It's one of the many reasons why I have a lot of faith in Valve.  They don't charge for using Steam. They make their money on sales from their site.

The word benevolent doesn't even begin to describe Valve's Steam policies.  They really are making the PC a truly competitive platform.

The current renaissance in PC game development is due to Steam. Period. 

Ask yourself this then. How do you think a single person developer or even a small team would be able to get enough copies in retail to actually make a profit and keep continuing to create games?

It was at a low point. No doubt about it.  

Having run Impulse and been making games during a 20 year period I've had to deal with the ebbs and flows first hand.  A viable digital distribution platform has been a major boon for game developers.  

In a world minus Steam, you could have easily had a set up where digital distribution became viable but there was no real platform available. Microsoft can barely be bothered to improve DirectX let alone provide a decent networking layer, intra-game services, account management, etc.  Steam's the only one doing this (Impulse was doing it but Steamworks was, overall, well ahead of Impulse::Reactor).

I'll take your word for it then.

I keep getting the feeling that if I want an alternative to Steam, that I'm going to have to program that alternative myself. That frightens me. I'm probably not the best person to do such a thing. I'm too easily distracted and the like. Plus, I'm only one person.

This is one of the reasons why I try to learn about Steam. I don't think it will die because a few or many people keep bitching about how they don't like Steam. They offer something that makes the market better, even if their other policies are not forgivable (or easily forgiven). To beat it, I think you will need a beast that can actually compete with it. Without competition, Steam can do what ever it wants because few developers can really afford to leave Steam at this time. Steamworks is the baited trap that brings developers in. From what I understand, it saves devs time and money because the developers don't need to buy code or program their own code to do what Steamworks. Unfortunately this means their games are unavoidably tied to Steam (unless they offer some sort of alternative game that uses no Steamworks code).

It's not that easy. There's all kinds of alternatives. Why would anybody use yours?

EA's tried to do it with Origin, and it's not exactly been smooth sailing for them. EA is a company with massive financial resources, and a very strong library of first party games they can use as a carrot to get people to install Origin in the first place. They still haven't particularly bothered Steam. Do you ever hear anybody say "gee, if only this game was on Origin?"

Before Steamworks came along, companies either had to do that on their own or pay for significantly more expensive and inferior solutions like GameSpy, or use even more inferior solutions like the loathed GFWL. Steamworks is a "trap" in the sense that it offers the best features for what it does AND offers those features at an unbeatable price. Developers aren't being suckered into it, they're getting tremendous value and aren't asked for a whole lot in return.

It's possible to make a game that uses Steamworks if it's there, and uses something else if it's not. But then you have to code the "something else", and if you're talking stuff that requires servers (matchmaking, cloud saves), you have to pay for that infrastruture too. Or you let Steam do it for you, and you focus on making games.

I mean just look at how far Brad has turned around on them.

That is what some people said about Civ5 when it was announced that it will use Steamworks. I was one of the people who said that I probably won't buy the game because of this. How did that work out? Civ5 did very well. I bought the game. So did many others who said they wouldn't. Steam is something that you have to deal with now, and luckily it has very few problems.

Like I said before, I hope they won't use Steamworks DRM even while using Steam. That is the only concession that I hope for

The thing is you don't need to compete with Steam for the whole market, just one niche e.g. games made by indie developers.  This means the scope is smaller, your costs are smaller, and you can scale up at a time of your choosing.

You also have the advantage of taking a fresh approach to distribution which your users may like more than Steam, and having a different client which has less bells and whistles but delivers what the user (and the developer or game studio) is looking for.

More than that though, providing a viable alternative means that eventually Steam may improve in response to what the user base is saying about your platform, however small it might be.  Real competition breeds innovation.

great idea, why don't you mod people make your own game, rack up millions of dollars and pay the 20 million dollars only to find yourself bankrupt on the curb because the game failed to sell well.

Nothing competes to steam, and BTW Microsoft is no longer controlled by bill gates and they proved to be greedy fucks lately because  haven't you seen the first Xbox one convention?

I would prefer it to be on steam.

So, this is how I see and understand it is this:

Steams servers and steamworks boosts the AI by enhancing its inteligence and learning tactics players use and building ships that they have designed for factions. It also has 1 vs 1 multiplayer.

Steam is also a useful platform for updates and DLC.

Steamworks is essentially a sharing service. If you enable the option and play whilst connected to Steam online, you will be sharing all the stuff you build, and the tactics you get, which gets added to a central server which then distributes it to other players via steamworks, and your creations and your tactics may be used (if good enough) against players.

That is how I think it would work anyway. Be funny if I was spot on.

Not true that 98% of gamers use steam. I have used steam in the past for games and quickly dumped it. It is a heavy weight program that is some what glitchy, intrusive, and annoying because it requires the program to run and an internet access to play the steam game in question. There are plenty of us gamers that hate Steam. Pick another release and distribution platform. Even though I love Gal Civ if you want to continue to use Steam you will not get my money!!!