So, then how precisely does Valve make any money if they aren't taking a cut of the profits? Or are we talking about the crack business model where they give away the first hit free, then wait for them to get hooked before jacking up the price?

Valve isn't any friend of indie gamers and it's difficult to imagine a way in which it's good for anybody except Valve and possibly some niches of gamer.

Except it isn't more hassle free to distribute. Adding DRM and the associated hassles is always going to be more of a hassle than distributing DRM free files. There are tons of services out there that will distribute files, they don't care whether or not there's DRM involved and quite a few of them can restrict access to people with appropriate log ins for the specific files.

All the costs has Steam too. And Steam wants a cut for this too. You forgot? Okay, I am willing to pay more but not twice. He is driving customers to Steam and to DRM. I stay with it.

You see this is how rumours start. He says his indent is to maximize profit. You misread it and think he is actually maximizing profit. But nobody knows because there is no second world to compare, right?

My argument was: If he gives up on offering competitive prices on his own website, he might loose profits because of the cuts he has to pay to third party agents, which would otherwise contribute to his own profit if they exceeded his own additional costs. We will never know by the way. But it could be bad for him.

And it could be bad for me, because the premium I would have to pay for the version I want is too high. It could be lower.

I would find it better if publishers would put competitive prices on their webshops, i.e. only slightly higher or same price than what they want on Steam. For me it looks like they prefer to sell over Steam and they prefer to give money to Steam. But then my image of the average customer is one of a very price-sensitive person. I might be misleaded by my own instincts.

Mainstream conditioned? This is a userbase that just made a game in which you walk around an island and do little else profitable in 24 hours.

I don't see any great risks there. If suddenly Steam turned into an indie-hostile environment, the indies will probably leave for somewhere else and hope for the best. There is of course the risk that when Steam refuses to sell your game (and from what I gather, their decisionmaking process in that regard is not transparent at all, but then again, some of the indie devs might be just butthurt when they complain about it), it locks you out of a huge potential audience. That's one thing where Steam really should improve, yes. But you can't really blame them for having the leverage they do, as it is their customer base who are responsible for that. You can blame them for not using it for greater good, though (if they for example threw their weight behind a campaign for stopping all the stupid region locking, it could mean a world of difference).

Wolfire should be launching their Humble store sometime this year; if they do and offer both DRM free and Steam keys, I'll happily shop there. There's a huge difference between an actual monopoly and might-as-well-be-a-monopoly. The story of Linux can attest to that.

That's all well and good, but the more developers deal with Valve the worse the situation is going to get. Steam still has some pretty obnoxious bugs that haven't been resolved and there is a definite history of abusive practices on the part of Valve. They finally had to admit that VAC isn't perfect and undo tens of thousands of auto bans last year, at least I think it was that year.
Long tail, Steam has an enormous userbase, if even a fraction of a percent buy something that's enough to make many indie games profitable.

You could politely ask Jeff Vogel if he's willing to provide you with a shareway key for the DRM-free version (yes, it's not 100% DRM-free but personally I can accept offline shareware keys as a pre-DRM and not too annoying means of security) if you prove that you bought it from Steam and then pay him the difference. I think it's worth a try (he even provided me the key for free because there were well-known issues with the GamersGate version I bought).

Well if Valve's no friend of indies, how comes so many are using it? I know it's not an argument when talking about sales, but game devs are usually clever enough to see whenever the distribution method is worth it. If it was easier to set up your own distribution of DRM-free version, why would any of the use Steam instead?

You don't have to add DRM, that's the point - from what I have heard about the issue you just have to send your game to Valve packed in a correct format, so it can auto download and install from Steam.

Yes, it does, but most indie devs seem to indicate that Valve's cut isn't really bad at all.

Yes, the very same game that despite its success and extremely recent release is still currently only at number 93 in the most played games on Steam. In fact, there are only 7 or 8 indie games in that list and 9 of the top 20 games are conventional mainstream first-person shooters.

As I say, mainstream conditioned. Dear Esther is a rare success.

Yes, because anyone who rejects Steam obviously hasn't considered it. All those who have truly thought about the issue must naturally embrace Steam wholeheartedly, for what other way is there?

While I can understand the complains people have about Steam and how it's run, it's important to note that while Steam does offer a form of DRM for the games published through the platform, it in itself is not DRM, it is a distribution platform. Being required to be on-line to install the game on Steam is no different to being required to be on-line download the game on GoG. Installing and downloading are synonymous on Steam because both happen concurrently as part of one process.

While I have yet to purchase Dear Esther, so can't comment on how it is distributed, I would expect that it being DRM free entails that the game files (once installed) come without any active form of rights management. Whether or not this is true for Dear Esther is another question. What I would classify as active rights management, would be certain forms of encryption on the game files, and/or processes that control when/where/how the game can be run, one exclusion to this however would be Steamworks integration, which also in itself is not DRM.

Given that Dear Esther is born of a Source engine mod, and has been developed using the Source engine, it's no real surprise that it is published on the Steam platform. It's also no surprise that many indie developers opt to publish their games through Steam, as it offers one of the simplest ways for developers to monetise their works, and has a large, easily reachable user-base. Simply publishing on Steam does not negate a developer's status as being 'indie', because the developer has still chosen to develop and publish their game independently of any major game publisher, and still independently holds the rights to that game. That's not to say that the 'indie' tag isn't being abused though, just look at Shank, a game published by one of the biggest major publishers out there (EA), and yet is classified on Steam as being 'indie'.

Having said all that, now that GoG is moving in the direction of publishing new titles, I really hope that this means that indie developers will have the opportunity to publish through GoG, and hope to see indie developers jumping on-board.

I might, but I'll probably just end up buying it as is, seeing as he got a pittance of a share from my purchase anyway (I bought it for something stupid like 2 euros), and it would probably be easier and less cheeky to simply go through the usual channels.

Ah, ok. After the trouble I had with the GG version and Jeff Vogel's surprising goodwill, I'll definitely buy the next game directly from his website, too, if I ever finish Avadon. :)


Yes it is, because you can't backup the installer and transfer it to a different rig without internet connection, or install it another time, when the internet is down. Your argument is based on the assumption that everyone immediately installs their games after downloading (and maybe does not even see a need for deinstalling them, ever). And that everyone is playing on the same computer from which they have access to the internet.

But in the end it doesn't really matter how you define DRM for yourself because contrary to popular belief, most people who argue against DRM are not just allergic to the three letters but have real issues with the mechanisms behind them, regardless of what they're called. ;)

Isn't that a cotnradiction? I have no idea about what games make into the front page of Steam, but for what people is saying my impression is that, in the end, only the indies that have already an important coverage elsewhere do get coverage in Steam too.

AFAIK - All new games are shown on the front page, until other new games pushes them out of the spot. From this point, you only get on the front page if there are any promotions.

That's pretty much it - when I say exposure - I mean you have access to those many millions of users, but getting their actual attention is another thing altogether. And when you're releasing alongside a major AAA Steamworks title, you'll be hard-pressed to get onto the front page of the storefront.

Dear Esther has been the first indie title IIRC to actually get any decent attention beyond the daiy deals since Skyrim came out.