Rag Doll Kung Fu Soon!

Just checked the site,... hadn't been there and a while.

Good news,... it's set to release in about a week!
Bad news!(?) It's being released through Steam.

I was 100% sure I was going to buy this, and now that I've found out the steam thing, it's dropped to about 10%

Anyone care to discuss their feelings about Steam? good or bad?

it sucks... hate it.

Well, that about sums it up then! :)

To be honest, I have not experienced steam for myself yet, but I specifically did not buy HL2 because of it, and when I heard about all of the bad experiences, it did not alter my previous thoughts about it one bit. I'm just trying to figure out what other's experience has been.

I was so looking forward to this, but now I just don't have the interest after seeing this distribution method. AAArg!

In a few years time all games will be distributed digitally. You'd better get used to the idea.

And its great news for developers - no longer will distributors and retailers cream off the lions share of the revenue for the tiniest contribution.

Oh and Steam works fine.

I think it's just another complication that's going to make PC games lose even more to consoles. I am not sure how it helps developers. They give a portion of their profits to the physical distributor, or to Valve, so what's the difference? And when Valve eventually goes out of business, you will lose all your games.

There's a huge difference. With traditional distribution more than 50% of the revenue goes to distributors and retailers. People who add nothing.

From a full price ($50) console game, the developer may be seeing as little as $3.

With electronic distribution games can be cheaper and vastly more profitable for developers.

Also from an environmental point of view you aren't making tons of plastic\metal disks and driving\flying\sailing them thousands of miles.

Consoles will be using digital distribution too.

Ofcourse they will. They're not going to surrender without a fight, don't be silly. Just look at all the fuss Vivendi Universal kicked up about HL2 in the first place!

They could. But they aren't going to. Inspite of chiefly electronic distribution HL2 was (and still is) one of the most expensive games around. Games are not going to get cheaper, not while people are willing to pay more than 50 USD for a lease on a game.

Sure games are going to get more profitable for some developers (Valve for instance) but that's not going to do the rest of us any good.

I'm not being remotely silly - that's uncalled for.

Vivendi kicked up a fuss because they had a contract and didn't want Valve competing with them. I can't blame Vivendi for fighting their corner but they didn't have a leg to stand on. Thanks to the profits of HL2 Valve no longer need to seek funding from a publisher like that. They won't ever be in that position again. If they offer their future stuff through the retail channel (and thats a big if) it will be on their own terms.

Distributors and retailers can kick up any fuss the like but if they don't have any ownership of the product there is nothing they can do.

The change won't be overnight but it IS inevitable.

HL2's price has been set by retail. When the industry is ready to drop retail the lower price will be its primary weapon.

And even if prices don't drop. Far more of the revenue will stay within the development community. This makes a lot more sense and should lead to better games.

Digital distribution has many other advantages too. There will be no scramble for shelf space. Games which are considered too 'niche' for the current hit based marketplace will become viable products - reaching their audience over time rather than in a 1-2 week window. Such games will be able to gather momentum via word-of-mouth etc.

You only need to look as far as BRL for an example of digital distribution making a software product a viable business for a small developer.

Microsoft have already begun to sell stuff online and Nintendo are making this a central feature of the Revolution. It's happening.

Really? Well I don't know how much it cost to make Wetrix, but I'd wager it's a lot less than what went into making Enter the Matrix. For example.

Sure. But it has many disadvantages aswell.

First of all, there's all the diffferent types of Steam/GameSpy clients that are just as inevitable in a competitive market.

Then ofcourse, for the piracy panicing types there will be the "you cannot play this game without an Internet connection" bit, that's eventually going to replace "you cannot play this game without a CD" mantra that's common today. This ofcourse will change gaming on the go from "inconvenice" (having to carry around 10 different play discs, depending on which games you feel like playing) to "impossible" (unless your flight/train/bus/hotel has decently priced Internet connections - which are uncommon at best).

Then there's the whole point of ownership. With a tangible product (like a CD or DVD) you could conceivably play games by publishers that no longer exsist. Games like Fallout and (in theory) Panzer General 3D, by Interplay / SSI can still be intallled and played, even tho' the companies that produced and published them have gone bankrupt ages ago.

