As a holder of several advanced degrees from the School of Hard Knocks, the more I learn about steam the more it resembles an old man driving a windowless van, offering free candy.... errrrr.... free steamworks to every kid he sees -- and we're the kids he's targeting.

Right now we're in the free candy phase.  How that changes once he gets enough of us into his van and he closes the doors, we'll have to wait to see.

Nothing in life is free.  No deal is too good to be true.  Stay out of land wars in Asia.

The FAQ is troubling in how it hints to Valve's selection criteria.  Once/if steam becomes the de facto standard, by virtue of which games Valve deems steam-worthy they'll affect what games we'll get to choose from.  In the 'old' days it was 'studios' (often 1 person like Garriott) who determined what games we'd see, then it was studios + publishers, now it'll be studios + publishers + valve between us and our games (unless/until Valve moves in on the publishers...).

Your actual question was if they'd make more money by doing all the stuff Steamworks gives them for themselves. Since Steamwork costs $0, I've pretty well established the answer there is no.

This isn't much different. How much would it cost Firaxis to set up their own DD store, download servers, and so on? Considering they'd have to support it for an indeterminate number of years while people who buy Civ 5 from it come back to download the game?

That kind of infrastructure is not cheap, especially when your usage of it is fewer then one game a year. Comparatively, Steam, Impulse, etc do it with lots of games for a fixed cost to the developers.

You see some companies trying to go their own way on this, and the results are usually awful. Ever tried the EA store? That thing is just terrible, and if that was the only place offering Dragon Age I would never have bought it.

You're the one who brought up music originally. There is no similarly sized project in music, you don't put together a team of 100 people to create a CD. The big expense in music is in marketing. The big expense in games is the game.

I use Steam.  I like Steam.  Frankly the latest version of impule might be better but, at least for me, Steam was in the right place at the right time.  Now all my friends are there and I prefer to play my games on Steam.  I also love the games that Stardock makes. 

Ultimately I want to log into one place to find all my friends.  I would rather see Stardock and Valve play nice.  I don't dislike Impulse in any way...but its really hard to get my friends to migrate once all their games are on Steam.  Steam has critical mass.  If Stardock REALLY wanted Impulse to be THE digital distribution platform I think they missed the boat.  Valve made the deals.  I personally prefer a Stardock that focuses on great games but ultimately it may be the digital distribution that pays Stardock's bills and I understand why they want their share of it.  I understand the corncerns about DRM but have never encountered any DRM related issues. 

I would prefer to give Stardock my money because I prefer their principles but in reality I buy most games on Steam because that is where my friends are.  I'm not sure how Stardock solves this.  I'm certainly gonna buy Civ V and I will probably buy it on Steam because, again, that's where my other games are and where my friends are.  Unless Stardock gets similar deals for major games that forces all my friends onto Impulse as well I probably will continue to buy on Steam. 

...but I would like a reason to buy more games from Impusle...

Because obviously with steamworks integrated in, you can use civ5 without steam...

Other than Stardock games and software, it's unlikely that you will see many "Impulse exclusive" games or software, simply due to Frogboy's views on monopolies. Sure, games that use Reactor are required to sell on Impulse in addition to whatever other vendor the publisher chooses, but that doesn't mean that Impulse is required. I could go out and buy Elemental from Walmart, uninstall Impulse from my computer, and never use my Impulse account to log in to multiplayer, and, assuming I::R operates as advertised, never need to install Impulse to update Elemental. Can you say the same of a steamworks game?

First of all, I also answered that in my last post.

Second of all, how is it apples & oranges? You have to sell the game somehow. Most sales are still at retail. Saying Steam's cut is bad when it's smaller then the retail cut is flatly absurd. Why would it be bad if Firaxis makes MORE money off Steam copies then off retail copies? More money to the developer is what we're all after, isn't it?

It's also almost certainly true that they make more by selling on Steam then by setting up their own store. If setting up your own store was easy and cheap, everybody would be doing it. But doing it well is not cheap, and keeping servers and bandwidth for years because you sold someone a game once is an endless drain on the bank account. Steam takes care of all that for a known up front cost. It's not a bad deal.

No, you're bringing up comparisons and then changing them when you don't like my reply.

A while ago there was a thread linking to an article that detailed Kotick's philosophy in regards to activision-blizzard and games.  I ran across some reports from DICE1009 where Newell gave the keynote address which gives some idea of what his philosophy is.  Sources are Geek.com, MTV Multiplayer, and G4TV.com.

"Valve has hired an experimental psychologist to come up with new ways to excite users with pricing models and sales. He suggested one in 25 users that buy Left 4 Dead get another Valve game for free."

"Newell added that Valve has hired an experimental psychologist to explore more unconventional sales tactics. He joked that the move was “turning us to the dark side of B.F. Skinner...”

