What would be the implications of GW2 coming to Steam?

[sorudo.9054]

many ppl hate steam for many reasons, releasing it on steam seriously doesn't do GW2 any good.may it be for disgust or other personal reason, ppl don't like to stick around when a game is depending on something as horrible as steam.

[Optimator.3589]

As a Path of Exile player, I can tell you that the Steam update experience is objectively worse than the stand-alone client experience. Have fun with 10 minutes of Steam preallocating for a tiny 14MB patch, while the people with the stand-alone client zip through their update and are back in game.

I'm not trash-talking Steam, as I do a fair amount of business with them during specials, but there are enough downsides that I could certainly prefer GW2 remain independent.

[Redfeather.6401]

Path of Exile and Warframe both have stand-alone and steam versions. Since they appeared on steam their numbers rose like crazy. Because gamers are sheep.

[Oldirtbeard.9834]

I think it depends on their relationship with Digital River, they would have to revisit their stance on third party sellers since Steam routinely runs it's own sales on other games and their currencies other than the games them selves; for example last winter when Crowns were stupid cheap and you could grab ESO and Morrowind for $20 during Steam's big holiday sale (pretty sure if that happened with Gems it would destabilize the in game economy, it would effect ANet's bottom line if they didn't coordinate the Gem Store sales with Steam Sales (why would you run a sale in your Gem Store if Steam made you take a bigger hit by selling Gems dirt cheap in a sale of their own?).

[starlinvf.1358]

@JDub.1530 said:

@piitb.7635 said:

@solfizz.5730 said:Couldn't the Steam version operate separately from the client that we currently play on? And perhaps the mtx for Steam accounts be handled through the Steam filter (whatever % they get) too? Just curious, not trying to come off as challenging those who might know more than me...

Typically all steam does is launch the client, the same client bought from Anet or other sources.

Black Desert Online expanded to Steam, and from what I heard, if you wanted to launch from Steam, you had to buy another copy of the game even if you already had an account. So I'm assuming the BDO launcher and the Steam BDO launcher were separate entities. The game servers were still the same, so it's not as if the two player populations were isolated from one another.

I think I know why...... Spiral Knights was a dungeon crawler MMO that added Steam integration several years ago. Basically what it did was use Steam Client for authentication, and then passed a token SK's server to login to the account. Because cause how this worked, Steam accounts and Normal Accounts were mutually exclusive. And while you could migrate you normal account to a Steam account, the process couldn't be done in reverse. This action permanently bound your account to Steam, and required the Steam Client AND the Steam version of the game in order to play. This also altered the in-game store to use Steam Wallet, with no option for either Credit Card directly or Paypal.

When the Steam Auth servers has problems with some kind time based integrity check the game was using, the Steam Based SK player had no fall back option. Whats insane is that you could log into the games website via a Steam login icon, but there was no ability to use the web-based client (which was just an applet to launch Java) to play as a Steam user.

If BDO was using separate client for Steam_Client based authentication, that would be the reason for needing a separate account (and thus a second key).

[CptAurellian.9537]

@Goettel.4389 said:Having to share gem store profits with Valve is probably the show-stopper here. As for bringing in (a lot of) new players, Steam didn't save Wildstar, which is a criminally underestimated MMO (IMO). Any arrival on Steam would probably need to be accompanied by a pretty huge PR campaign to have any real impact. I still encounter MMO players who haven't even heard of GW2, let alone about how much more awesome it's become over the years.

Steam brought a lot of new players into Wildstar, the game just didn't hold them for long. That wasn't a very big surprise in face of all the glaring flaws that were still present when it launched on Steam. Just having big potential, as WS certainly did, isn't enough to keep a game alive.

[Arzurag.7506]

Steam should not be taken as a provider of Anet´s services, due steam´s behavior of re-providing respective service is flawed.Take eso as example

[artemis.6781]

I'm not sure, but if GW2 went to Steam, we would probably have to pay for the DLC that we now enjoy for free??

[Linken.6345]

@Arzurag.7506 said:Steam should not be taken as a provider of Anet´s services, due steam´s behavior of re-providing respective service is flawed.Take eso as example

Agree totaly dident like having to have 87g free to first download client then to open and install I needed another 87g total of 174 just to get the game up and running.