I'm sure you have answered this question a million times but I was just curious if this game will ever come to Steam?
Thank you-
Mine, explore and conquer in this atmospheric space experience! · By
Hi Archtek!
TLDR: I DO hope to release the game on Steam.
Steam has a lot of hurdles, is more complicated and has more gatekeeping than Itch.io. I picked Itch.io as my initial launch platform because they make it so easy to post new builds. They also have a more flexible cost system for developers. Right now, Masteroid doesn't even have an installer, you just unzip the files and play. Releasing on Steam will require me to improve my build process a lot, have installers and patching systems, and do some things like getting an Apple signing key that have a direct cost in both time and money. These are important but take away from the feature development focus I have right now!
Purchasing the Itch.io game gets you access to all future updates on Itch.io for free. My hope is that when/if the game does launch on Steam, I issue a free key to all Itch.io purchasers. However, I don't know Steam's restrictions or costs to developers well enough. If it costs me more time and money to issue a steam key than players paid on Itch.io in the first place, I will probably not offer free Steam keys.
Hopefully that seems reasonable and fair! I do my best to deliver the best quality I can to gamers and fans!
Thanks for posting,
Justin
Thanks for the response. After reading this and your retrospective I found on Twitter, I could not help but support your game. It looks really fun and am about to dive in. I like how you share what you have to go through as an indie developer. Good luck on future builds and projects and hope you'll keep pushing.
Thanks a bunch for supporting the game!
I just saw that you had a major crash to desktop bug that you filed. I'll see if I can fix that as soon as possible :(
For future readers, the retrospective aRCHTEK referenced is here: http://justindjohnson.com/masteroid/masteroid-2017-retrospective/
Ironically, the bug you filed was a good real-world example of why Itch is a great platform for the early stages of a game. You found an issue, I reproduced, fixed, built and published a new build in roughly one hour. That's not a realistic response time at scale but in this game's fairly-early state, Itch.io really helps me respond that quick!
Hey! Just another random dev, you game caught my eye and I thought I'd give you a reply here :)
Just wanted to let you know that Steam build process is not much different from itch.io (I've uploaded games on both) - you don't need to create installer as it creates it for you. The initial review / set up takes about two weeks between your normal dev tasks, but after that - you can upload build / patch it in five minutes.
Game looks great by the way, good luck with development!
I read this awhile ago but forgot to reply. Thanks for the info!
The next release addresses one of the major weaknesses in the game: horrible UI. Now that UI is overhauled, the game is close to having a pretty complete feature set and looking consistently professional. I hope to release it on Steam in a month or two.
Thanks again!