First, we've launched our new website! We've know for a while that we'd need a little more functionality than the blogger format provides, but we waffled for a bit on whether we'd use a template-based web platform or simply create our website from scratch. In the end we built our own website because we love the ultimate flexibility that offers. We're still waiting for more content to fill out the site, but we think there's enough content ready to open alkanaur.com to the public. Speaking of which, we're now using the domain name alkanaur.com (which previously sent you to our blogger page) for our main site. We'll still be using blogger for our blog posts, but you can also find and search through those posts on the main site. Additionally, if you want to know about important Alkanaur developments, please subscribe to our newsletter. You can find the button at the bottom of our new website.
Second, last weekend there was quite a stir in the indie game development community thanks to an announcement from the PC gaming behemoth Steam. As a popular digital storefront, social platform, and gaming library, Steam is an essential hub for developers who want their game to reach a mass market. Steam's process for allowing new developers digital "shelf space" was called Greenlight, and you can read more about that process here in one of my previous blog posts.
Anyway, last weekend Steam announced that they will abandon the Greenlight program this spring due to oft-discussed issues with Greenlight's voting system and the veritable deluge of games pouring into Steam. Instead of Greenlight, the gaming platform will move to a program called Steam Direct. Rather than a small, one-time fee that allows a developer to place as many games as they want in the Greenlight voting pool, indie devs will now pay a single fee for each game and skip the voting process entirely. That fee is still being discussed, but Steam said the fee would be "recoupable."
So what does this mean for Rob the Sky Games and Alkanaur? Honestly, not much. While Steam Direct will likely create a big impact on the indie dev market as a whole, our plans remain the same, and we will still release on Steam. We will not have to worry about garnering enough votes to get through the Greenlight program, which is nice. If the fee ends up being extremely high (the highest number being tossed around is $5,000), we'll just make sure that our Kickstarter will cover the fee. We'll need to wait and see how the market adjusts to Steam Direct, but both our small indie company and Steam hope that we'll see fewer low-effort titles competing for visibility with great indie games (like Alknanaur!).
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