In March of 2014, Incarnate announced that VO has been greenlit, meaning that it was approved to release as a steam game in the future. My question is:

When is that going to happen?

Incarnate mentions that it will take several months of preperations and polishing up the game before we can risk the step.
Now is VO 1.9 that polishing up and preparing? Will VO go on Steam with the release of 1.9 or do we wait until 2.0 is happening? I'm not aware of any other news towards that topic, so an answer would be cool to have. I may have just missed on some news regarding this topic.

I've been wondering about this quite a while now, but wanted to give it time. Apparently, Steam is a very big thing and I expect (and hope) that the player number go up significantly through it. I'm not really familiar with steam, so I don't know how realistic my hopes are.

Fortunately and unfortunately, I think your hopes are extremely realistic and probably somewhat scary for the devs. It will add thousands of new players a day. I really cannot wait.

I'm currently planning to hit Steam somewhere between 1.9 and 2.0. It will not be the first additional platform out of the gate: That will be iPhone, which I've been promising to people for a lot longer. iPhone could be as early as September, but I'm not sure. Steam could still be this year, but again, not promising. Also, game-industry launches tend to happen in fall (before Holiday), and generally Valve recommends that indie titles not launch at the same time as Call Of Duty or whatever else.. they say it's better to launch during a more "quiet period" (like January instead of November), when they can feature us, and we don't get lost in the noise. But, we'll evaluate all of that when we get there.

Steam does have its own set of requirements as well, like additional billing mechanics, making the game work with their "stuff" and so on. So there is a bit of custom development time on their mechanics.

Preparing for the potential influx of new users is a big part of why we're doing all this server-side and infrastructural upgrade work (creating the patch-cloud for the update servers, changing how the database was segmented and migrating the website somewhere else, upgrading our database software in general, and next will probably be moving the game-server itself).

Some of this stuff has been in the works for over a year and a half, but unforeseeable situations delayed some aspects, or shuttered then entirely, and required us to be inventive and spin to a different approach. Things are going pretty well, relatively speaking, but as usual it's taken longer than expected, or desired.

It's notable that we have a lot of platform launches coming up. Steam is a big one, but in terms of game population, it may not be the biggest (an iPhone feature alone, could be.. nuts, but there's other big stuff coming as well).

I'm intending to make a whole newsletter about the platform release plans, but waiting for some un-announced things to be finalized, so we can talk about them all at once, rather than piecemeal.

In general, 1.9 is the blocker for things like Steam, but definitely not waiting for 2.0 (please hold the sarcasm, the distance between 1.9 and 2.0 will be a lot shorter than the infinity that has been 1.8). 1.9 basically means "new rendering architecture, new graphics, fixed a LOT of technical bugs, in a place where things are more stable and we can add new gameplay", and that's a huge thing to get out of the way. We're also dealing with a lot of external moving targets here, that change the way we have to prioritize development (something as seemingly "irrelevant" as changes to Chrome browser defaults can force us to suddenly go work on something else right away).

For those who go "OH GOD MORE PLATFORM DEVELOPMENT", I don't expect this to soak the amount of time you've seen from Mobile or anything. Most of these are "platformy" things like Steam that basically just mean a new distribution model, with only minor changes to the actual game. But, in the end, it does mean a very likely large spike in population.

We (obviously) have a crapload of stuff to do between now and "wow, that's a lot of new users", including a lot of game mechanic tweaks. So, if anything, the potential for huge exposure is going to really put a lot of pressure on us to fix and polish some of the bigger gameplay-problems too.

Anyway, moving on it all as fast as we can..

Thank you for the thorough reply, incarnate.

It is good to hear that you guys have already worked out the plans for further preperations for these two very important releases. Some people may disagree, but: Take your time with that.
Getting more players is most important. I often miss more content updates myself, but then there is times that when I look at channel 100; I notice that most of the people there are android players. Without Android, VO would be even emptier. We need these people.

I look forward to the Steam release more than I look forward to the iPhone release.
While the iPhone release surely will bring a bunch of new people and while I'll certainly be there to watch the party, I really think that we can't expect much player retention or atleast many new full subscribers.
Most of the people on the Apple store will be relatively young kids and VO is not as enjoyable on a small screen etc. etc. etc.

I have much more faith in the Steam release. The type of player that can't be bothered to subscirbe or only looks at VO for 5 minutes also can't be bothered to get involved with Steam.
So the chance of a person directed to here from Steam sticking around will be significantly higher (feel free to disagree, but these are my hopes...).

However, to make sure we have some good "starting" retention, I suggest you guys start a special subscription programme for an amount of time after the Steam release. Subscriptions could be a bit cheaper, or you could really think of anything else to make the Steam players feel more welcome and most importantly, make them more like feeling to send over some money. :)

I, for one, agree with what you said there Sieger. A lot of the new android players don't tend to stick around, because of combat being harder, and all the other reasons you mentioned. Hopefully the new players from steam will have a higher chance of playing for a longer period of time.

This is just an offhand remark, but if you really want the steam thing to be a hit, you could do something like a crowdfunded project for free membership for a month for new players from steam (so theoretically the money from the project would make up for the loss in revenue you would incur). I know a lot of PC players are put off by the 8 hour time limit for their first go; it's certainly not enough time to fully appreciate the game and/or make a decision about it. Getting new players more invested in the game is important - if you built up an account over a month, you feel a lot worse about abandoning it then if you've only sunk 8 hours into it. Only people who are really stubborn will try to continue playing, instead of just saying 'Meh, I'll just go play that new indie game steam just released.'

I don't expect this to soak the amount of time you've seen from [insert any number of things from the last decade here]...

You never do and yet it always does.

It is what it is, but seriously, why keep saying stuff like the above? It's the opposite of underpromising and overdelivering, and it pisses people off.

What I said was entirely accurate. Launching on something like Steam or Windows 10 or whatever is nothing like going from PC to mobile, which was the example you cropped. It doesn't take years of time to implement Steam support.

I think you're just over-sensitized on this kind of issue, which is something I can understand, but it isn't going to keep me from continuing to try to be as accurate as I can.

Considering getting a subscription and getting more invested in the game.

With all due respect, I think that the Steam release needs to be the top priority.
I also agree that 8 days try is way too short. 30 days minimum is the way to go. Same goes for the friend invite

@avguste

You seem to have misunderstood. I currently am paying for 2 subscriptions. Also, the current limitation on PC for new players is 8 HOURS of in game time, not days. You can get 2 weeks of real time to play if you get a friend key, which people rarely actually use, care, or even know about, especially after 8 hours.

Well, I for one agree with all of this, no matter if PCers like it or not mobile is here to stay. I think mobile players have really makes VO well...mainly player wise that is.

Yea, but here it the thing. Majority of PC players is on Steam. This game has the potential to have a high number of players on a daily basis, but it has to be on Steam. Mobile can wait. Release Steam first

AHHHHH thread necro >.>

avguste, yov've already made this point on a cvrrent thread. I'm dovble-tapping this one.