Steam is very strange about how it helps a game. It give you access to so many people and a lot of them would buy but the problem is there is a part of the community that wants to see every game fail. They will site their lie about the game get people not to buy it(this applies to early access only). Then there is the community itself which most of the time is rude as hell it seems. I just have a major problem with the steam community. Unless you need steam to survive just stay off it. The sales don't make up for the fact your community is in the can now.
I really don't think that it's a guarantee that the players that come from Steam visibility will be as acidic as a lot of us really fear. These types are going to come no matter what distribution system you use. My example for a good Steam community would be Payday 2, from everything I've experienced and from what I've read the folks there are quite decent to be around. Now the opposite would be something along the lines of Dota 2, where I can't even miss a single Ice Path from Jakiro without half the known universe commenting how bad I am. You're going to get the good and bad, in this case I believe that we can't condemn the entire community for the actions of a very vocal faction of it. I think the benefits of visibility and marketing would outweight whatever trolls are haters we'll meet because no matter what they're going to come.
I would say that EC, which will be promoted well - i'm pretty sure - doesn't need something like steam, to get it to the people. I play alot of games on steam. Most of them are indiependentgames which Steam is perfect for. But I play games like SWTOR and GuildWars2 as well, which are not on steam but especially GW2 was one of the most popular games during the last year.
Well - as a player I am all for steam, there is just many benefits and I like being able to download any game I have basically anywhere I am. As a developer there is a few things that need to be thought through - I have integrated parts of the steam mechanics to the code base we had at Funcom, and it's nice and easy to use, it gives some nice features and overall it's a good piece of software; the downside I see is - we are going to launch f2p, at least for parts of the Orcs, that means they have to charge us for transactions in the item shop - that means, they need to see what is going through the item shop, that means more work for us while we loose money. Now i don't know numbers, and it's really hard to predict stuff like this, but will steam bring so much more paying customers to make the extra work ok? will the numbers increase to make the costs ok? I personally don't want to take that bet - speaking as a developer, but lucky me I don't need to take it
Steam is amazing for many reasons. First it's great for just browsing games who knows someone might look at the picture of EC and say I want it. Second steam has amazing community tools we can use to build hype for the game. These are just a few reasons steam is a good idea.
Wasn`t the greatest fan of steam many years in the past, but got used to it over time (cos needed it and wanted to check it out) and so far it was pretty decent ride. Not to mention u can track friends and community and events as well over it!
Steam takes a huge chunk of your money, for what is the equivalent of advertising, since you could download games from their websites when available usually. MMO's aren't usually willing to do that, and if they are, its because there dying and on the way out and are desperate for cash.
While u are right about the EC running of its own client and that might be a good idea over all, steam has amassed such a big audience of people that just by promoting it there and having an option to play it through it, will attract a big chunk of population that might not be checking all the EC forums and lurking like most of us. (and im talking from personal experience with people that i play/ know irl) They tend to check couple sites/and steam for updates on most games sadly.
