Hi Shiro,
ULTRABUGS will likely be available there too in the future. If you like a developer and their work, surely it would only be good for you if they had more avenues to sustain themselves. If you don't care about our games, our ability to continue making games for the people who love our work, or the health of the gaming ecosystem for creators and consumers alike, it is obviously difficult for me to care about your opinion: I care deeply about my work, and about my community.
As such, for the moment I support these early efforts by Epic Games to create a form of competition - it will create better terms for developers, and a renewed focus on the platform by Valve. I understand this might not be an immediate concern for you, but it absolutely is to thousands of creators you love and support. Many of them might stay quiet about that for fear of backlash: at Vlambeer we've always been in favor of transparency with our fans and customers.
While we have no loyalty to any one store beyond how well it allows us to continue making games for our audience, since we have a good history with Steam, appreciate the platform, and deeply appreciate the Nuclear Throne community on Steam, we've decided to launch here first, or simultaneous - in other words: to not take any exclusivity deals. This, by the way, is exactly the sort of existing momentum that forces Epic to buy exclusivity to stand any chance in mounting the sort of competition that would break Steam's current grip on PC.
I hope you enjoy the game, whether here on Steam, on the Epic Game Store, on the ever-lovely itch.io, on Nintendo Switch, or on any other platform or store we might support in the future. Or, if you decide to not buy our game because a developer is trying to survive so they can make more games for their players: enjoy whatever else you play.
Let me know if you have any other questions.
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Steam isn't feeding me. You -the players- are. I have no loyalty to Steam, nor Epic - I have loyalty to games as a medium, then to my work as a creator, and then to my audience as studio. For games -my primary loyalty- it is healthy to have competition, and it so happens to be that currently, Steam is in a position that makes competition extremely difficult. Epic is the only competitor so far that has had any shot at mounting competition, and they needed Fortnite's pseudo-infinite revenue-stream to start.
My money is where my mouth is - I support stores that treat developers well, I support stores that my community appreciate, and I support stores that give us a good deal. I personally don't really like exclusivity on PC, but it's more important to me that the ecosystem is healthy for both developers and consumers - as it was before the Epic Games Store, Valve had a monopoly on large-scale games market, and that's never healthy.
I'll openly and vocally complain about any issues I see with a store though, no matter my income or revenue from that store - as a visible developer in the games industry, I believe my audience wants to hear the honest truth, and I would be remiss to not use my platform to amplify developer concerns and opinions.
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Steam absolutely does not feed me, it has paid me a total of $0 that wasn't paid by somebody that wanted to buy my games. If Steam didn't exist, they'd have a different way of playing (and paying for) our games - the idea that gamers that can loop Nuclear Throne would somehow be incapable of navigating the internet to play games they like is absurd. As a fun fact: a large majority of Vlambeer's revenue over the years came from iOS for most of the studio's existence. We are critical of Apple's platform, too.
The idea that Valve is somehow morally superior to Epic because Tencent has a minority share in it is pretty amusing to me. Tencent already runs the largest digital PC games store in the world with WeGame. It already has stakes in or gains revenue from Western-developed titles such as League of Legends, PUBG, Fortnite, many of the most popular Steam games via their stakes in publishers like Ubisoft, Activision-Blizzard, and the best-selling mobile games via Supercell. Tencent is the largest game-company in the world - in the industry people joke that if you aren't owned by Tencent yet. Valve, then - too, has gained massive revenues via Tencent through people buying Tencent games on their platform. That's just in games, Tencent also has stakes in Reddit, Snapchat, and a ton of other companies. It's a genuinely troublesome development - but the notion that Epic Store is somehow an exception is preposterous - almost everyone in games is touched by Tencent.
For the record: while John and I were not fans of each other by the time of his passing, we held a courteous albeit strongly-worded correspondence behind the scenes, and appreciated each others' insight frequently. While I did not necessarily like his influence on the gaming ecosystem, I mourned for his passing as a human I used to disagree with, and missed his presence at the next event we were scheduled to have a chat. Many people in the industry have strongly opposing views, but we don't often share the militancy or aggression of many of our fans.
As for Twitter: if you decide to post to a public forum, Shiro, please expect the post to be treated as public. It's the nature of the internet, and you made for a good example on Twitter of why developers are wary of certain Steam features. This thread serves as a good way to focus this conversation into one specific thread as to not have to deal with it all over this forum.
Let me know if you have any other concerns.