorities -- maximize his profits, etc.

I have my priorities -- good games ('good' being defined by me).

Commenting on Newell's philosophy from my point of view does not mean he's wrong in his priorities, or that I think he should be "...working for the betterment of mankind rather than their shareholders...".

This ain't rocket science, it's basic rhetoric and logic.

That's the fallacious Non Sequitur -- your conclusion does not follow from my statements.

Hyperbole, False Choice, and Non Sequitur in 2 posts -- you're on a roll!

I don't see how what I said isn't true.

You want X, steams action are is proivding Y (in your eyes, yours and his priorities do not match).

Thus your objection to steam seems to be that they arn't putting 'better games' ahead of profits.

Remember, you commented on the actions of Newell, you gave no real conclusion other than Newell is just like Kotick (a widely hated figure).

I commented on your comment that it seemed like you were saying that newell should NOT be doing what Kotick is doing and should be doing something else.

I'll try again using your statement "...[1]If you don't like his business decisions you either think [2] they are not going to make enough money or [3] you have some kind of 'ethical' objection."

Regarding [1] ("...If you don't like his business decisions...") -- some I like (the 75% off one for example), some I don't have an opinion on, some I dislike.

Let's just focus on those I dislike (no need to specify them for this).

Regarding [2] ("...they are not going to make enough money...") -- I think just the opposite, that they'll provide money hats for Newell and his employees.

Regarding [3] ("...you have some kind of 'ethical' objection.") -- this is business, no ethics involved (well, except for things like the Ford Pinto's exploding gas tanks and the like, which clearly aren't applicable here).

So your 2 'choices' are false.

The correct answer is that I think some of his decisions make the game worse for me.

Yours was the fallacious False Choice because you offered only false choices, and purposely excluded any other options.

This does not give you license to make up stuff and present it as something I said/believe/etc., as you did here: "You sound as if you think any business man like Gabe should be working for the betterment of mankind rather than their shareholders, the companys bottom line or thier own pocket."

You put words in my mouth (see above), then argued against those words that I didn't say.

Hey, that's Strawman.

An entire post and you have yet to say which of his decisions make the game worse for you. How can anyone argue against you when all you state are vague things like "I think some of his decisions make the game worse for me."

You are intentionally vague, then lash out against anyone who tries to interpret your nebulous opinion. How about this: from now on, stop being so abstruse and list your arguments in bullet points so those of us lesser than you can make acceptable arguments.

And instead of dissecting other people's posts, try dissecting your own opinions and statements before you post, so that we may see all facets of your arguments.

Excellent write up there Nick, thank you for including all of that information.  It's difficult to argue against such transparency, however it works both for and against VALVe as a whole.  I do agree with your last line, and VALVe's method is vastly superior to Kotick's method.  The absolute bare-basics is: VALVe do new things in new ways, thus generating more income.  Kotick/Activision find new ways to charge more for the same thing, thus generating more income.

My primary issue is not with Valve's goals - I think a company in today's world needs to do more than the usual press release crap of Activision Blizzard if they expect brand name loyalty, and Valve do this in new and exciting ways, such as the Portal 2 information leak that was completed with an update to Portal.  Their games are also of an extemely high calibre, and they tend to take their time on something to get it right (Half-Life 2: Episode 3) or provide a lot of post release content to make a purchase more attractive in the long term (Team Fortress 2, Counter-Strike: Source).

My primary issue with Valve isn't with their game development, but rather with practically everything else Newell mentioned.  As a service, Steam is incredibly unreliable and they have an almost complete lack of customer service in any and all regards.  They're simply not capable of delivering the quality of service needed to operate at the level.  Their reach is well beyond their grasp.
Numerous cases of over-charging, double charging, etc., for titles have been reported, and the general response from Valve is it's not their problem.  They also have the standing policy of never un-banning an account, and a ban from one title on an account bans the entire account and voids any and all licences connected to it, resulting in people losing thousands of dollars of software because they cheated in one title.
Valve also have some shady business practices in terms of Steamworks, which as you mentioned is intentionally shackled to their store.  Forcing other people's customers to be Valve's customers is entirely unethical, and screams of a company who don't have faith in their services gaining steam (no pun intended) on it's own merits.  It's less about providing a high quality of service or transparency - if it were, why does Steam check for updates at start up, then announce random updates once hte program has started which require a program restart, while background downloading with no notification of what its downloading - and more about ensuring a high volume of customers, which provides them with more muscle in terms of negotiating contracts.

