In a recent blog post by developer Notch, the creator of the hugely successful Minecraft, he was asked at PAX about whether Minecraft would be available on the popular Steam platform. Steam is well known for carrying a huge selection of indie games. It’s a great platform that makes game shopping for the PC really convenient and easy. They also feature great sales and have a "daily deal" that can discount a game as much as 75%. Lately Steam has been at odds with EA and their online digital download service Origin. It’s rumored Steam has refused to carry such titles as Battlefield 3 and other major EA releases due to the fact EA games tend to handle DLC in the game itself verses outside sources.
I am not sure how these rumors are effecting Notch's decision to hold off on releasing Minecraft on Steam but in his blog post he says "Being on Steam limits a lot of what we're allowed to do with the game, and how we're allowed to talk to our users. We (probably?) wouldn't be able to, say, sell capes or have a map market place on minecraft.net that works with steam customers in a way that keeps Valve happy". In my personal opinion Steam has possibly been over stepping their boundaries, almost bullying companies into regulating how DLC is handled. It seems to be using its market share to dominate the industry, almost forcing companies to offer DLC through there platform and in turn receiving a small percentage of each sale.
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| Competition is good! |
Every development company should be able to offer DLC how they want, and not be afraid of losing 5 million potential customers on Steam if they don't want to play by their rules. If Notch is planning on making micro transactions for Minecraft available on Minecraft.net it's going to make it very difficult for the game to be released on Steam. He does say in his blog they are talking with Valve about it. Being optimistic Steam does offer games like Sims 3 which feature their own DLC shops not on Steam, but with the way things are going between Valve and EA, I wouldn't be surprised to see Sims 3 taken off Steam.
"So there's no big argument, we just don't want to limit what we can do with Minecraft. Also Steam is awesome. Much more awesome then certain other digital distribution platforms that we would NOT want to release Minecraft on” Notch makes it clear, that he and Valve are not on bad terms. He also says there is a certain inherent incompatibility between what the two companies want to do. So in all likelihood we won’t be seeing Minecraft on Steam and I personally am happy about that.
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