Spring RTS Engine

Forboding Angel wrote:It's stupid not to try to market spring as much as humanly possible, and steam is a great way to do that and reach millions of untapped potential.

Read again. I never say I was agaisnt Spring on Steam. My point was that I agreed with Regret, Steam is a DRM.

Argh wrote:Note that all of this SP stuff- what people pay for, when they buy a RTS. Other than DemiGod or people buying WC III to play DotA, few buy RTS games for online play over offline.

It came as a shock to Chris Taylor himself, but Only 23% of Demigod Players Even Tried to Play Online.

Caydr wrote:But I really hope Spring doesn't get any wide attention until we've made some good progress towards typical Windows-level ease-of-use. The control panel, the startup system, the lobby, and hardware compatibility are all in dire need of attention.

Hasn't happened for your years, unlikely to happen ever.

Caydr wrote:If we try to push something commercial, anything at all commercial,

Did you notice the first posts were about un-commercial distribution?

So can you comment on what percentage of the raw sales $$$ reaches your pocket, or are you under NDA? I would be very interested to know what kind of a cut Impulse takes from a developer with no alternative mainstream distribution system. Does it vary with sales?

Eh? Impulse is explicit about the deal they offer. They take 30%. In fact, they're the only distributors who don't dick around about that, or try to keep it a trade secret (Steam's is rumored to be 45%+, but as they never bothered talking to me...) and I think their cut is actually amongst the lowest.

@AF: Well, I will have stuff to say there soon.

@zwzsg: Yeah, that's why I assumed they won't touch Spring with a ten-foot pole, DRM + GPL = perfect-storm GPL lawsuit waiting to happen (at least, the FSF seems to think so... me, not so sure). With Impulse, it's a different story, I don't think they apply Goo (their DRM) unless you specifically do that with them.

Argh wrote:They take 30%.

Thanks. But I'm shocked. I had always heard publisher took an outrageous 90% or so, and always made you sign non disclosure agreements.

Well, in my case, they aren't my publisher, they're just a distributor. Huuuuuuge difference.

Publisher = money to developer to work on game, Real Money spent on marketing, and I wouldn't be able to say jack squat about anything.

Distributor = place to sell your game, some marketing help (like emails to news agencies when you have a release, promotion on their website, etc.). In Stardock's case, they were awesome enough to host the Demo as well.

zwzsg wrote:

Argh wrote:They take 30%.

Thanks. But I'm shocked. I had always heard publisher took an outrageous 90% or so, and always made you sign non disclosure agreements.

One developer I worked with in 2002 IIRC said they only got 5-6% of the PROFIT for physical sales. That's according to their lead developer, who I was good friends with at the time (I was helping with translation, forum moderation, etc).

Until the entire game's development grant (if any), advertising fees, administration fees, made-up fees, imaginary fees, and of course interest on all of the above are paid off, you get zero, just like with the music mafia.

That was just one publisher, but I doubt the deals get very much better unless you're a famous AAA developer like BioWare or Crytek.

Steam is perfectly capable of allowing games without any DRM. Case in point, once again, world of goo.

Forboding Angel wrote:You'd have to be a real dummy for your steam account to get hacked... honestly.

Simply untrue. I've seen a network taken down by a virus which had the sole purpose of ripping game serial numbers from the Windows registry. It was a brilliant virus too which even went as far as disabling Norton AV and rewriting taskmanager and regedit to make itself hidden and difficult to remove.

It was only detected because it was too greedy. It created a packetstorm on the network trying to hack the admin account on other machines. Had it been more subtle it could still be there today.

Point is, the Steam business model is a liability to users, wether you suffer personally is a different matter but be sure that more than one user has probably lost the right to play a game they legally purchased for reasons out of their control.

Personally, I hate Steam. I also hate "Games for Windows LIVE" and the shear volume of crap both networks install that has nothing at all to do with the game itself. I was more impressed by Stardock however. It is less intrusive and more tolerant of making backups and playing the game without the network client installed. Note that I'm talking about my experience with Galactic Civilisation which predates Impulse. It wasn't perfect though.

I personally hate Impulse and wish that they had simply improved StarDock Central... but that might because I spent like and hour installing Impulse and it's various prerequisites only to find it crash out for no apparent reason on my computer while downloading GalCivII ... after an awful mess trying to get it to try again and finally installing the game didn't work on my computer... so yeah... don't liek Impulse.

Impulse is a nice attempt but its execution was poor.

those screenshots make me want to buy pure.

i dont have the money though.

Do you run Linux? I am still planning to give away a few free copies to people who can / will do some serious testing of Linux builds...

ooh! ooh! i run linux!
as for the testing... it depends i guess, i'd probably play through the SP campaign (if it's good enough ) but i've never tested a game before so i wouldn't know exactly what to do =\