I have not defiantly decided to publish on steam but the first step is to get it approved. Then all will depend if a deal can be made.
So please go to the green light and vote.
Please Vote on this green light page
HiTech
When you have a deal and that part you can share with us as to how it effects us is made clear, you may have to make decisions we won't like for the future of the game regardless of Ack-Ack's assurances. Then I will be happy to vote, at which point you will know if this is a good venture for you and the game by the deal you will have in hand. And I won't need to vote. This vote is a bit of a Catch-22 at this point. Until then we won't know about things like terrain creation and other content if steam will force you to restrict it to a single controlled source employed by HTC for quality control, limit your arena offerings, or place restrictions on special events to protect their image of quality control. You will be the only person who will know these once you have a framework to sign a deal upon.
After all of these years you already know you have players who want this game on steam and have lobbied rabidly in POSTS when they come up for you to move to steam. Throwing out a vote here in the forums is singing to a small choir of people who expend more effort in the gaming world than many in the MA. I will venture you will get more go for it votes than don't go for it votes out of these forums. Will you throw out a vote in the MA, and how much will that scare some of your older players who may be a larger group than these forums denizens? Will they understand you moving to steam when they have just been thrown into turmoil with AH3?
It's not an issue of moving to steam if that will get more players signed up, it's an issue of how you do it.
And how much steam will be able to impact the larger core group of customers who don't come to these forums perception of what they pay for to be entertained by. I'm more interested in seeing how this is sold to them to see how they will take it. Moving to steam is not a bad thing if you Hitech is handling it, I just don't want that transition to end up as a cricket farm during prime time. Right now this game is not populated in the MA by a bunch of 11-30 years olds who love and demand change for the chaos of it all. Granted if handled right, it may well move into that direction at steam of repopulating Aces High. The game won't crank them up and pull them into it's addiction if you don't have all those vets in the arena now doing the Aces High thing that hooks people like it did them. Back when all of those older vets a decade ago were doing the Aces High magic thing that hooked the current vet generation.
Keep your vets and this has a good chance of working, scare them in all the ways they always can be scared, and unfounded rumors on 200 and greifers on range seeing a chance to get rid of the old rednecks with the transition is all it will take. There will be no core group of vets to keep the Aces High magic alive. Because this game and that magic is a generational thing no matter how much the gamers want all the old vets to eat it and die or go away and stop turning the place into an old redneck guys home.
Listened to alot of that during the closed alpha by younger players who signed up just so they could get a peak at what was going on. In their opinion AH had to many redneck sounding geezers. What a Catch-22 for that Aces High Magic that makes it unique and how it gets generated.
