Much ado was made about one of the year’s biggest games, Battlefield 3, skipping Valve’s Steam platform. Publisher EA has its reasons. Minecraft creator Notch has a similar-sounding explanation for not releasing his game, which “officially” releases in November, on Steam.
https://lastchance.cc/you-cant-buy-battlefield-3-on-steam-5828309%3C/a%3E%3C/p%3E
“Being on Steam limits a lot of what we’re allowed to do with the game, and how we’re allowed to talk to our users,” Notch writes on his blog. “We (probably?) wouldn’t be able to, say, sell capes or have a map market place on minecraft.net that works with steam customers in a way that keeps Valve happy. It would effectively split the Minecraft community into two parts, where only some of the players can access all of the weird content we want to add to the game.”
In better sounding news, Notch offers a little hope that someday Minecraft may come to Steam.
“We are talking to Valve about this, but I definitely understand their reasons for wanting to control their platform,” he writes. “There’s a certain inherent incompatibility between what we want to do and what they want to do.”
On the Valve side, co-founder Gabe Newell recently told Kotaku that it recognizes the developer has work to do to convince companies to embrace Steam.
https://lastchance.cc/gabe-newell-wants-ea-on-steam-and-is-polite-about-it-5832206%3C/a%3E%3C/p%3E
Why no Steam, Notch? [The Word of Notch]
You can contact Michael McWhertor, the author of this post, at [email protected]. You can also find him on Twitter, Facebook, and lurking around our #tips page.
