Add the game to steam

[wiki-me]

Why I think it will be beneficial:

• it is very popular and it's website has a lot of visitors (Alexa ranks it as the 314 most popular website on the internet).

• Seeing a lot of good reviews can really tip the scales and make me (and probably others) take a chance on trying a game (it's basically social proof), it could lead to more exposure which will mean more developers and more feedback (former developer of naev said it brought new developers).

• Steam is one of the only game review systems that i know of which is able to rank games only based on "recent reviews" (besides gog.com), so if a game starts badly and keeps getting developed and becomes good the old review don't prevent it from getting a good rating, this is especially good for open source games that can have a very long history of development (being developed for more then a 15 years is common).

• Another nice feature of steam is that you can find reviews for players that played more then a certain number of hours , some games can be half done and a review after three hours of play time might not reflect problems, a review after say 30h indicates you can pour some time into it without the game failing (and you will have to wait for a newer version and maybe play it until the point you reached before because save files are not always compatible with future versions).

• Some FOSS projects on steam have a price (for example the game Mindustry ). Maybe you could use that for funding and paying freelancers to create graphics and sound (iirc this is what shattered pixel dungeon does).

• early feedback can be useful, there is a saying that if you are not embarrassed when releasing the software then you released it too late, steam can mark a game as early access (like supertux does) so there is no danger of disappointing players because the game isn't fully polished.

[AnotherCommander]

My thoughts on the matter have been summarized in this forum topic: http://www.aegidian.org/bb/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=21215

[wiki-me]

You said it requires "constant monitoring of reviews" , is that really a must have?, if you are interested in the feedback you can sample them every once in a while when you or anyone else feels like it.

[RunningDroid]

My thoughts on the matter have been summarized in this forum topic: http://www.aegidian.org/bb/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=21215

That link died, I think that topic got moved here : https://bb.oolite.space/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=21215
Archive link in case that link dies : https://web.archive.org/web/20240419213710/https://bb.oolite.space/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=21215

[Garryck]

Given that 'steamshim' has had no work done on it for 3 years now (and that it apparently is no longer compiling on Windows) I don't see this going anywhere, any time soon.

[AnotherCommander]

We could still set up Oolite on Steam without any kind of Steam interaction, in a similar way done by other GPL projects. The Steam version of the game would essentially be an exact copy of that distributed normally and no shim utilities would be necessary for setting all this up (and there would of course be no Steam achievments, stats, workshop, etc.).

The difficulty in all this in my opinion has more to do with putting in the hard work of setting up a Steam developer account and store page, paying the related fees, learning how to create repos and prepare releases on the platform and (most important of all) supporting the community once the game has gone live. Community support would be orders of magnitude more demanding than what we are currently dealing with and failing to properly respond to demand could very quickly lead to a "ded gaem". I am not sure we have people with that much time available to provide this but I could be wrong too, so if I am, anyone feeling ready please step up. In any case, I think the problem is more of an administrative and less of a technical nature.