City of Heroes on Steam with Achievements & Purchasable Starter/Vanity Item Packs

Actually, in this case you did explicitly pick a fight.

That was the first instance of using actual fighting words.

And as far as I can tell, Hyperstrike wasn't arguing semantics, he was explaining why he was responding to what Nal wrote, as opposed to what he might have hypothetically meant. I also assumed Nal was referring to targeted advertisements and it only occurred to me much later that he could have been referencing the mode of advertisement altogether. In fact, I *still* don't know for certain which it was.

It is not kosher to challenge someone's interpretation of what was written and then automatically accuse them of arguing semantics when they explain their interpretation.

Not as obvious as you want to make it seem apparently.

Not only did Hyperstrike interpret it that way, but I did as well.

It seems Arcanaville did as well and who knows how many others.

You are the only one I've seen express the interpretation as something different.

Unless Nal comes in and explicitly states what was meant, we won't know for sure.

The biggest and most important detail that renders everything else moot is that the decision was already consciously made to take CoH off of Steam. Given that, any debate of Pros and Cons is just so much dust in the wind.

Tenzhi, you keep saying that, but there are other factors closely tied to your claim that you are either unaware of, overlooking, or ignoring. Like, for instance, the fact that Steam's F2P program for MMOs had not even gotten under way when City of Heroes was pulled from Steam. Once it had gotten underway, the floodgates opened to all manner of MMOs (both F2P and various degrees of hybridized subscription models). Steam built it, and they came--a big pile of them in fact, including F2P MMOs utilizing microtransaction models almost mirroring CoH's (Fallen Earth, for instance).

Just to throw this out there, by the way, I'm not trying to beat you in an argument. I am way more interested in the truth of the matter than I am in winning an argument on the Internet. Obviously, there is a reason why City of Heroes decided to pass up on massive exposure, but I am not convinced that your argument strikes close to the truth of the matter. In fact, I'm not convinced that Paragon Studios is done with Steam at all.

Around the same time that Freedom launched, Paragon Studios stepped up its public relations channels all over the place in a big way. More social networking, and even more elbow-rubbing with the gaming press. Paragon Studios has often shown a willingness to experiment and those are very effective tools. Maybe they thought they could do it on their own. Well, they appear to be doing great, actually. So, depending on their goals, maybe they don't need Steam at all. But even long-time gaming press darlings like Eve Online are on the bandwagon these days. You don't have to NEED Steam to WANT all the extra exposure and profits it brings a studio.

In a way, I suppose our entire argument is off-topic. The OP was very specific. In short, "Would City of Heroes on Steam be cool or what?" The reactions to that have been mixed. What we're veering into is behind the scenes crap that has very little to do with good, clean fan feedback. Furthermore, out of all of my City of Heroes-playing Steam friends (for which I've posted links to this thread on their Steam profile pages), absolutely none of them have bothered to come post here--so I'm wondering if people with an axe to grind may simply be more motivated to post in this thread than people who are genuinely pleased with Steam. There are related studies about online community behavior that I'm sure you're familiar with, in passing at the very least.

Like I said before, if I had suspected the thread's outcome, I would not have posted at all. Not only because I loath watching my suggestions trampled upon. I do loath it, which is natural; but more importantly, I don't think this thread has been especially productive. A productive thread gives the development team useful feedback that they can use. And there aren't even that many people here, just a lot of posts. Unproductive threads drift into speculation about how the devs operate, which is information they already have.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

This is pretty much my opinion.

What I would hope is that if they ever do go with steam they drop the NCSOFT launcher. I would NOT want to have to launch steam then launch the NCSOFT launcher.

Achievements, chatting with friends via a steam interface, I couldn't give a rat's rear about.

Thanks, snowglobe, you seem to have taken my post as an assertion that this was indeed happening, but we seem to be in agreement.

We don't know what strings are attached to steam (or not attached), so judging the devs intentions or reasoning for NOT being on steam (as others have done in this thread) is a stretch for anyone.

I wasn't arguing that what I was saying WAS happening- just that these are possibilities we, as consumers, would be unaware of, and that fit the few actual facts we have at our disposal. They're also somewhat common in other similar businesses (referral fees, commissions, and retail frontage (paying for display space in stores) are all rather conventional methods of reimbursement used for organziations in Steam's position).

Wait, what?
As I said in that line, that was the quote I took DIRECTLY FROM WIKIPEDIA. I was asking anyone here, who may be more familiar with the game (which I admitted not having played) if WIKIPEDIA WAS FRIGGIN WRONG. Wikipedia is often wrong, but as my only source for that statement I wanted to be sure! I couldn't rule it out, since just because you had a store from day 1 doesn't mean you can't add an alternate payment method (steam wallet) to it...

Is there other outside evidence you see other than this timing? (not a criticism here... I'd like to see more info on it).

There is a degree of sense to this. Ages ago (pre-Auto-Assault) a NCSoft explained that their strategy for fighting churn (players only playing for 2-3 months and leaving) was to "not fight it." Rather than try to futilely keep a game fresh for the people churning out, they'd like to have a stable of titles available so someone tired with one game would go on to try one of their OTHER games. Their own proprietary launcher would help guide others to another title whereas Steam would just as easily guide tired users to titles of other publishers altogether....

Granted, that was years ago, and the execs stating that left with the TR shakeup (I think), and the theory seems to have NOT panned out-- few users left Lineage or CoH for AA, TN, or some of the other shuttered games since then.... but the philosophy may still be there. I expect the GWII launch to be trumpted through the editor eventually, for example.

On the other hand, given the dearth of new titles in the NCLauncher, it seems odd that they'd have prematurely broken away from a valuable source of new users (...if we assume that Steam did prove a valuable source of new users...)unnecessarily broken off of a good referral source like steam so early, though. (Of course, I'm assuming it WAS a good referral source, I don't have that data)

It also might not be entirely NCSoft influencing this decision here:
- Back when brick-n-mortar video game stores had a PC section that was worth a hill of beans, MMO's were viewed with suspicion. Some game companies believed that they were losing out on their fair share of revenue from these (since they didn't get a share of the monthly subscription) so they started charging more for frontage for these titles. (One friend with access to this info once remarked that an MMO paid 3x for display space than what a console game would)
<SPECULATION>Extending on this example, it could be possible that Steam, seeing the launcher's ability to divert users to other titles outside of steam's referral & sales system, sought more compensation for listing those titles than what NCSoft was willing to pay...</SPECULATION>


Well, that was the point.

Too many are stating all this as unassailable FACT when we're all playing a guessing game because we're not privy to most of the details.

I was shooting out a blast of alternatives that also matched (as well as I could tell) the few actual details we have available. I tried to use qualitative statements that would stress these were speculative ("could have...", "possibly..." etc) but probably didn't include enough to prevent people from assuming that I was claiming to know the truth. maybe I'll use the <SPECULATION> brackets from now on....

The only advantage that ANY of these theories may have over *some* of the others is that they don't generally require us to assume that one of the parties involved is stupid, selfish, or evil for the theory to work.