Man that blog post has given me a lot to think about. What it basically boils down to is: if you want to sell stuff, better not act like a douche. I like that whole “we trust you to do the right thing” attitude, even when you know that people are going to take your basic tutorial on how to get your stuff for free and actually do it.
Why care? You’re not going to stop it anyhow. Better to focus on keeping a good name, which is to not appear like a money-grabbing corporation.
Our DRM isn’t really so much about DRM as just making it easy for me to deploy games 
It’s a pain maintaining a demo and full version build separately. A big pain.
Cas
Regardless of the motivation, the solution works
That is an interesting solution. I think you’ve found a great middle ground which both protects your property and allows easy access to your game for the player.
Once again, thank you for sharing so much of what you’ve learned.
Not sure if this was asked yet. To get on Steam do you have to have an established reputation already or some sample games for them to look at or what? I figure you have to have at least a game that you are looking to put there, but is there anything else they look at?
You just have to have the game you’re distributing, they’ll look at that and make the call.
The system they have is this: if one of the Valve employees has seen your game, and thinks it’s cool, they’ll have a little chat amongst themselves about it and the more of them that like it the more likely they’ll say “yes” for whatever reason. It’s really just as random as that.
Cas
If you don’t mind answering - how did the Desura sales compare with direct sales from your website? And how much effort was it to keep your stuff up to date and available on Desura?
Less than a tenth; which made it more effort to support than it was worth, for us. We’ve found this to be the case for every “publisher” except Steam.
Cas
Thank you.
That’s unexpectedly terrible, damn.
When you get to know the ins and outs of publishing games you’ll eventually realise it is not at all surprising. We didn’t even want to offer it on Desura in the first place because we already knew it was going to be a waste of our time, but we humoured them.
I still want to make it clear though - maybe when they’re 10x bigger, it’s going to be worth it. But right now, they are not.
Cas
Cas, how did you balance your games ?
Excel sheets with magic formulas, hundreds of voluntary freaks play testing for food, or just yourself playing until you got nightmares from your own games ?
To me, it still seems like the hardest part of all ???
The reason it was surprising to me is they seem fairly popular, at least as far as getting press. But I guess the (alleged) 30% of the market Steam doesn’t have gets split many, many ways. I mean, I didn’t expect it to huge, but less than a tenth of direct sales is just… ow.
You know Cas, if everyone waits till they are 10x bigger they will never be bigger. It like waiting till g+ is 1/2 the size of facebook before they are worth it. It will not happen when everyone does that.
However everyone will do that. That is why it is called “barrier to entry”.
I play them until my hands, ears, eyes and brain bleed, and then I play them some more. I hate every single one of my own games now.
Cas
It is just as much their own fault. It is a classic engineer’s fallacy - “build it and they will come”. No they won’t. You have to sell, sell, sell. Market the crap out of your thing. They’re very slowly working on it (for example the Indie Royale bundles). They need to actually put some effort into the marketing and promotion of the titles they carry instead of expecting us to do it for them.
Cas
What they really need is a hook. To get the ball rolling… like say a game as popular has half life that is more or less exclusive 
Sometimes I think people forget that was how steam got rolling.
That is exactly what they need. I speculated (privately) a while back that Mojang should really have bought them out but they didn’t, and now the opportunity has likely passed them by (Mojang are simply not going anywhere after Minecraft, I think).
Cas
http://cityrag.com/photos/uncategorized/2008/06/18/dramatic_dhipmunk.jpg
Well, personally I never got into minecraft, but I’m obviously in the minority.
With a fanbase that huge, I doubt they will utterly fail.
The fanbase is what they have now. They have no guarantees of growing it or of coming up with another game that will achieve the same following. Minecraft made Notch and friends enough to luxuriously retire on, but to run a company that develops new titles? Don’t think so.