I don't know if this is proof positive, and I had promised myself I wasn't going to share these pictures, but over the winter I had a chance to visit both Steam and GOG headquarters where I was treated to a party being held by each staff. I'll let you decide if this has anything to do with the monetary differential.

Not really, you need to do a cost-benefit calculation. I do now the problematics of saying 0.5% of the population is interested in your game, and that it does not compute directly. However, regarding selling as many places as possible - putting a game in a store does require cost on your side also, be it only in time and effort spent.If you want to promote your game there also, a monetary cost is usually also involved (unless it is done by the store itself). you therefore need to calculate that the potential income will be higher than the potential outcome - if it is not, then there really is no need to put it on that store. This also includes creating different builds of the games, for different stores (though ideally it would be the same build...steamworks may interfere)

i prefer that personal touch myself ;)

I think noone would deny that you'll probably sell a lot more games on Steam than elsewhere, but why does it have to be an either/or scenario in the first place? He's basically saying: 'I don't care about the peanuts I might get from customers on other stores when I can get the big money from Steam', which is a pretty arrogant statement. It's also his prerogative to think and talk like that but I doubt it will bring you more sales if you publicly let on that money is more important to you than your fans or your service.

You do have a point, I can see why he'd try to avoid additional promotion efforts, seeing how he obviously sucks at PR. ;)

it might look arrogant but once you running your own business you will learn not every penny is worth chasing for

One can certainly look at other segments and conclude they aren't worth the added effort for expected return, but then I start wondering what someone has done to their game to make it so difficult to sell outside of Steam.

Unless someone makes more per Steam sale and wants to funnel all sales through there, it does seem like it would be worth deploying in all sectors. Even if it only gets you a little icing for your cake.

But then maybe he's right and there isn't much money it. In which case he is free to continue caring only about making some cash, and nothing about the well being of the industry or the consumers he is using to make that cash. Maybe that is harsh, or ignorant of his personal barriers to selling in other spaces, but then he did through out flame bait on twitter.

That's a hollow blanket statement without any sales figures to back it up.

I make all the money at the bar, but doesn't mean that I won't also try the street corner.

Well he had the game on Desura before Steam, so he does have some experience with smaller distributors.

For digital distribution? Creating the game is a lot of work, but making an agreement with a company and *possibly* dividing a payout between team members isn't nearly as difficult.

Then what's wrong with 36000? :) Continuing with the maths, 35000 < 36000 :)

Quite the opposite. Steam actually encourages developers to sell in as many places as possible. http://www.steampowered.com/steamworks/FAQ.php

Umm... what?

The potential sales would be the same as the amount of users... The percentage of population interest is completely subjective - especially considering that people who aren't even interested in it could potentially buy it during sales just because of the low price.

I don't see the need to add the Steam requirement at the IndieGameStand. Leave it the way it is and add your game to Steam too. What have you got to lose by doing that?

Indeed. When I saw the tweet, my first thought was "who the fuck is this?"

Now I've put two-and-two together, the whole thing makes sense. I'd say just ignore the idiot. Other people likes Lars Doucet have made money on GOG just fine.

Viglione's advocacy is not commercial, it's ideological - he's a known Steam sycophant. Sure, not being on Steam at all hurts your sales, but ONLY being on Steam hurts them just as badly, as other platforms make up an estimated 30-40% of sales.

Any developer that develops software on the basis of a single external provider is an idiot. I'm not an expert developer, and yet even I know the importance of keeping my software platform-agnostic. Use the Steamworks API by all means, but plan your development processes so that you can be flexible and support other platforms with ease. It's not exactly rocket science.

It reminds me of the Linux question in a sense - developers kept refusing to support it because it was supposedly not commercially worthwhile and that Windows was where the money was. What it essentially mounted to was not a matter of commercial viability, but rather the fact that they planned the whole affair rather poorly and used Windows-only libraries like XNA.

Also, the two publicly available comparisons that we have don't support Viglione's claim. The WItcher 2 sold 80% of its digital copies on Steam, and 16% of its sales on GOG. Defender's Quest sold 58.6% of its copies on Steam and 8.5% on GOG. Any businessperson that goes out of their way to cut out more than 5% of their business for ideological reasons is a fucking idiot and deserves to go out of business.