mjbrune

I am very tempted to try this as they mentioned it on the recent bombcast...

If someone finds me the directions I will youtube it.

Exactly what my theory was in the first place a few days ago.

E.g. create a bunch of paths where you can easily waste time and have only the right one be obfuscated by random things. This is just the pipe theory without specific pipes. "Find a goomba in a load of crap, grab a star, make a jump, take the left door, grab a goomba, make a jump, take another door, do more random things. It's certainly a "trick" in the sense that the only way to finish the level is to either brute force the solution or decrypt the secrets of the level using the editor and work backwards from the flag.

The other part of this is that it's timed so all Dan really has to do is fill a LONG level with random crap like the GB stream levels and watch patrick never figure them out. "Take pipe 3-4-2-1-4-6-3-3-1-3-5-7-2-3" would be a solution that would take more than 72 hours to brute force. Specially with all the devious misdirection you can use. The path you thought was the answer and was working on for the last 5 hours turns out to be a pure dead end.

Grabbed screencheat. Will reported back with how fun it was for me and my friends :D

Sorry but simply put not all online distribution services take 30%. Even Origin waves their entire service fee for kickstarter games for 90 days. The most expensive ways to distribute your game online is Steam and gog. Also, I am completely not talking about retail. Retail at this point, for me isn't even a consideration when releasing a PC game. Itch.io takes 10% and tons of others are around that. Humble takes 5%. Desura takes 15%, 30% only if they make the sale directly. I mean even paypal, the most greedy of the choices takes 2.9% + .30 per transaction.

At this point the only reason to be on steam is exposure, which is quickly going away with their systems in place now. They help you get out there and a lot of purchases are done on steam but there is a reason why you see a lot of games like MMOs done outside of steam's store.

Also to clarify I was saying stating steam is starting to hurt developers on a few levels. Mostly that they are devaluing the games. Not that they haven't ever been good for developers and that they aren't good for some developers right now.

@beachthunder: Ahh didn't see impulse had died in 2014. Was trying to make sure I included everything I could think of in the recent years. :)

As a consumer I love steam. Steam is my answer to everything. Friends system that keeps me close to people, sales to keep game costs down and a community/workshop system that allows me to participate in the games I love.

As a developer I hate steam. 30% of the sale goes directly to them. With UE4 as your game engine 5% goes to Epic Games. A publisher will take another 30% minimum and business costs are generally at least 20%. Leaving around 15% for actual paying of the team.

Overall though, and I might be because I am a developer, I think steam is bad. They simply have no competition right now. Anything with a monopoly is bad. You always want strong competitors out there. Even duopoly isn't great but it is certainly preferable all around to monopolies. Worst of all I feel Steam drives down the costs of games below a point where they can be sustained on the budding developer level. Unless you simply save up tons of money and start pushing out games on your own dime you simply can't make it as a developer without a publisher or some sort of investment backing. Steam sales drive down demands for games. Everytime someone says "I'll buy it when it goes on sale." is proof of this. Steam has created an expectation that a game will go on sale in such a little amount of time that it's unreasonable to pay full price for it. Of course you can apply the piracy excuse of "I wasn't going to buy it at that price anyways" but in the long run you don't know that because no one can see into the future. This sale mentality coupled with the 30% take from steam and the rough calculations before can clearly show that steam is in fact hurting developers.

So okay okay, Steam isn't great for developers but consumers are consumers and surely it's up to developers to solve this problem, right? Some people will argue that consumers should worry about what really happens to developers. To an extent they are right. If the consumers really love the industry then they should make sure they take care of it. One way of doing that is of course making sure where your dollars going and making sure you are supporting the right parts of the industry. Developers do have their own side to deal with though and they have to create their own solutions and not push it on to consumers entirely.

Okay so I am a developer and have no solutions on how to survive on Steam. How can I do it? Simply put, look at the guys who are surviving on steam as a budding developer or even some of the major developers. Valve themselves are making tons of money from community made items. Things like Maps in CS:GO and items in Dota 2 bring in tons of money for their games. Explore monetizing your community. With Steam's current setup it's real easy for a low cost to free to play game to make lots of money via items. They don't even need to be cosmetic as long as you balance your entire game around the ability to have items change set attributes. Such as the items in TF2.

Whoa whoa, I am a consumer and I don't like the idea of my work being monetized by anyone but me! Then start paying full prices for games and start paying it directly to the developers where possible. Otherwise this is where the industry is going to end up. If you don't like this idea then push the industry in the other way and show them there is more money in full pay games than piecemeal.

depends on the game but as hard drive space gets cheaper I start seeing no reason to be limited at all. I always save to a new file vs overwriting data.

My last gaming laptop was 1300 USD and lasted maybe 2 years, running everything at medium.

@teddie: ahh sorry. I hadn't watch UPF yet. Didn't see any sarcasm from them about it though.