"Valve aims to touch its customers in some way every three weeks, not every three years when a new game is shipped."

"As far as privacy goes, Gabe believes that people are willing to give up system and personal information if they feel it's being used to get a better service. Steam's hardware survey is an example of this. Rather than spying on users for nefarious reasons, Gabe believes things like its hardware survey helps with better sales of products and service. As long as companies are transparent, he feels that customers will accept this."

"By using the service’s strengths such as extensive data-mining capabilities, the company can be given a competitive advantage. Newell warned, however, that intrusive measures must be transparent and can be proven to give the customer better service or better games."

"With Team Fortress 2, Valve shipped the game as a service and not a product."

"Right now, those two social networks [Facebook and MySpace] are sources of interesting features, but not quite right for a partnership currently."

"Perhaps Newell’s grandest vision of them all was the evolution of game companies into more general “entertainment companies.” He reckoned that most consumers were similar to Harry Potter fans, who are fans of the entire franchise and not just the books or just the movies. To that end, Newell intends to take Valve in the “entertainment” direction. The studio tested the waters with Team Fortress 2 animated shorts using the game’s characters. The house that made those shorts will be making TF2 comics in the near future, Newell announced."

"the winner of the next-generation console war won’t be whichever box has the best graphics, but rather which machine allows game companies “to have this relationship with your customers.”

"Video game companies acting as "entertainment companies": Newell said he is "obsessing" over gamers' expectations for "what kind of entertainment company they want us to be." They are fans of properties, not forms of entertainment, fans, to use his example, of Harry Potter, as opposed to just Potter books or just Potter movies. As a result, he said he is moving away from thinking of Valve as a video game company. One example is the introduction of "Team Fortress 2" video shorts made by Valve. The next will be that same team's "TF2" comics."

From all this it's clear that steam being required even for single-player offline Civ5 games isn't an 'accident', but it's the goal, so steam/steamworks was made to be taken as a whole and not to be divided up to allow choice of what to include.  Steam needs to be installed and running in the background as often as possible for valve's desired goals as described above -- extensive data-mining, offering us advertising as often as possible, 'touching' us at least every 3 weeks, becoming an 'entertainment company' not merely a video game company, possibly a partnership someday with the likes of Facebook and MySpace, etc.

Newell's goals seem similar to Kotick's, which makes sense from their perspective.

You sound as if you think any business man like Gabe should be working for the betterment of mankind rather than their shareholders, the companys bottom line or thier own pocket.

Why would he be doing anything other than kotick? (trying to take over the world improve thier profit margin).

Because all the things they do are good business decisions. If you don't like his business decisions you either think they are not going to make enough money or you have some kind of 'ethical' objection.

Thus, "you sound like you have an ethical objection to steams pratices of making as much money as possible by growing thier market share agressively by trying to force thier platform via atractive well proven systems that developers have little other choice but to accept." which is the plain version of what I said.

I don't see how what I said isn't true.

You want X, steams action are is proivding Y (in your eyes, yours and his priorities do not match).

Thus your objection to steam seems to be that they arn't putting 'better games' ahead of profits.

Remember, you commented on the actions of Newell, you gave no real conclusion other than Newell is just like Kotick (a widely hated figure).

I commented on your comment that it seemed like you were saying that newell should NOT be doing what Kotick is doing and should be doing something else.

An entire post and you have yet to say which of his decisions make the game worse for you. How can anyone argue against you when all you state are vague things like "I think some of his decisions make the game worse for me."

You are intentionally vague, then lash out against anyone who tries to interpret your nebulous opinion. How about this: from now on, stop being so abstruse and list your arguments in bullet points so those of us lesser than you can make acceptable arguments.

And instead of dissecting other people's posts, try dissecting your own opinions and statements before you post, so that we may see all facets of your arguments.

I am not sure if I agree with this idea. Today's world pretty much says Activision Blizzard can do whatever the hell they want and their fans will by the game regardless. Lack of dedicated servers, 15 dollar map packs (part of which are recycled maps), splitting a game into 3 parts. If  anything, 2K just wants a piece of that. I mean get rabid fans to give you more money, funnel them to one service, start charging the hell out of them for small incremental additions they label DLC. Sounds like a gravy train to me. Personally, I've seen a lot of expansion packs these days featuring less and less often because of the DLC released around them.

In any event, Activision Blizzard has no reason to change. Most their players aren't knowledgable about the subject to care, or just don't care in general. I saw a couple of people surprised by some issues with MW2, but those 15 dollar map packs and 25 dollar mount sales... what do they care if they lose some fans when they've got others willing to pay 2 or 3 times what was lost by the people turned off by the business practice.