The Steam deal thread! All Steam deals, all the time.

[calintz]

it should still be on sale on GoG until May 15
http://www.gog.com/en/gamecard/alan_wake

[Chronos]

Originally Posted by calintz

it should still be on sale on GoG until May 15
http://www.gog.com/en/gamecard/alan_wake

Nice.

[KingOfSentinels]

More deals. God I love Steam sales.

Plants vs Zombies is 75% off, awesome game, everyone must buy, best tower defence game I've played in years. Dear Esthar, a cool Indie game running on Steam, is half price. And a game called Mini Ninjas, which I want from the name alone, is also 75% off. One day Steam won't have any sales, and then that is when the world will implode.

[KingOfSentinels]

Also, forgot this one.

Serious Sam pack. You get Serious Sam Classic and HD versions of the First and Second encounter, Serious Sam 2, and the Indie spin-offs Double D and the Random Encounter, as well as the newest game Serious Sam 3 BF3 with all the digital deluxe content, exclusive making of videos of the game and PDF printable artbook and official sound track, for 75% off. If you already own the Classic ones then you can gift them to a friend.

Holy shit Batman. Apparently the pack is £63 separately, and only £16 for the lot. That's about £2 per game. That's some good quality right there, and more reason why I adore Steam.

http://store.steampowered.com/sub/13606/

[Alucard]

Well helloooo Esthar, wanted you for ages, $5 is good enough. Just wihs those idiots would make a plans zombies 2 already. Been FOREVER!

[Alucard]

Seeing a few deals going up and noticed one game called 'Bloody Good Time'. I recall being interested in this and so checked the forums to see how the game had gone. Not good at all. Game is apparently super enjoyable but there are just no servers anymore and zero support. I found this posted by one of the developer guys who made it. Very interesting and further reveals publishers to be scum. A little long but very interesting. Heres to kickstarter style funding replacing them.

Firstly, Ubisoft funded Outerlight to develop BGT (they did not buy Outerlight). The original deal was for around 4.5 million dollars, and if they had stuck to that deal, BGT would have probably been a fantastic game (or should I say, even more fantastic! ).

As an aside, they also promised marketing (ho ho), and that OL would retain the IP, both of which promises were broken.

So, after Outerlight had delivered everything that Ubisoft had asked for in pre-production, Ubisoft (in their infinite wisdom) decided the game was no longer going to retail (boxed copies), and that the budget should be cut to 2 million dollars, less than half the original budget. Their logic was...and get this...nobody buys multiplayer only games...ha ha ha. I guess they had never seen Counterstrike, or Team Fortress, or Left for Dead, or...

The immediate consequence of this was that OL had to lay off some staff, and we had to pitch a new version of the game which could be delivered for the new budget. Ironically, had they given us the 2 million & let us get on with making the game, we could have still delivered 8 maps, and the rest of the content. However, they always wanted to re-work every aspect of the game, over and over, which meant a great deal of inefficiency, and meant that we could only deliver 3 maps.

Back to the royalties. The money they gave Outerlight to develop the game (which ended up being 2.5m as we managed to squeeze more blood from the stone later in development) was an advance on royalties, which means that while it sounds like Ubisoft are paying for the game to be made, in actual fact they are lending OL the money, and OL have to pay for ALL the development costs from their royalty share.

OL's royalty share is around 20%, which means that once everyone else involved takes their cut, OL gets roughly 90 cents per copy sold. However, this money has to pay off the development costs, so until roughly 2.7 million copies are sold, Outerlight will get NOTHING.

Given the game is highly unlikely to sell over 2.7 million copies, the reality is that OL are unlikely to ever see any royalties.

The nature of these deals are amamzingly bad for developers, you'd think that perhaps all the money recouped from the game would be used to pay off the costs, and then any profit would be split, but no, the developer has to pay from their 20%.

This is why, if you look back over the history of games, publishers have got bigger, and developers have gone out of business. This model also means that publishers get bigger financial reserves, and thus keep control of the deals with developers (as they hold all the cash), while developers rarely end up with enough money to ditch publishers & go it alone.

This also answers the question, "why do developers even sign these deals?", well, with only a few big publishers, what choice do they have? If they want to make games, they have to work with publishers.

Please also note, had Ubisoft charged a reasonable amount for the game, like $20, then ok we'd sell less copies due to the higher price, but we'd get roughly $3 per copy sold, and so would have to sell 835k copies before seeing a royalty. Still unlikely, but more likely than 2.7 million copies!

