Can we buy Doom forks or spiritual successors outside of Steam?

[doomlayman]

Can we buy Doom forks or spiritual successors such as Supplice or the upcoming Brutal Fate outside of Steam?

[Kinsie]

Some games like Beyond Sunset and Hedon are available on GOG, and others still may or may not be available on Itch.io. Pickings will generally be slimmer on those platforms, though - Itch's sales are often not high enough to bother with (I've had at least one indie game I've bought there just completely stop updating their Itch version, focusing on their Steam release!) and GOG has historically had an opaque and esoteric curation process that has a habit of knocking indie games back for no explained reason, in comparison to Itch and Steam's selection processes of "do you have a pulse" and "do you have $100" respectively.

[doomlayman]

@Mechadon hello there. Is there any option to buy the game Supplice outside Steam?

[Kinsie]

It is not available on any other platforms at this moment, as a quick Google would have told you.

 

It is also not necessarily Mechadon's decision to make, on account of working with a publisher.

[doomlayman]

Kinsie

 

About your first statement, which Google Search do you mean to or what did you write in Google exactly?

 

About your second statement, are you suggesting that Steam might have legally-conditioned Mechadon not to publish the game in any other platform?

 

---

 

Well, I assume that it's still worth to suggest to Mechadon to consider individual selling of copies or giving them free for specific donors, if legally possible.

Edited December 22, 2023 by doomlayman

[Gez]

5 minutes ago, doomlayman said:

About your second statement, are you suggesting that Steam might have legally-conditioned Mechadon not to publish the game in any other platform?

I'll answer for him: no. Steam does not seek to have exclusives from other studios. They're too big and well-established to need that. But they're not the publisher there, just the marketplace. The publisher in this case is Hyperstrange.

 

[doomlayman]

Oh, they seem to have nice games, shame these are available only via Steam, which I no longer use.

[Kinsie]

Hyperstrange has a few games on GOG, I suspect Supplice will eventually appear there once it leaves Early Access, if GOG wants it.

[magicsofa]

For what it's worth the game is also on the GOG Community Wishlist with 359 votes 

[Mechadon]

I think Kinsie and Gez pretty much answered your question.  But I'll say that if we are able to put Supplice on other platforms in the future, we will try to do that.  I'm certainly in favor of having the game on other platforms, though I don't have a say in that matter.

 

I'm sure we'll make an announcement if/when Supplice appears on other platforms.

[Monocled]

Is there a reason to not want them on steam? And it varies from game to game and its the choice of who holds the copyrights what platforms its allowed on

But outside of steam you can find some cool hidden gems that almost no ones played on itch, A little more well known but i also recommend checking out ScumHead's TC's

And here's all the itch games tagged with doom filtered by rating (Not all of them are necessarily made with the doom engine)

[DoomGater]

19 hours ago, Monocled said:

Is there a reason to not want them on steam?

 

Ehh...yes. It's Steam.

[No-Man Baugh]

21 hours ago, Monocled said:

Is there a reason to not want them on steam?

Steam isn't a marketplace, it's a subscription service that makes you rent out it's contents piece by piece. meaning if Valve ever pulled the plug on Steam then there goes your entire library (even outside of that hypothetical scenario, you can't play games downloaded via steam without the launcher being installed, the account you bought those games from being logged in to that launcher, AND being online unless you check a box prior to going offline that you're offline [which is impractical for times when you're most typically offline; power outages])

Meanwhile with GOG and itch can just be downloaded and installed thru the websites, no launcher required, itch has all it's games in porable packages so no install needed and GOG has offline backup versions of each of their games (atleast of what I got)

While they might not be any closer to actually "owning" your games because you can't resell games in you account thru any of these services, atleast GOG and itch give you more control over the stuff you bough than Steam does. it's like the difference between buying music thru iTunes vs. anywhere else like 7digital, qobuz, bandcamp, or physically on CD: all the other places give you an actual format under mp3/flac/wav/watever, whereas music bough thru iTunes is literally just an HLS file like you downloaded it from the streaming service Apple Music

[Edward850]

8 hours ago, No-Man Baugh said:

Steam isn't a marketplace, it's a subscription service that makes you rent out it's contents piece by piece. meaning if Valve ever pulled the plug on Steam then there goes your entire library (even outside of that hypothetical scenario, you can't play games downloaded via steam without the launcher being installed, the account you bought those games from being logged in to that launcher, AND being online unless you check a box prior to going offline that you're offline [which is impractical for times when you're most typically offline; power outages])

Valve have talked about a hypothetical shutdown and stated they'd release a final client that disables any needed check-in for online credentials, presumably by forcing an offline mode trigger for all apps. Which brings me to my next point: Offline mode, you seem to be running on old information. Steam's offline mode is quite reliable nowadays and they fixed the bug that prevented it from working if you never prepared it in advance (apparently the client credentials cache would become corrupted if Steam launched and first tried to connect to their servers, thus invalidating the mode, which selecting offline mode specifically avoided).

 

In fact in just testing this myself, I curiously found that they've actually improved it recently, it can now seamlessly bring itself back into online mode if started with no internet. It just launches with no connection automatically, didn't even stop.

Edit: Actually I now just realized why. Steam goes partially down for maintenance every Wednesday morning, makes sense to (finally) make the client as seamless as possible to the end user while the authentication server is down.

Edited December 18, 2023 by Edward850

[Kinsie]

Also: GPL licensing stuff means that every GZDoom-based game on Steam has to be DRM-free by necessity, so you can just download the game and stash the folder away at your leisure. (Yes, DRM is optional on Steam, it’s just a lot of people don’t take that option for whatever reason.)

[Dark Pulse]

52 minutes ago, Kinsie said:

Also: GPL licensing stuff means that every GZDoom-based game on Steam has to be DRM-free by necessity, so you can just download the game and stash the folder away at your leisure. (Yes, DRM is optional on Steam, it’s just a lot of people don’t take that option for whatever reason.)

Take a guess.

[Monocled]

9 hours ago, No-Man Baugh said:

you can't play games downloaded via steam without the launcher being installed

You absolutely can, As long as the game is installed, But you still have to have the launcher to download them, But if for some reason you wanted to delete the launcher after downloading something you could still do it

9 hours ago, No-Man Baugh said:

meaning if Valve ever pulled the plug on Steam then there goes your entire library

Valve makes tons of money with a small amount of employees to pay, They made an estimated 13 billion dollars last year so i don't really think steam is gonna go for a really long time.