Fortress Idea?

[Titanoboa]

and honestly anything that will generate popularity is worth doing.

Nope.

[takburger]

and honestly anything that will generate popularity is worth doing.

Nope.

I remember few brand managers who said that, and then they regretted it (bad buzz is no good buzz)

ps: If you wanna promote such a game, you have to understand nobody here in the community have sufficient resources to do so. So you must put all your effort on small targets that are meaningful.

[delinquent]

Steam won't fix anything if the community isn't interested in it. There's an armagetron steam group already and there are like 7 people in it, also you can add non-steam games manually and it'll show that you're playing that game in the client.

The idea behind greenlighting arma is a bit of advertising. How many hundred thousand people use steam on a daily basis?

[Vogue]

Getting it greenlit is a good idea.

Calling on Z-Man <3 could you please submit the game to Steam? If there's a fee involved, I'll gladly donate money for it and make it happen. I believe all we'd need to do after that is vote for it, while I'll advertise for if it happens.

We can add sine's totally awesome trailer for it!

[Z-Man]

Sorry, I don't think Steam would be a good idea. Once upon a time, it was good advertising just to be on Steam, nowadays with Greenight, that is no longer the case. It's an additional distribution platform to take care of. It's just not worth it, I think.

Though, If anyone else wants to submit the game and take care of everything, they have my blessing. The fee is in the nominal range, IIRC, 100 or 200 $.

[Vogue]

It's an additional distribution platform to take care of.

Can you explain what this means?

[Z-Man]

Distribution Platform = way to get the game to the player
The downloadable installer .exe is one kind of platform, the 0install package another, the .deb files another. I'm only guessing, but for Steam distribution, another method is needed. It's probably sufficiently similar to 0install: The distribution itself consists of a packed archive that gets extracted into your Steam folder, plus metadata to tell Steam which executable to run, plus icons and stuff. Building that package should be reasonably easy (We're already doing most of the work automatically, I bet), but getting it uploaded and activated on updates could be cumbersome.
Oh, did I say one additional platform? I meant three. I totally forgot that we'd also want to support Mac and Linux Steam clients.

[Vogue]

Ok, well if anyone is willing to set that up for me I'm willing to pay the fee. It's up to you guys.

[Hoax]

Until you can generate revenue why would it be on Steam get real.
I'd be suprised if 2% of users even regularly viewed the greenlight section anyway if the plan was for promotion only. You could argue that might be a lot in the scale of things but that's not what greenlight is for.
You could try Desura as it seems more accommodating for somethng like arma

[takburger]

Anyway, the comunity would need better videos as promotional material for a platform like steam.

[delinquent]

Ok, well if anyone is willing to set that up for me I'm willing to pay the fee. It's up to you guys.

The requirements are that you own a game on Steam (perhaps a $5 investment) and a one-time $100 submission fee.

It's an additional distribution platform to take care of.

Not exactly. The existing .exe can be used for windows releases, it's merely a case of adding eight or nine paragraphs of code which is mostly pre-written. I can take care of it; I looked up some basic C++ stuff today, looks similar enough to C# that I can do it myself. This will take a while though, I have a baby, an apprenticeship, a college course and CCNA/P to do atm.

[fman23]

Just my small input on the Steam idea (since I've researched a lot into this before),

Steam is a fantastic distribution platform that makes it easy not only for the end user but also the developers. To distribute the game on Steam, it would simply mean compiling binaries and supporting files, compressing them, and pointing Steam to the main executable. Steam not only would make distribution of the game easier and provide a little advertisement, but it would also make an easy platform to distribute and sell moviepacks for a little money for the devs.

Aside from distribution, Steamworks provides its own alternative identification mechanism and a matchmaking/lobby system. Without the benefit of the identification and matchmaking systems, I would not recommend putting Armagetron on Steam, but it is a viable option. Seeing other games that get Greenlit on Steam, every gamer I know (only one of which plays Armagetron) do agree that if the 0.4 client with its updated graphics, sound, tutorials, etc. were released, it would be easily Greenlit. The game is already featureful and stable unlike many of the Greenlit games.

One thing about Armagetron Advanced being on Steam is that it will be in a tiny group of GPL games on Steam (there are two or three others last I checked). The GPL is easily compatible with Steam so long as the source code is still easily accessible and Steam wouldn't change that.

For anyone interested in Steamworks, information is available at http://www.steampowered.com/steamworks/index.php.

For distribution, I already make Windows builds of 0.4 on my website http://fkmclane.net/armagetronad/builds.html (speaking of which, can someone with push rights take a minute or two and push this patch: https://bugs.launchpad.net/armagetronad/+bug/1317586) and can make a Linux build with necessary libraries both of which can be pushed to Steam. I guess dlh can cover a Mac OS X build and associating dylibs.

[delinquent]

Sweet. When I get round to doing this, I'll be allowing both 0.2 and 0.4 releases, if that's possible. If not, I'm going to push the 0.2 release, seeing as it's the "supported" version. I'll try and make a secondary package to install Sty, CT, AP et cetera.

@Vogue: Do you fancy getting this moving? If you prefer, we could put a moneypot together and get some of the forum members to contribute.

[sinewav]

So what, like $200 might get this rolling? If we get a dozen or so people to give $5 - $10 I can make up a chunk of the difference. Make a kickstarter and visit all the clan-sites with the link?

[delinquent]

Kickstarter

is an excellent idea.