Interesting read Stardock, thanks for reading. Minor chuckle at hiring all those various civ 4/5 devs.

First off, I really appriciate that Stardock has felt it necessary to share it's private successes and failures with the public. I have a few things that I took note of:

I find it interesting how Brad has acclaimed 90% of their sales to steam. Obviously, if you release products that are steam-only, than the % will be weighted in that direction. Only way that stat would be useful is if the products all had multiple venues of sale.

The same can be said for download sales versus store sales. Since developers stopped selling their games through stores, obviously the % will shift towards direct download. You can't get it in stores. It's being forced on the customer base.

I also found it interesting that only 37.2% prefferred steam. The rest want alternatives. Granted, a portion of the rest are willing to live with steam, but there is a portion that would be happier without. Comparing closer to home, 20.8% still want direct purchase from the developer. Even if half were willing to use steam, that still means Stardock has decided to cut away 10% of it's market by going steam only.

I'd wager, if SD was on the stock market, the release of this document would have made the market very cautious to invest, despite being SD's best year to date.

Thoughts? Comments?

Over 95% of the customerbase is male?

Interesting stuff, Frogboy.

Why u think im not mad at LH being steam only? You guys tried. I do suggest this, one thing that held the Civ5 Steam Exclusive tensions was the integrated Steam Workshop. Having a steam workshop made players feel like there was some benefit to having steam other than having steam (which isn't always a benefit).

I would hope that a Steam Workshop integration would inspire you to similar action. Yes, there are ways to get mods however a lot of people are kind of confused about it, and uncomfortable "tinkering", they just want a button to make it work.

Keep up the great work, everyone. 

Good stuff, glad to see SD is doing great. 

Also hell yes for Steam Workshop and more mod stuff! 

Awesome Sauce for Stsrdock!

Nah, I don't feel like everyone needs to have the same opinion as me when it comes to steam. You are quite welcome to your own.

As for why you can't understand my position, I'll try to explain it to you:

FE:LH and it's future successor game to be released on steam have placed me at a crossroads.

On the one hand, I hate steam. I've tried it. It strips control away from me. Even after switching to manual update and offline mode, the games still periodically demanding online connection and whenever steam updated, it reset to defaults auto-updating my games and corrupting my saves. Absolute frustration with the client, not to mention the extra memory it takes...and yes, every little bit counts. Compound that with the fact that whenever you didn't have access to the client or whenever the client crashed, you lost your game too. Now, this all happened quite some time ago and maybe steam has come along way, but the Eula steam enforces is also completely off the wall! Digital software law is way behind the times and at the moment, all the power is with the host of that software...not with the user. That means that if steam wants to change, they can. If they change their Eula....I have no choice but to accept or lose access to ALL my games. If they don't like something I post online, it dictatorship style, they can BAN me from their server. Don't think that it can never happen. It HAS already happened to people. The law NEEDS to catch up to the flagrant abuse that is currently happening with steam. Most people don't care and are willing to use the product. Most people don't care who runs their country either. In the end they will reap their own reward. In short, I hate steam, and so I've removed it and will have nothing to do with it. I guess I'm just old fashioned and competent that way. I like being able to control what goes on my machine and what is running in memory.

However, on the other hand, FE has been the closest game to be released that has been MoM's spirtual successor since MoM itself. MoM has been my absolute favorite 4x game of all time. Nothing had come close to it's complexity and uniqueness and adventuressness until FE. I don't have to speak much to this point because the game speaks for itself. By the end of this series release, there will be a mod that'll basically MAKE MoM for users to enjoy all over again. I asked several times during FE beta whether or not Stardock would be going with steam or not because the question and concern was already raised back then. When Brad informed us that a direct download option would be available, I was instantly on board.

That FE:LH switched to being steam only....well, it's like have the rug pulled out from underneath you. Granted, FE:LH is not FE.....but the original impression given was that FE:LH was to be an expansion to FE, and thus free from steam. However, since the decision to turn FE:LH into a stand alone product so that they can make it steam only....well, I like already said......rug was pulled out.

Anyways, hope this clears up my point of view on why I dislike prettymuch the entire embodiment of what steam represents. Steam may have been a temporary stopgap measure to ensure continued existance of PC gaming, but it's very quickly turning into the end of PC gaming as we know it. Once steam hits the console market as well, all games thereafter will be released at low console quality. PC gaming will be over.

An atmosphere of independant direct download gaming needs to be prevelant amongst gamers to encourage developers to continue aiming for top quality, independant, products.

Steam is one of the best things to happen to PC gaming in years. I'd say probably 2/3 of my currently played games are on Steam, and many I repurchased on Steam at a discount so I could have easier access to them. I'm sick of CDs, and a couple hours to install a game is a minor price to pay.

Also, so many games I really enjoy that I never ever would have known about if not for Steam.

Impulse was nice, and Stardock Central before it. Impulse even protected me from installing E:WOM*. I kind of resent the Gamestop client now, though.

* Actually actually a weird problem with my dsl modem being incompatible with Impulse. I never did figure out how that was possible, but whatever. All the games I care about are on other clients now.

you should try the search function. It was completely redoe recently.

This forum doesn't represent the majority who buy Stardock's games, just the most vocal fans who feel like they have something to say (such as myself, I'm pretty damn vocal sometimes)

I'm one of those folks who prefers non-Steam, but will accept Steam given no other alternative.   I do believe if Steam goes dumb, an alternative will pop up very quickly (but I've also learned never to underestimate the willingness of gamers to throw away their principles for a game)  I do understand the logic behind going Steam-only, as much as I don't like the decision. 

I'm not surprised 90% of Stardock's sales are Steam.  Ironically, I think it helped FE that so few people actually played War of Magic because it wasn't on Steam.

You can play Steam games just fine without an Internet connection.