Add the game to steam #5086
Comments
wiki-me
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Status: Needs Discussion
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Hi @wiki-me However, unfortunately at this point in time, we do not have the capacities to invest the effort necessary to bring Terasology to these platforms, which is why I'll label it with our "Dream" label as something that we currently will not do but would love to revisit in the future. |
jdrueckert
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Type: Dream
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Also, just for cross-reference, this is somewhat related to #4952 |
I think that's why it should be prioritized, i have been casually looking at the work this project does for some time (commit messages), I don't think anything the developers did has a better chance of bringing in new developers and increasing the development capabilities (but i could be wrong of course). |
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Hey @wiki-me and thanks for the issue and interest :-) Speaking as somebody who has literally been here since the very beginning I can confidently say we've simply never quite been ready for Steam or wider publicity specifically because of the attention it brings. We've been close at times when we had multiple types of gameplay that were enjoyable, but the roller coaster ride of activity and contributor lifecycles mean that things are rarely stable for long. The trouble with attracting more attention you aren't ready for is that it can actually make things worse - both in small ways and big ways. For instance: when we originally got reviewed by the German Lets Play Youtuber Gronkh many years ago it resulted in a video viewed more than a million times - which is incredible! It brought in tons of contributors including some active to this day and I'm super thankful that it happened. Behind the scenes however, because our infrastructure wasn't ready it also metaphorically melted our presence on the web, to the point where our hosting provider at the time couldn't even bring our dedicated server back online for unknown reasons (but at least we could still retrieve our files, phiew). It was down for weeks, during which tons of people couldn't download the game, had a bad experience ("Why is their website broken? This sucks"), and we lost out on dozens or hundreds of more contributors that could have really solidified our future. We primarily updated Facebook and such where most of the new audience appeared, which was something, but we didn't have a good routine in keeping that running (none of us are really marketing types) and over time our social media presence suffered from not enough attention while we were very visible to others making the project sometimes look sort of bad. A similar thing happened with Destination Sol, which is in fact on Steam, Google Play, and so forth. Again it made a substantial splash early on, had hundreds of people talking on the Steam forum and elsewhere, but then when things calmed down suddenly we faced more platforms to keep an eye on, and during periods of inactivity we just don't have the volunteers for that and the Steam forum got sorta ugly for a while with "dead game!" or "neglectful devs!" and so on (including spammers, which also doomed our regular forum). Which can be really demotivating, meaning more volunteers drift off, and a vicious spiral continues. I'd be thrilled to get back to all these ways to get the word out - Steam, Android, GOG, other OSS gaming sites, Linux distribution repos etc - but it is one thing to implement support, another very different thing to maintain everything. We've been suffering for years from even just the game features being a tad wide without enough contributors to keep things working, and have been cutting back specifically to reduce the maintenance burden and tech debt. At this point I think we're essentially in a mild form of hibernation until either some of us core contributors get more free time again (I have a 1 and a 3 year old right now and just moved halfway across the country, for instance) or somebody new with a ton of free time helps reinvigorate the project. That's often just the sad reality of volunteer projects, some get further than others, for instance The Battle for Wesnoth which is awesome and has done well but if you dig around you find similar old plans and ideas long since abandoned. |
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Oh, one other example I forgot that's perhaps also interesting from a somewhat different perspective: Valheim Great little game developed by a small shop, went viral, earned them tens of millions of dollars ... and they had to still completely delay their roadmap and focus on bugs and stability for months due to the massive influx of players :-) You'd think with practically infinite money they could have built on that success effectively and immediately, but they managed about as well as I think they could. They slowed down despite having enough money to hire an army of developers, so they wouldn't lose themselves or their ultimate goals, and only just recently started catching back up. Counter example to that would be poor Star Citizen - more money than some countries, but with poor direction, prioritization, and massive feature bloat it is years late with no end in sight. I wish we could suddenly just have millions of dollars, but even if we did then doing it right still wouldn't put us on Steam within months, or even a year or two :-) |
Steam has an option for "playtesting" where the number of players is limited (space station 14 uses it, that's one option). I am also not sure if the game is in a bad state as you think it is (alternativeto.net shows it has 27 likes, and some good FOSS games i played had a significantly smaller amount).
