Fairly Recent Naoki Yoshida InterviewFollow

Main reason most MMOs don't like steam is because they take cuts from from cash shop sales.

You also know a crap load of people who apparently go with your doom and gloom, just sayin'.

We can have a private discussion about how Steam is unfriendly to developers, because that would be largely veering off topic, and I can rant on that for hours.

Valve is nowhere near perfect and Gabe Newell said he's going to change things in the future in order to make things more convienent on both sides of the table. Steam's technical difficulties could have arose with incompatibility with S-E's websites for accounts, or the PlayOnline Viewer's adjustments to handle Seekers, who knows.

As I've posted before, the fault can go either way.



Yes, that can be done. I did that with Windows Live Messenger way back in the day (before I uninstalled it and moved on to better IM services). But that isn't an excuse for Valve insisting that Steam opens with no option to disable auto-startup in their own native user interface.

Edited, Apr 24th 2013 5:06am by UltKnightGrover

Are you implying that there isn't a lot of people who make their PC game purchases on Steam exclusively? If you scroll up, Callinon in this thread said that same exact thing, I don't know him at all.



No, it's right in the interface. There's a check box for "Run Steam when computer starts" in the settings menu.



No company is perfect, but I haven't been screwed over by Valve (while, for example, I feel that Square Enix has screwed me over countless times).



That's fine. A lot of people like the convenience of launching all your games through the Steam menu. I never said "everybody likes Steam", but a lot of people love it, and a lot of people won't even hear about/care about/consider buying ARR due to no Steam release.

Edited, Apr 24th 2013 8:18am by Killua125

I tried Steam. I didn't like it. I prefer to manage my games on my own.

I also don't tend to download games willy nilly. About the only time I play indi games is with the humble bundle.

Well, I can say that I've used Steam several times before and never liked it. On two different occasions I bought and downloaded a game that didn't work at all. I contacted support and got a refund, but it was still really annoying. I'd rather just buy an independent digital download version than go through Steam.



This I agree with. Regardless of whether or not I personally use it, or know others who don't like it, I don't disagree that there are tons of people who DO use it, and any good company needs to market themselves any way possible, and Steam certainly would have made sense.

That said, I don't think it's a catastrophic blunder to not be on Steam. Out of the top 100 games being played on Steam, I counted only 5 or so MMO's, and none of them have more than 2500 people playing. It doesn't seem like a ton of Steam users are big MMO players. Steam seems to be more for FPS and strategy games according to their top 100. Sure they could have genereated sales from it, but I don't think that the 3-4 million people are automatically people who would be interested in FFXIV, let alone willing to dish out however much it would cost on Steam. So perhaps the cost to create a Steam-worthy client just wasn't worth it, especially considering they also take a fairly hefty chunk of the sale (even if 30% isn't accurate).

I dislike Steam..... Is just so.. annoying.

Agreed to that, dumping PlayOnline for XIV was the best thing they could have done. I didn't like that either.