While I can appreciate what Valve are trying to do, I've pretty much lost faith in them.  Left 4 Dead 2 is a good example of their shifting business focus, and the E3 surprise could have quite easily been Left 4 Dead 3, and no one would've been surprised.
Now that they've got enough muscle with their customer numbers on the PC, they've moved over to the larger console market, with the PS3 being the only console willing to allow a developer to operate their own service on it.  The decision was less about providing a better customer experience, and more about gaining better numbers of customers.

I use Steam, but I don't buy full products on it that aren't made by Valve, and I don't buy full titles that are shackled to it like Civilization V.  God forbid they over-charge me for Civilization V and then ban my entire account for charging back their account for my money after they ignore my emails and delete my forum posts.  If I had to pick a single company through whom I had to go through to game on the PC, Valve are not the ones I would pick.

I am not sure if I agree with this idea. Today's world pretty much says Activision Blizzard can do whatever the hell they want and their fans will by the game regardless. Lack of dedicated servers, 15 dollar map packs (part of which are recycled maps), splitting a game into 3 parts. If  anything, 2K just wants a piece of that. I mean get rabid fans to give you more money, funnel them to one service, start charging the hell out of them for small incremental additions they label DLC. Sounds like a gravy train to me. Personally, I've seen a lot of expansion packs these days featuring less and less often because of the DLC released around them.

In any event, Activision Blizzard has no reason to change. Most their players aren't knowledgable about the subject to care, or just don't care in general. I saw a couple of people surprised by some issues with MW2, but those 15 dollar map packs and 25 dollar mount sales... what do they care if they lose some fans when they've got others willing to pay 2 or 3 times what was lost by the people turned off by the business practice.

And how is that necessary in order to prove Aractain's assertions regarding my opinions are false?

Answer -- it isn't.

Aractain put false words into my mouth.  Correcting that didn't require stating exactly which decisions of Newell's I don't like.  The salient point is that his false choices were incorrect, and I gave the correct reason which you quoted.

Your expectations are just that -- your expectations.  I accept responsibility for what I do.  I do not accept responsibility for what you expect me to do.

I wasn't vague.  I presented information essentially uncommented upon, for the reader to draw their own conclusions from.

This is the fallacious argument Ad Hominem -- personal attack implying I think I'm superior.

The intention of my post regarding Newell was to put out information essentially uncommented upon and let the reader draw their own conclusions.  I did that.  You expected something different and now criticize because I did not meet your expectations.

Sorry, I was trying to draw a clearer line between what Valve means and what it actually does.  Obviously I didn't.  I'm in support for a company being more one-on-one with it's customers.  Valve does this in part, with it's Portal 2 information leak, which I can assure you fans really enjoy.  However, Valve are trying to become a faceless corporation with their Steam service - their customer support system is almost entirely automated, and all replys to your emails are copy/paste answers to ensure complete compliance with their terms of service agreement - so their contradicting itself.  They want Stardock's loyal fanbase, Microsoft's level of industry control and Activision Blizzard's profit margin.


And there is the problem.  The mindset of "ROFLCOPTER A business is truying to make munniez, and you think theys evil? ROFLCOPTERTEABAG11!!!111ELVEN IMA BUY CoD51 DAY ONE BITCHNOOBS!" sums up the majority of Activision Blizzard repeat customers.  Educating these people is the only way to put a top to the industry wide shift towards Activision Blizzard's business practices, and if we were actually capable of educating those morons we could solve around 95% of the worlds problems overnight.

Seriously... To me, you sounded like you were saying X. I posted that.

Then you start attacking my post for trying to "put words in your mouth". You know, rather than saying "Thats not what I mean". In fact it sounds like that IS what you mean (you want Gabe to focus on making better games rather than profit), and you are just trying to deflect my observation.

I make a half serious observation and you try and dismantel it rather than replying to it or ignoring it - the man doth protest too much!

 

If Gabe Newell says "I want to give more people access to this service without them knowing" for example, I would say that it sounds like hes saying he wants to intall steam with windows or maybe with a rootkit.

Thats not me saying "OMG GABE NEWELL WANTS TO USE ROOTKITS TO RAISE STEAMS MARKETSHARE!!".

There is a difference.

 

As for Steam, I do not like the power they are getting to hold in this market, it needs compition to force steam to improve their services, the quaility and ultimately their attitude. That cannot happen without serious opposition because steam is still the BEST choice for both developers and customers (compared to antiquated services like Gamespy and faliures like GFWL).

I totaly think the way DLC is moving forward as oppossed to expansion packs (and thier value) is troubling and is probably the main draw for publishers over the savings on using Steamworks rather than rolling their own.

 

Impulse is already late, Reactor is way late (as in we needed it ages ago). Hurry up guys.