future betas

Anything not related to one of my specific games, like general polls or promo/sale announcements. For general talk about games, go to the Golden Lion subforum
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jack1974
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Re: future betas

Post by jack1974 »

Don't get me wrong I am NOT against demos. I am simply trying to find a way to not go insane with everything I have to do :lol: When you start to count Steam, mobile, direct downloads, and multiply it for 20+ games... :mrgreen:
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jack1974
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Re: future betas

Post by jack1974 »

Good news is that I found a way to still use my "Dropbox system" to upload new builds :)
I also put some games on itch.io to see how it works. It's nice but sadly not exactly what I wanted (I don't want another appstore but more integrated with my own site).

Anyways the bad news is that last month direct sales was the lowest since... 2010 or even before :shock:
It really seems that nowadays 99% of people buy the PC games on Steam only :( Add to this the various CDN costs and the master idiocy of Apple/MS that forces us devs to codesign the exe (and instead if run from a launcher like Steam, you don't need to do it!)... (the codesign tools have yearly cost as well and are an extra bother step to do).

I will wait until end of year but I fear it might no longer be worth it for me to keep selling the games directly. I'll see what happens in next months!
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Harbinger1975
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Re: future betas

Post by Harbinger1975 »

The reason I like buying your games directly is because I can't stand the censorship bullshit that comes with Steam. Plus, they're practically killing the indi developers. What about selling them on GOG.com?
"Direct intervention is necessary. Assuming direct control."
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jack1974
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Re: future betas

Post by jack1974 »

Gog is curated, and they've made very clear that aren't interested in my games.
I think itch.io can be a good compromise since there's no censorship, you can either use the client to download patches, or download a single .zip with the latest build of the game (so like happens now when I do the betas for my games). I might end up using them (still doing some testing).
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DarkWolf
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Re: future betas

Post by DarkWolf »

Harbinger1975 wrote: Mon Sep 18, 2017 7:04 pm The reason I like buying your games directly is because I can't stand the censorship bullshit that comes with Steam. Plus, they're practically killing the indi developers. What about selling them on GOG.com?
That's not true at all about steam killing indie devs, Steam helps indie devs be heard, in the process of popularizing VNs in west getting them up on steam was the biggest step that made things change massively in terms of how much people know what VNs are. When they changed things from green-light to simply pay to get a game out they took indie devs into consideration and made a price as low as possible. Without steam most of those indie devs making VNs wouldn't even exist today.

And for censorship, for the most part it is just people making dragons out of flies.
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jack1974
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Re: future betas

Post by jack1974 »

Yes I wouldn't blame Steam for it. More the market saturation, like what's happening on other appstores. The "danger" is also not the various shitty games made in 5 minutes (sorry but that's what they are). But the SEVERAL GOOD GAMES that come out every week :lol:
As player, it must be great. As developer, not so much haha.

Regarding censorship now Steam is much more lenient - obviously you cannot post super-porn games, but things like Loren now could probably be published even without the need of a "censor workaround patch". I'm still probably going to do it though. Better safe than sorry :)
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jack1974
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Re: future betas

Post by jack1974 »

You can read a bit on my latest blog post: http://www.winterwolves.net/blog/2017/1 ... amenities/
in practice I thought August was bad, then September was even worse :lol: so at this point the only solution for me to keep selling direct beside Steam is to make the process as less painful as possible, and it means using itch.io for future games :) I'll also move the current ones there (I have put almost all of them, there's a bit of a problem with DLCs support on itchi.io at the moment).
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Jaeger
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Re: future betas

Post by Jaeger »

I'm wary about installing any clients by those digital distributors. I tried GOG Galaxy, and while I liked the cloud save feature, my computer started throwing fits as time went on.

Truth be told, I haven't bought your games in a while due to financial strain. However, the ones I did bought were all direct.
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jack1974
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Re: future betas

Post by jack1974 »

Hehe it seems nobody reads carefully my blog :lol:
There was another person who commented negatively, but the thing is: you aren't forced to run the itchio client. You can still download a normal .zip file from the same page, containing the DRM-Free full game. The client it's completely optional. Otherwise I wouldn't even think about using it, would be the same as Steam.
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