Then ofcourse there's size. Pure sheer size. By far the lions share of todays games are shipped on 4CDs or a DVD - a game in the 4GB area. Even on a good Internet connection, downloading 4GB of data is going to take time, and depending on whether you're paying for traffic or not, and have a cap or not, potentially expensive - meaning that any price reduction the customer might get from the electronic distributer, he pays the ISP instead. Then ofcourse there's the fact that more than 80% of the people who have Internet in Europe and the US, are still on dial-up. And 4 gigs is going to take a long, long time to download @ 33K6.

It won't happen overnight. It will happen. Pointing out why we don't have it yet is not arguing against it.

Really? How will this work considering consoles are a consumer product that need to be usable by non-techy people? They need to be idiot-proof.

P.S. This is a genuine question - I'm not being sarcastic/argumentative. :)

>>Also from an environmental point of view you aren't making tons of plastic\metal disks and driving\flying\sailing them thousands of miles.

I want manuals and books and a multi-media experience when I buy a game - i'm buying into a world, an environment, and a story. Games should be more than just a binary.

As for the discussion about steam, I think I will avoid this weeks melee...

The same way a Sky box delivers digital content.

Oh, I see. I couldn't get my mind away from the Internet when people started talking about digital distribution.

Yep, I guess this is the way things are going to go - especially as we're all being forced to go digital with TV soon, anyway.

What will happen to the highstreet game stores? I can't see them just throwing in the towel.

They will sell physical stuff. Hint books, toys etc. But they'll fade away eventually.

If I was Virgin or Game or HMV or whatever, I'd be busy trying to figure out how to reinvent myself as the digital distribution channel before the revolution comes.

So I guess that in my pessimistic little world nothing'll ever really change :-)

Ultima cloth map and broach anyone? Can't download that.

It's not the digital download I'm opposed to, if I could download a game and back it up on my own CD I'm ok with that.

What concerns me/ticks me off is the licensing methods. Anything that forces me to connect to the internet to use is a no no for me. Anything that forces me to depend on the company to be there so I can play the game is a no no for me. Anything that makes it difficult for me to install on any new machine I may own in the future is a no no for me.

I'm not talking about piracy, I'm talking about a legitimate buyer being able to install and run what he paid for.

Or the wishmaster glow in the dark stone... or all the lovely goodies you got in the other infocom games. :(

What percentage does Valve take if you distribute through Steam?


Wow...Reaganomics for games. Give the rich man money, and he will pass the savings off to you. Yeah, that idea worked really well for the United States.

Digital distribution replaces a physical publisher with a digital one. It won't save the develop money, because digital distributors are going to take just as much of a cut as physical ones. It won't save the end user money, because games have cost about $50 for the last 20 years. The only thing it will do is make owning and playing a game more complicated.

Afaik, you can download Steam and register an account for free. Cant hurt to try and see if it works well on your system before making any purchases that involve the thing.

I'm not keen on the idea of digital downloads either. It's too open to piracy, even more so than just copying with the regular medium. And with most people having broadband, you can pretty much download everything these days.

Sure the developer may get more of the share now, but once this idea gets more mainstream, you can be sure it'll divert back to how it is now.

I for one would much rather have a box, disc, manual etc with my game. Then I feel as if I've got something. If I've downloaded it (anything I download) I often forget about it and don't back it up.

I remember about 10 years when people thought online gaming would replace solo gaming, despite being popular online gaming has not replaced conventional gaming, far from it infact.

though of the half dozen or so games I still play... a full 50% of them are played online. It might just be taking a bit longer to catch on. :)

Problem I find about online games is that they never end. Fun for a while but you just play the game until you're bored of it rather than accompshing something like finishing it.

It's like starting a game of monopoly knowing full well that the game is never gonna end. BOOORRRRIIIIINNGGGG!!!!

ENAY needs "closure", dude. :P

Big 10p's have been 'closed' for years, at least 12 :)

I still have one knocking about somewhere. Just think, a whole game of Pac-Man gone to waste. :(

Seems like an interesting game, id try it out but I dont have a credit card I can use to buy it (or the money)