What is the benefit of having SuperTuxKart on Steam?

[zequinha]

Currently, we can download and install SuperTuxKart from the website with no problems. It's available to Win, Mac and Linux. Steam won't bring it to anymore platforms as far as I know.

Is the download from Steam going to be free or paid? Steam is a DRM platform where the games are often sold for profit. Will STK get some funding from this?

How will this impact STK on the long run?

[Akien]

Bigger exposure → More players → More potential developers and artists → Better game for everybody.

[konstin]

For everyone using Steam (and that's 90% of people playing pc games) installing and updating becomes much easier. But most importantly, we get a set of popular community tools and a lot of visibility for free.

I know it's all bad big corp, but it's just a reality that steam is the de facto standard for distributing games and SuperTuxKart is made because it's fun writing and playing games and not as rebellion against the prevailing circumstances. Someone else from the team might disagree with this view, but we've reached consensus that we want steam as an additional platform.

To answer your questions: (1) For free (2) No (3) We'll get a bigger community and hopefully more contributors.

[samuncle]

Hi

@ zequinha

Actually we already answered to your question on our blog but let me write them here:

1) we will never put drm in Supertuxkart. We don't like drm and we don't want to use them.
2) Supertuxkart will remain available on our website and various other repository
3) we don't know yet if we will sell it on steam but selling gpl software is fine with the license and if it can helps the project why not.

If you don't like steam and don't want to use it that's fine, you will be able to play to Supertuxkart without steam.

Sam

[hiker]

Currently, we can download and install SuperTuxKart from the website with no problems. It's available to Win, Mac and Linux. Steam won't bring it to anymore platforms as far as I know.

I would indeed not expect more platforms, but a different kind of audience, people who might not look normally at open source games.

Secondly, my main goal for STK is actually for it to be available as a teaching tool (we already had STK used in several University projects), so if stk becomes an example of how to use the stean API, that's an additional benefit (unfortunately that's hard due to our current GPL version, there's a thread about this in this forum somewhere).

Is the download from Steam going to be free or paid?

We are not entirely sure how we will distribute the game on steam, and are considering various options.

Steam is a DRM platform where the games are often sold for profit. Will STK get some funding from this?

Selling STK on steam is one of the options we are considering. STK as a project has ongoing costs (cost of servers, domain names, hardware costs, ...), so we need to make some money in order to pay those costs obviously.

How will this impact STK on the long run?

No one knows of course. STK will remain GPL, I would hope to get a bigger audience, and maybe more contributors - but who knows.

Cheers,
Joerg