I'm not sure, but if it's totally free then there's nothing for Steam to take a cut of. I think that's putting the cart before the horse, though, because you can't put a game on Steam just by asking - you have to demonstrate that the game is popular enough to get on Steam, either at the start or by going through their Greenlight voting system. That leads us to a chicken-and-egg problem: we can't put the game on Steam just to get it popular, because Steam won't take it unless we prove to them that it's already popular.cashto wrote:QUOTE (cashto @ Mar 18 2015, 04:40 PM) Do we have control, at least, as to whether the game will be free-to-play or not? Are there many examples of games on Steam which are truly free-to-play (no microtransactions, premium content, pay-to-win, etc)?
It's an awesome thing you're doing, Cash, and all sorts of options open up if the community gets the rights. But I have a feeling Steam is going to be a dead end, and it's probably best if we're looking for alternatives rather than getting excited about Steam.
And on that note, I've poked around on Desura a bit. It looks like Desura doesn't much care about the games themselves, they'll post pretty much anything that's submitted - with one caveat. In order to actually put a game on Desura, you have to register with them as a game development or publishing group, not a fan community. There doesn't seem to be much in the way of requirements for that, either, so FAO could probably pull it off, but the group needs to have two active points of contact at all times. Also, Microsoft Game Studios already has a Desura profile and I have no idea how they'd react to an outsider group publishing a Microsoft game on Desura under their own name.
QUOTE (phoenix1)My guess is that the answer is "yes." Steam's money is based on game sales through their platform. One of the marketing tricks they use is they have a huuuuuge variety of games available for purchase. Why buy your games on steam rather than, say, at Best Buy? Because you don't have to leave your house. Then why buy it on Steam rather than, say, Origin? Because all of your games are already in Steam. It's the same reason they have added functionality to let you launch non-steam games from steam: their goal is to get you to buy games from Steam, and the first step is to make sure you have Steam opened, so they want you to utilize nothing *other* than steam to launch your games.
(That's why, even after you've purchased a game, every time you launch a Steam game it launches Steam.)
Basically, having Allegiance on Steam is good for Steam because it's an advertisement for Steam every time Allegiance is launched.[/quote]
Opening a Steam game only launches Steam if you use the Steam "Create a desktop icon" function, which actually creates a shortcut to Steam rather than a shortcut to the game. If the game doesn't rely on Steam for authentication or anything, then often the game itself can be launched without ever even touching Steam, if you run it directly from its folder or if it creates a non-Steam shortcut of its own.