I would say that's a net win if you still have contributors now, The fact that your web host couldn't handle it just means you had a bad one i think, anyway it seems the website is now hosted by github so i doubt they will have this problem.
You could always have a pinned thread posted on the steam forum saying this is unofficial and linking to your prefered method of communication (Reddit?), also you could drop some of the platforms as they don't seem to be generating value for potential users , facebook and twitter seem to be getting somewhere between one and four likes, If we would use openttd as a case study it got about 3k players when the project started and now seem to be averaging at about 500 player per day. Also generally speaking you can't please everyone, and that shoudn't prevent you from doing good work (that would make some people happy).
You could always put it on steam, and check for updates, if the version is out of date you could link to the official website and say it's outdated. |
Appreciate the kind words there for sure! :-) All these things are absolutely possible - but they all indicate trying to elevate the game's level of maintenance to a point that just isn't sustainable right now :-( For instance play testing (or early access) on Steam indicate a sort of process - a thing is going on in preparation for a next thing. That's setting an unrealistic expectation since the game is effectively in hibernation right now. It won't be forever, however, and I hope we're closer to the exit of the tunnel of lower activity than the entrance. I'm seeing some potential personally just being set up in a new house and getting the kids set up with schooling, activities, etc. I will get back to Terasology sooner rather than later, and when they're ready I'll be dragging my kids into helping one way or another as well 😁 In the meantime the project is entirely open source and anybody is welcome to help out and maybe even more helpfully help others help out - you seem to be well-connected to the various places games could be published, short helping with our logistics in automatically publishing the game to more places if you could find other people still that would be interested in helping code things and so forth that would be amazing :-) (And for that sake if you'd be curious to yourself learn about building and releasing games for Steam that's another option to work toward - although the first step there would probably be firming up Destination Sol's release process since it is already wired for Steam) |
Imagine how you or other will feel seeing the game constantly getting reviews saying it's a good game.
I am not sure the game is as inactive as you think it is , openhub catagories it as a moderately active project, and openhub also seems to be missing some repositories so the activity is likely higher then reported. Also if i look at the commits it seems it is somewhat active, Sure not super active like some other game projects but as active as some projects. You could also have a pop up when the game start saying the project is not very active in development.
There is some other FOSS related stuff i would like to do, I can post the project is looking for maintainers, But i would prefer if there was a blog post saying that otherwise posting it feels too spammy , you can write a blog post and message me on reddit and i could post it. |
I'd feel great! However, that won't magically make more time available 😅 Yet if we get flooded with bad reviews that can be a huge hit to motivation for spending what time we can find I've personally worked on our OpenHub config and yeah it would be nice if we could just define multiple entire GitHub organizations so all our activity would be counted. Still I tried to pick some of the meaningful repos. The metric is pretty arbitrary though - if the number of counted commits was all for "one thing" like a simple Java library then yeah I'd call "moderately active" sensible. But it is a very broad code base, and if a bunch of tinkering is happening in one corner of the engine that doesn't mean the game content is "fresh" so to say :-) Blog idea is good. We need a sort of re-kickoff at some point hopefully soon - could try to do a round of publicity then. We need to be ready to respond to it though. I'm really eager to get to that myself, and when we get settled in our new house soon I'd like to think I'd personally be ready to jump back in and help, both for awareness and actual project work 👍 If I were to wager a guess I'd aim for mid-spring or so. I'd be thrilled to have some new energy including from others by then! |
I think it's worth a try if you want to add devs, as they say you miss one hundred percent of the shots you don't take. I also don't think it will get only negative reviews, and even if 90 of the reviews are negative some still like it (which is kinda a miracle considering it is made by volunteers), You could also have a pop in the game asking for a 5 star rating, that way that project could have some "objective subjective" data on the quality of the project.