Compare this to the deal if you can fund your own game and distribute it on steam. If you do that, you get 70% of the price on Steam, so if it was $20 we'd get $14 per copy, and the break even would be 140k copies (assuming we spent 2m making the game). If, like The Ship, we spent less, more like 1m, then the break even is a very achievable 70k copies.

As I have said elsewhere, the flaw with this model is the need for funding to make the game. Given that historically developers tend to go bust, banks, investors, and governments are not keen to fund games. This is very short sighted, as while the old situation (publisher funding) meant developers rarely made money, digital distribution has created a real opportunity for developers to see the returns from their hard work & creativity.

The current situation is really pretty appalling for developers, and I hope it changes sometime soon, although I am not holding my breath. I think the only reason developers continue to make games is the passion that we and gamers have for games, and the publishers are happy to exploit that passion.

As a footnote, I would not have minded Ubi cutting the budget if they had been in financial trouble. However, when we signed to them they'd made a profit of 240 million euros, and just recently they announced they are spending 62 million euros on "restructuring". Now, I don't know what restructuring involves, but I wonder how many developers out there can afford to waste 62 million on moving desks & chairs around...I suspect the answer is...none.

Maybe I should be proud and think that 2 million of the re-structuring money is money they promised to us, so I guess I am paying for someones new walnut desk & gold plated chair! I hope we at least get a "donated by brutalising Outerlight" plaque on it.

[KingOfSentinels]

He's a bit arrogant if he thinks his game can even be compared to stuff like Counter-Strike, but that does sound a bit retarded. They must not have had much faith in the game, and were probably right since it's sitting on 5 user scores on Metacritic. As usual though, only negative situations hit the news and everyone thinks all publishers are bad because of it.

It's like Noel Gallagher once said. "You can praise a person a million times over in every interview, say they're fantastic and brilliant and no one listens, and then you call one person a cunt, and it's everywhere."

At least games like this can now be Kickstarted. Smaller, unproven developers tend to struggle with big publishers. Outerlight's first game The Ship apparently made a loss and the studio disbanding is attributed to that, so Ubisoft's funding probably bailed them out of shutting down then and there. Did he miss that bit out? Oh look at that, he did. It's easy to sound like the victim when your side of the story is the only side.

[Alucard]

Pretty sure The Ship was their own money and that came out years ago. Havent read the metacritic reviews but I'm sure most of their issues were from lack of content, which ubisoft wouldnt let them create. I'm having trouble finding people who dont like it in forum threads. Everyone says its plenty fun. Real shame. Although you cant defend ubisoft for taking the license from them after supposedly promising to let them keep full control.

[KingOfSentinels]

The Ship was their own money, yeah, but it didn't sell well and they made a loss, and they couldn't make another game on their own money. So Ubisoft's funding saved the studio from closing; without it they wouldn't have even had a chance at making another game.

Generally a publisher will want to see results and will set milestones. They don't give you millions and let you waste it all. "We give you this amount of money and we want to see this working by this date.", sort of stuff. All studios will do this. If you continually don't make those milestones, which I bet is what happened here, then unfortunately the project stops becoming viable for profit, and funding gets cut or the entire project itself will get the plug pulled. Can't expect a publisher to willingly lose millions. All the nice guys like CD Projekt or Valve would do exactly the same thing if in that position, and Valve actually did do this with Turtle Rock and no one called them evil.

There's nothing to say he's some innocent victim in all of this. And yes, they shouldn't have taken the license, I think this guy should have checked the contract a bit closer. That's the bit that's iffy for me because all the milestones and what they wanted to see would have been highlighted in an initial agreement. He missed them, and the funding gets cut. Funding doesn't get cut for no reason.

I don't think Ubisoft are angels in all of this but he definitely isn't either. It's a shame all this Kickstarter stuff wasn't around when the game was getting developed.

[Alucard]

The weird thing is the game came out working fine, just only had 3 maps. I dont see why ubisoft couldnt have funded more maps to be used as DLC since that thing is every publishers wet dream. And yeah, total shame kickstarter wasnt here years ago. Hopefully stuff goes well now for the little guys.

[Alucard]

Some cool stuff up today. One of them is Jamestown for $3.39 down from $10. Its a top down old school shooter, co-op, good reviews too.

[BlindMaphisto]

Really fun to play in my opinion. Nice thing about top down shooters is that they don't monopolize a lot of time.

[calintz]

$11.99 USD

[Drunken Savior]

A game of the year version for this game was just announced. It will retail for $40 and includes all the DLC.

[calintz]

how much are the DLC?

is $12 + DLC more than $40?