{"id":1044,"date":"2011-02-12T14:24:29","date_gmt":"2011-02-12T14:24:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/?p=1044"},"modified":"2011-02-12T14:26:15","modified_gmt":"2011-02-12T14:26:15","slug":"democracy-and-steam","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/2011\/02\/12\/democracy-and-steam\/","title":{"rendered":"Democracy and steam"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Sooo&#8230; After being annoyed about reading a message from someone along the lines of &#8216;I&#8217;ll only buy games on steam&#8217; I tweeted angrily earlier and pointed out that steam was not the whole PC market, and got dozens of tweets from people extolling the virtues of steam. I know the virtues of steam, I&#8217;m a gamer too. I have an account on there, and buy some games there. My beef isn&#8217;t with steam (I love steam), but with the mindset that you turn over your freedom of purchase choice to a third party. I would go berzerk if I was told I can only buy food from Sainsburys, or could only watch the BBC, yet people seem happily to confine their game purchasing to the stock of a single store.<\/p>\n<p>Anyway&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>I made a game called <a href=\"http:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/democracy\/index.html\">Democracy 2<\/a>. (I did the original too). It&#8217;s a politics sim, a sort of &#8216;Sim Country&#8217; game, and it&#8217;s quite complex and technical. It has, however, sold extremely well over the years, and continues to sell now. I&#8217;ve sold seven copies so far today, and it&#8217;s only 2PM. Not bad at all. It&#8217;s also won various awards and praise in reviews yada yada. It is *not* as polished or good-looking a game as <a href=\"http:\/\/www.gratuitousspacebattles.com\">GSB<\/a>. But it has depth and lots of originality.<\/p>\n<p>Screenie:<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/democracy2\/images\/screenshot1.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter\" src=\"http:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/democracy2\/images\/screenshot1_mid.jpg\" alt=\"\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Anyway&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>You can&#8217;t buy Democracy 2 on steam. You can get it from <a href=\"http:\/\/www.impulsedriven.com\/democracy2\">impulse<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.direct2drive.co.uk\/7494\/product\/Buy-Democracy-2-Download\">direct2drive<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.gamersgate.co.uk\/DD-DEMO2\/democracy-2\">gamersgate<\/a>, but not Steam. Obviously you can buy it <a href=\"http:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/democracy2\/register.html\">direct<\/a>. I offerred it to valve ages ago, and they rejected it. I then offered it again, after GSB had sold ten zillion copies, but they still rejected it again, which is a pity. They said<\/p>\n<pre style=\"text-align: center;\">\"This is just not a good fit for distribution on Steam.\"<\/pre>\n<p>Now obviously, steam can do what they like. They are a private company. They might think the game is too amateurish. they might think it won&#8217;t sell. They might think that their time is better spent getting bigger budget, or newer games listed. Democracy 2 is a few years old now. This is all up to them. However, I can&#8217;t help but think it would sell really well. It&#8217;s a game that looks a bit sucky in screenshots, but people get into it really quickly. I think there is a market there, especially amongst the &#8216;I only buy games on steam&#8217; crowd. It&#8217;s very moddable too.<\/p>\n<p>Sooo, if you are someone who quite likes the look of D2, but would only buy it if it was on steam, please let them know. It only takes 2 minutes, just fire off an email to valve, hopefully linking to this post, and saying you would like to buy Democracy 2 if valve sold it. I&#8217;d appreciate it, and you never know, it might get listed. Stranger things have happened!<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.valvesoftware.com\/contact\/\">http:\/\/www.valvesoftware.com\/contact\/<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Sooo&#8230; After being annoyed about reading a message from someone along the lines of &#8216;I&#8217;ll only buy games on steam&#8217; I tweeted angrily earlier and pointed out that steam was not the whole PC market, and got dozens of tweets from people extolling the virtues of steam. I know the virtues of steam, I&#8217;m a<\/p>\n<p class=\"text-right\"><span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Continue Reading&#8230; Democracy and steam<\/span><a class=\"btn btn-secondary continue-reading\" href=\"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/2011\/02\/12\/democracy-and-steam\/\">Continue Reading&#8230;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1044","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1044","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1044"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1044\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1047,"href":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1044\/revisions\/1047"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1044"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1044"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1044"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}