Still there seems to be some user facing activity on the ModuleSite repo. |
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Yep! module site is one of the pieces being worked on a bit, I'm looking forward to how it turns out :-) I'll do my very best to get back to it all this spring, or maybe even earlier if this work thing I've been trying to plot for ... years 😅 finally works out |
No rush, I think one of the advantages of open source games is that because there is no rush or people livelihood is not dependent on the project there is less stress and less negative emotions which iirc according to some research could improve creativity. Plus your giving the damn thing for free and don't owe us anything 😆. |
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$100 is trivial, nowhere near as much of an issue as the effort and the philosophical reasons raised earlier :-) We have a publisher account set up with tax info, bank stuff, etc already thanks to Destination Sol. A revival process has started and is visible on Discord if you'd like to check out some activity or chip in somehow 👍 |
While we are on the subject of philosophy , ownership estimations are any where from about 4-87k for cataclysm dda and 374.6 k to 1.10 M to mindustry (both fully open source games that sell on steam), directing that money to some non profit (e.g. children in underprilivaged countries) is another philosophical benefit. |
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I'll go ahead and respectfully suggest that those numbers are easier to post than achieve and digest into charitable donations ... :-) |
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Yeah, but you don't need those number to make a difference, it reportedly costs 55$ to be plastic neutral and $1 dollar to plant a tree or 15$ to feed a child for month. Not judging you if you don't want to do it (I could also probably do more), but it's an option |
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Let me put it this way: we could all do more to make the world a better place. Any effort spent doing so through Terasology is almost certainly going to be vastly less efficient than doing so as an individual, or even as a group organizing around charity. Any effort spent setting up on Steam, Gog, or elsewhere explicitly to earn revenue to then immediately drop into charities is going to be a huge amount of work where if you instead spent that time as an individual making money for donating or going off to volunteer somewhere in person you'd almost certainly make a bigger impact. Shoehorning charity related efforts into the project would reduce focus and increase maintenance burdens that we are simply not positioned for right now. If we had a bunch of the prerequisites already done, a huge playerbase that would push revenue on us that at present we don't even want (covering routine expenses would be nice but other than that we have no use for trickle income), and it was just pressing a button to redirect some funds for charity? Sure, at that point that would be an option. We are not at that point. And on a similar note we aren't at that point for Steam, Gog, Linux packaging systems, etc, even for just distributing the game. As activity comes and goes we get to thresholds where some new things make sense to consider - but even so we have to think long term in what we can commit to over years. That sort of project management is not trivial. That said - anybody on the project is of course absolutely free to pursue individual charitable efforts (and plenty do!), which is an honorable goal. But it is simply not within scope for what we can do as a project right now, or in the foreseeable future. |
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Putting it another way, let's say the game is put on Steam or GOG, and it gets a tonne of attention. That's great and all, but what also goes up is feature requests and bug reports. With the current state of the team, it is not feasible to keep up with this workload, and I am sure plenty of people on the team do this for fun and passion for the game. I personally would love to see it on Steam or GOG, but is a pipe dream currently, so it is best to focus on the here and now. Improving the game and naturally building up more contributors is a more sustainable way to make the game better. I feel this issue is something that should be considered in the future, but not something that could or should be entertained for now. |
Motivation
The game is hard to find, also it's hard to assess if it's worth playing.
Proposal
Add the game to steam
Why I think it will be beneficial:
it is very popular and it's website has a lot of visitors (Alexa ranks it as the 314 most popular website on the internet).
Seeing a lot of good reviews can really tip the scales and make me (and probably others) take a chance on trying a game (it's basically social proof), it could lead to more exposure which will mean more developers and more feedback (former developer of naev said it brought new developers).
Steam is one of the only game review systems that i know of which is able to rank games only based on "recent reviews" (besides gog.com), so if a game starts badly and keeps getting developed and becomes good the old review don't prevent it from getting a good rating, this is especially good for open source games that can have a very long history of development (being developed for more then a 15 years is common).
Another nice feature of steam is that you can find reviews for players that played more then a certain number of hours , some games can be half done and a review after three hours of play time might not reflect problems, a review after say 30h indicates you can pour some time into it without the game failing (and you will have to wait for a newer version and maybe play it until the point you reached before because save files are not always compatible with future versions).
Some FOSS projects on steam have a price (for example the game Mindustry ). Maybe you could use that for funding and paying freelancers to create graphics and sound (iirc this is what shattered pixel dungeon does).
early feedback can be useful, there is a saying that if you are not embarrassed when releasing the software then you released it too late, steam can mark a game as early access (like supertux does) so there is no danger of disappointing players because the game isn't fully polished.
Alternatives
Maybe just add it to gog.com, it has some of the benefits (A "recent reviews" feature, and it is somewhat popular but not like steam so it won't provide the same exposure).
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