People who have already purchased the game from them are not getting Steam keys (yet?). Bummer.

I was wondering if anyone was on the fence about buying it because it wasn't on steam. I did have a few friends that opted not to buy it because they wanted Steam hooks and the like.

Why wasn't this on Steam originally?

@beachthunder:

Frontier made there own launcher. Not that's a real excuse or anything for why they still couldn't just have it on steam. Given how soon(ish) after it came out they added it I wonder if it might be some sort of weird localization issue with steam and other countries or some sort of rules that had to be met.

@boxxybae said:

Here's a tweet from Frontier stating: "current players will not be receiving a steam code in current plans, we are assessing player feedback."

wow, I never noticed the tweet button :P

I'm glad it's available on Steam because that's definitely a consideration for me, but I'm not sure it's enough. The game sounds kind of boring in its current incarnation.

I was reading a Eurogamer article about the Steam release and I thought this was interesting:

Elite: Dangerous can be updated automatically by Steam as well as via the game's launcher. But DLC needs to be bought from the Elite: Dangerous web store.

Wasn't this the reason EA gave for pulling their new releases from Steam way back when? I wonder if Valve have relaxed their rules on non-Steam DLC.

@conmulligan:

To be fair the DLC is just like paintjobs right now. Its not really "dlc" like you would think of it.

@beachthunder: They said they had no reason to release it on Steam since they had their own back-end and launcher. Honestly, I think they didn't put it on Steam because they wanted the initial wave of purchases to 100% go to them, and then they'd release it on Steam later for the people who didn't want to buy it at launch but might be tempted to later.

I will say it sort of rubs me the wrong way how they said they had no plans to release it on Steam and then it suddenly appeared a few months later.

I wasn't waiting for it to hit Steam, just waiting for my tax refund. It's just coincidence that the two coincided.

The game still features Frontier's launcher. At least it's unobtrusive (unlike, say, a U-Play game), but you really aren't missing anything if you have this in your library as a non-Steam game.