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[marshmonkey]

Some of the trends I am most excited about in gaming are digital distribution, free-to-play model games, and models where the public are the gate-keepers.  I love the direction of things such as Steam and Kongregate.  Kongregate to me is a shining example of a new way for game authors to monetize their efforts where there previously was no easy avenue to do so.  Steam, catering to larger more traditional games - is less open, but has the same philosophy of  bringing developers one step closer to their audience, as well as a neater way to manage a collection of executeable games.  So there is Kongregate on the small end of the spectrum, serving up free, fast, flash games - and there is Steam on the opposite end, serving up commercial larger scale executeable games.

The question I am posing is: is there room in the middle?  What if there was a steam-like service that had a large collection of free to play executeable games?  Like Kongregate, all these games would be free to play, but there would be ads displayed somewhere in the process, with the authors of all these games getting a majority cut of the revenue.  Brainstorming, here are some bullet points that this distribution method would feature:

- One application for all features:  As with Steam, all applications and other functionality are launched through one app.

- free to play: free, free, free.  No (financial) barrier to entry.

- as few gate-keepers as possible:  like Kongregate, almost any game is accepted into the system and the system is entirely transparent.

- democratized content:  the community decides what games are showcased through the system

- easy to use:  browse, click, download, play, all stored in one place (like Steam).

All these things have been done and are being done currently, in different places and in different pieces.  What this platform's goal would be is to take all the free indie downloadable games that are sitting in their own small dusty neglected corners of the internet, and creating an opportunity for authors to monetize them, while at the same time and perhaps more importantly display them somewhere they can get many eyeballs at once, all the while fostering a community around them all.

What do you think?  Is there any demand for something like this?  Is this already being done as described?  Is it even technologically possible given the wide gamut of dependencies and such needed for downloadable games?

[ravuya]

GameTap has a lot of free games, but I don't know what the deal is with them.

[thecreatrix]

You might be interested in Steamworks.
http://www.steampowered.com/steamworks/

[Alex May]

It's a great idea, I think it's only a matter of time until we see something like this at least for casual games.

[marshmonkey]

You might be interested in Steamworks.
http://www.steampowered.com/steamworks/

yep, I am very excited that valve is opening up steam to some extent!

[Lukas]

Hi!
One programmer of my c0re-project just told me about Steamworks.

We're thinking about releasing c0re on Steam since some of it's features are really promising. We even thought about releasing it on Steam ONLY, which would allow us to optimize the game for the Steam-framework.

Since there isn't really much information on the page itself I'd like to ask wether someone here has some experience with Steamworks.
Is the downside that Steam takes away some possible players really all that big?


BaronCid

[marshmonkey]

in my experience Steam Works is only being distributed for testing to companies who have games that are done or almost ready to be put on steam. Until it is more robustly tested I don't think it will be widely available for people to play with.


Which means I have been unable to get ahold of it

[Chris P]

in my experience Steam Works is only being distributed for testing to companies who have games that are done or almost ready to be put on steam.

This is the impression I've received as well. I may be wrong, but it seems like you have to get your game on Steam in order to use SteamWorks right now. Even if that's not true, there certainly is an entry barrier which is higher than you might expect after reading the SteamWorks hype.

Not that getting on Steam would be a bad thing.   And I think they probably will open it up more later.

[ravuya]

Are there free APIs for the advertising? I bet the Double Fusion guys wouldn't say no to licensing their kit to a freeware developer.

[marshmonkey]

Which means I have been unable to get ahold of it

[PaulMorel]

Steamworks looks nice, but I don't think that it does what the thread author suggests.

For one, Steam will never be a good marketing tool or revenue source for free games.  Without ad revenue, Valve will never make any money off of free games, so it doesn't make any financial sense to give them the kind of visibility that bigger indie titles get.

One thing that's nice about GameTap is that everyone can rate every game, and it's easy to sort games by their rating.  So it's easy to jump in and download the highest rated game that you haven't yet played.  Still, GameTap has too much of a gatekeeper.

That leaves Greenhouse and Kongregate.  Greenhouse has 1 game so far.  Kongregate says that they will never support exes.

I say that we build an application to do this.  The code itself wouldn't be that hard to write.  I think that the difficulty lies primarily in centralizing and organizing the resources necessary for the system to operate fluidly.

So what resources would be required, and how could those requirements be met?

1. Cheap bandwidth and storage for the games and client app.  The obvious solution is Amazon S3 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_S3).  The less-obvious solution is to have each developer provide their own hosting service.

2. Database of users, ratings, games, comments ... etc.  I think that this could also be hosted by Amazon S3, or, if we don't want to invest in our own server space, we could possibly find a friendly site to host the db (TIGSource?  I dunno).  A key thing to note here is that all users will be able to submit games, and only the other user ratings will differentiate them.  There will be no gatekeeper as in TIGdb.

3. An advertising solution.  Could be a custom one, or something sourced to another company.

4. Programmers to write and maintain the code.  These could be culled from a community like this one.

5,6 ... things I am surely forgetting.

I would gladly commit some coding and db-design time to a project like this, if other people would be willing to help solve the other problems.