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Steam now allows the sale of adult only games on their store,the only hurdle to releasing your VN there has disappeared

Posted: Sun Oct 07, 2018 10:43 am
by margheritachan
Hopefully this means that team four leaves will publish Katawa Shoujo on Steam.
Is there any hope of that happening?

Re: Steam now allows the sale of adult only games on their store,the only hurdle to releasing your VN there has disappea

Posted: Sun Oct 07, 2018 4:22 pm
by demonix
Regardless of this change in policy, there's only two hopes of it happening and they are no hope and Bob hope and Bob hope is already dead.

Re: Steam now allows the sale of adult only games on their store,the only hurdle to releasing your VN there has disappea

Posted: Sun Oct 07, 2018 4:39 pm
by a1fox3
margheritachan wrote: Sun Oct 07, 2018 10:43 am Hopefully this means that team four leaves will publish Katawa Shoujo on Steam.
Is there any hope of that happening?
Why when there are so many places to download it for free.

Most of the 4LS devs are gone anyway or as far as I can see that is.

If they ever did put it on Steam I would pay 5.99 for it just to give them some money for the ones that are left.
I really hoped they would get back together and do a sequel to KS but my hopes have died a long time ago.

Re: Steam now allows the sale of adult only games on their store,the only hurdle to releasing your VN there has disappea

Posted: Mon Oct 08, 2018 5:18 pm
by Mirage_GSM
None at all.
Simple reason:
- Steam makes money by selling games.
- KS is free.
-> Steam can't make any money with it.

Q.E.D.

Re: Steam now allows the sale of adult only games on their store,the only hurdle to releasing your VN there has disappea

Posted: Wed Oct 10, 2018 12:50 pm
by Mythic
Mirage_GSM wrote: Mon Oct 08, 2018 5:18 pm None at all.
Simple reason:
- Steam makes money by selling games.
- KS is free.
-> Steam can't make any money with it.

Q.E.D.
Oh for love of god, I thought we had a talk about this! There are plenty of free games on steam without microtransactions; Doki Doki Literature Club, Everlasting Summer and Yume Nikki should have broken that stereotype by now.

Re: Steam now allows the sale of adult only games on their store,the only hurdle to releasing your VN there has disappea

Posted: Wed Oct 10, 2018 1:22 pm
by Mirage_GSM
Checked those three examples for you:
Yume Nikki is free but offers the Yume Nikki Dream Diary for 19,99€.
Doki Doki Literature CLub offers a "Fan Pack" for 9,99€.
Only Everlasting Summer seems to not have anything like this, but the development studio ran a kickstarter for their follow-up project some time back for which this may have been a promotion.

Besides, Steam will make money from the release even IF it is totally free in the form of the publishing fee, so anyone who is offering a game on steam without any monetarization schemes will do so at a loss - something 4LS certainly won't do when they have a perfectly good distribution platform on their own website.

Finally, a steam release presupposes that there are people willing to put in the time and effort to negotiate a Steam release. Not sure if there would be any programming effort involved, but I assume so.

@SC: Maybe add "Steam Release" to "fandisc, sequel, or prequel" at the top of the FAQ?

Re: Steam now allows the sale of adult only games on their store,the only hurdle to releasing your VN there has disappea

Posted: Wed Oct 10, 2018 1:30 pm
by Silentcook
As if that would work to any significant degree. :roll:

Re: Steam now allows the sale of adult only games on their store,the only hurdle to releasing your VN there has disappea

Posted: Thu Oct 11, 2018 3:34 am
by Mythic
I will give you that Steam Direct being monetized now poses an issue to 4LS, although I'm sure that Valve offers some sort of waiver for free games/known game studios and steam drm is basically a .dll hook, so there is no need for extra programing at all. And FYI Yume Nikki: Dream Diary is a sequel, so it doesn't support your hypothesis at all.

Re: Steam now allows the sale of adult only games on their store,the only hurdle to releasing your VN there has disappea

Posted: Thu Oct 11, 2018 8:37 am
by Mirage_GSM
Why wouldn't it support my "hypothesis"?
They are offering part one for free to get people to spend money on related products - whether they are sequels, merchandize or DLCs does not matter, does it?

Re: Steam now allows the sale of adult only games on their store,the only hurdle to releasing your VN there has disappea

Posted: Mon Oct 15, 2018 1:18 am
by Oddball
KS is already out there and it's free.

Putting it somewhere else where there's a fee for it just doesn't make any kind of real sense.

It's also been around long enough by now that anyone who would be interested in it has probably already heard of it and the devs have nothing else planned as a group so there's no real need to push it to a bigger audience.

Re: Steam now allows the sale of adult only games on their store,the only hurdle to releasing your VN there has disappea

Posted: Tue Oct 16, 2018 1:00 pm
by TheHivemind
Yeah it's great that Steam would host our game, but it would cost money and also, as people have pointed out, it's not exactly hard to find as it is.

Re: Steam now allows the sale of adult only games on their store,the only hurdle to releasing your VN there has disappea

Posted: Tue Oct 16, 2018 1:22 pm
by margheritachan
TheHivemind wrote: Tue Oct 16, 2018 1:00 pm Yeah it's great that Steam would host our game, but it would cost money and also, as people have pointed out, it's not exactly hard to find as it is.
I see your point,at the same time getting games on Steam is pretty cheap so...

Re: Steam now allows the sale of adult only games on their store,the only hurdle to releasing your VN there has disappea

Posted: Tue Oct 16, 2018 2:51 pm
by Silentcook
Suppose hypothetically that we put KS on Steam. Question: cui prodest?

Re: Steam now allows the sale of adult only games on their store,the only hurdle to releasing your VN there has disappea

Posted: Wed Oct 17, 2018 3:13 am
by Valjean Lafitte
Silentcook wrote: Tue Oct 16, 2018 2:51 pm Suppose hypothetically that we put KS on Steam. Question: cui prodest?
4LS, if you go the Doki Doki Literature Club route and offer bonus, non-game DLC.

For example:

- Character wallpaper packs ($2.99 a pop)
- An all-new digital art book ($6.99)
- An album of KS covers/remixes ($8.99)
- An illustrated PDF of Summer's Clover (art by Weee, Raide, or maybe even a well-liked fan artist such as Rtil) ($9.99)
- Rika and Saki routes ($14.99)

Price points pulled from my ass, but you get the picture. There are ways to "benefit" from your game being on Steam without charging a cent for the game itself.

Re: Steam now allows the sale of adult only games on their store,the only hurdle to releasing your VN there has disappea

Posted: Wed Oct 17, 2018 4:34 am
by Silentcook
Except we don't want and never wanted to offer DLC, and even if we did, we wouldn't charge for it. In fact, we even made an April's Fool post on the blog about this very thing before, and judging from your choice of strikethrough, I suspect you knew of it.

So no, 4LS wouldn't benefit from that, with or without quotes. Your suggestion is invalid.