Newton Adventure on Steam Greenlight

[devnewton]

In order to reach a larger public, I put Newton Adventure on Greenlight with the help of Stuffomatic.

Greenlight is a section of the popular distribution platform Steam. Player can vote for games they want to be accepted by Steam.

The Steam version will regroup the free base game, the paying mods et integration of some Steam features (achievements for example).

If you are interested, check the Newton Adventure page on Greenlight.

(NB: while I am not a fan of this kind proprietary software closed distribution platform, there is so much people on it that getting on Steam is quite mandatory to get your game noticed by a lot gamers.)

[Akien]

I completely support Newton Adventure getting on Steam, I think it's a great platform to reach new gamers (particularly new Linux gamers who switch from Windows to *buntu and don't know much about FLOSS yet).

Personnally I think you should emphasize the fact that Newton Adventure is and will stay under a FLOSS license. I think I'm not the only one to unconditionnally support open-source games.
As for the paid-for content of the Deluxe edition, as long as it is not mandatory to enjoy a great open-source game, I find it interesting too, and would probably buy it on Steam. I don't know about how such content could be licensed, but I guess you know more about this than I do. You could also use a process similar to Tales of Maj'Eyal's one.

EDIT: I saw the deluxe content pack in the source code, so that answers my questions about the licensing

[Julius]

I am not sure a delux edition to an otherwise "free to play" game on steam is the best idea.

To quote myself:

Lately I have come to the conclusion that even if you are not actually planning to make money of your game you should still charge a small sum ($5?) when offering your game on Steam, Desura etc. You can still make it available freely through your website or repositories, but I STRONGLY suggest you don't do it on those mass public distribution channels.

My reasons for that:

1. Psychology: if something is free it is "worth nothing", and open-source is neither understood by most people nor well featured in those distribution channels
2. If you game is free it will be lumped together with other "free to play" games that are mostly crappy P2W ripoff games and the entire section is skipped entirely by what is your most likely intended target audience (people that play F2P titles will likely not care about FOSS)
3. It shows other indie developers that they don't have to keep their source closed

You can always donate the money made to a good cause like the FSF or whatever!

[devnewton]

The mods are libre/opensource, pay what you want, but not free as in free beer!

I think FLOSS games are like DRM free for "normal" gamers.

[charlie]

I'd be happy to buy a FLOSS game on Steam and get the benefits of Steam Cloud and achievements etc.

[Julius]

While I also wouldn't mind donating to a project through steam (and getting automatic updates is nice), I am a bit skeptical when it comes to steamapi integration (which is what Charlie is proposing above). First of all there seem to be license issues with the GPL and secondly those obviously can not work outside Steam effectively making it two different versions with different feature-sets. Besides that this is generally undesirable, it also makes it likely that the non-steam version is more or less dropped at some point (ala "here have the source, no idea if it works without steam") which is really against the idea of FOSS as you more or less depend on a closed source system then.

[charlie]

That's incredibly pessimistic Julius and basically FUD. "Stay away from Steam as it'll kill FLOSS." No precedent, no samples, no data whatsoever.

If anything, the more popular a game becomes the LESS likely it is to become some Steam-dependent FLOSS obfuscated code pile, as it will attract attention from people who want to e.g. port it to non-Steam platforms or e.g. fork it etc.