Steam Sale Saves Developer


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Steam Sale Saves Developer

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If ever proof was needed of how important Valve's Steam platform has become to many PC developers, look no further than the tale of Introversion, the developers of Defcon and Darwinia, whose company was saved by a Steam sale.

Despite a string of cult successes like Uplink, Darwinia and Defcon (pictured), the British developers had run into some tough times recently, and had gone from being a "proper" studio, with an office and staff, to having to fire most of their workers, sell their furniture, move out of their office and code from their bedrooms.

In desperation, one day they decided to add some Steam achivements to Defcon. Doing so meant Valve gave the team some promotion on Steam, and that promotion turned into sales.

Valve okayed the promotion and even though it didn't focus on DEFCON we were happy that we had achieved our core objective. This was the game-changer. When we started Introversion we'd had a string of successes and believed we were undefeatable, but it was a long time since we'd had a victory and we really needed one. Right on cue, Valve delivered. The promo exceeded all of our expectations and when combined with our low burn rate (no office or staff now) we had gone from being fearful about paying our mortgages to having a year's operating capital in the bank.

Great news for Introversion, as they thoroughly deserve it. It'll also hopefully give them the coin to continue development on Subversion. But for everyone else...Valve may be in most people's good books, but it's still a little frightening to think that a single company can play Kingmaker with the fortunes of developers across an entire platform, so dependant have so many PC publishers become on Steam for legitimate sales.

Source: Kotaku

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Nice news for the developer. Cautionary news for us consumers. Depending on how Valve wields their power.

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I just wonder when Microsoft is going to call it a day and just buy them. Steam is so much more advanced then Games for Windows, MS can just buy it and rebrand it Games for Windows+Mac lol. Then they could lay claim to have probably the best pc and console distribution system.

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Price is still the BIG factor.

Back when games were ALL physical products, I could see

a higher price tag to recoup distribution and manufacturing

costs. Hell, one of the reasons I absolutely loved the Ultima

games was because they came with cool stuff like a real

cloth map and extra goodies. And that was without having

to pay $20-$40 more for the "Collector's Edition".

But today? If the damn game companies would just switch

to digital-only and cut the game cost in half, they'd probably

see a LOT more sales. Look at how well Torchlight has done.

It was really cheap to buy and people jumped all over it.

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i loved defcon back in the day in the demo, and uplink wasa pretty cool game. both had intersting and intuitive takes on graphics and ui. but i never bought them as i don't have a cc to just purchase any ol game off steam with.

hopefully this company can come up with some new games on the level of these old favourites of mine from them.

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