Adding the game to steam
Posted: Sat Oct 15, 2022 3:54 pm
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.