Quote:
Originally Posted by Markus Heinsohn
Here's my honest response: There are two issues that led us to the decision (which was a hard one).
First, reviews written by Steam users who got the key for free no longer count towards the game's user score, Steam changed their policy on this in September. And we need a high number of reviews in order to be considered for Steam promotions etc. We are still way too small that we can ignore the effect of this policy change which they instituted in order to fight artificially inflated user scores for games. For more info on this, see here: http://www.polygon.com/2016/9/13/129...s-abuse-ethics
Second, we thought about doing a regular Steam pre-order period with 20% off and beta access, however the guys at Steam strongly advised us to not do it, again the reason is that we're still too small and need all the launch-day excitement we can get (high number of sales on day 1) in order to get promoted by Steam and placed high in the charts.
Steam nowadays accounts for over 60% of our sales, and we need to do everything we can to get good visibility there. Unfortunately, this forces us to no longer give away free Steam keys this year. I am sorry.  |
Oh well so be it. The one thing I didn't like about Steam was being patched automatically, having no choice when some patches for OOTP17 were, well lets say, not up to par. Going back to the original setting means having the option to patch or not.