Caves of Qud (now at Early Access Feature Friday #131) $

[akeley]

You can buy it from Humble DRM Free, no need to contribute to Gaben`s pile of golden Cadillacs. Mind you, they still have to update the version there (must crank up my pestering campaign up to 11)

[jim]

Thanks, Mr. Minotaur! I guess my experience must be several versions behind.

Akeley, if you are successful, I'll grab it. I am not anti-steam in particular, but the ease of use aspect is a big deal, particularly because I am a big slacker who likes to play RLs at work.

[getter77]

IIRC, the Steam edition can be wrangled somehow or another to just launch directly as is without having to use Steam to play the thing outside of the auto-updating and such---no time wasted on convoluted extra DRM.  You can always ping @unormal on Twitter or some such!

[akeley]

Yes, I heard Steam version doesn`t contain the usual cancer. The Humble one is few months old, not that bad either (tbh, I always die within few quests anyway so could be playing the ancient one for all I know

[unormal]

The Steam executable is drm free, just launch it directly and it won't try to launch Steam. So you can just copy/paste the stuff you get off of steam wherever you need. I have to like manually e-mail people at humble and get them a dropbox link and they have to maybe update their thingamabober, and it's a huge PITA compared to Steam, so it's always way behind.

[jim]

You guys rule thumbsup.jpg

[akeley]

I won`t be so charitable: it`s a firstworldproblems.gif from me. I know - in AD 2016 having to "manually" email somebody is understandably a major ordeal. Perhaps, if it was all free distribution any grumbling would be unjustified, but as it is  you guys actually SELL that game at a place called Humble STORE (hint hint)  (make it "games" actually - Sproggiwood is still on 1.0 as well)

So, okay, you only sold 7 copies through Humble compared to 7 kaziilions on Steam - sod these 7 guys, who cares. Fair enough, there`s a simple solution: don`t use Humble! (at least not for the DRM-Free thingy)

It`s not just Qud, this is endemic, hence my little rant. Buy yourself Dungeonmans on Humble - you`ll get a version over a year old. Same for Signs Of Life and probably others that I don`t even check on anymore. At least the Catacomb Kids dude has enough decency to apologise and update frequently.

Makes a man prone to reconsider that whole "support the devs" shtick, dust off the Jolly Roger and sail away.

[unormal]

Feel free to send me your paypal information, or physical mailing address, and I will be extremely happy to send you a refund.

[jim]

Harsh! I think akeley was surprised/frustrated that devs don't support the venues that are (supposedly) designed to better support then.

But then, the wasteland is a cruel place.

http://www.channel101.com/episode/332

[unormal]

I just think it's pretty audacious to see insanely hard working indie devs, many of whom (including us) who update weekly on steam, for trivial financial rewards even on Steam, realize that a ton of them are behind on Humble and from that draw the conclusion that the devs are lazy, and not that there's a real problem with Humble's update workflow. Then cap it all off with a direct threat to pirate the game. I'm a congenial chap, but c'mon. 

[AgingMinotaur]

Well, this touches on a more principal debate about commercialism and Roguelikes (and Roguelike-likes etc.). The really good games in the genre are so intricately compelling that players also invest their heartblood in them (at least a tiny bit). Note, for instance, akeley has always been a vocal proponent of Qud. I feel that a partial strength of the RL genre has been a certain detachment from the regular economy. It allows for the slow, in-depth game development necessary to work these games. No doubt, the likes of CoQ, ADOM and Dwarf Fortress would have come out differently had they been developed commercially from scratch.

Of course this whole debacle is a grey area. I'm not saying noone should earn a cent from RL developing, although I'm definitely in the free software camp myself. It is easy, from my utterly hobbyist viewpoint, to speak as a true anarchist: my own game'd take a decade to finish, if ever I come to that point, so it'd be futile even trying to sell it.


As always,
Minotauros

[unormal]

I think it's clear we'll never come close to recouping development costs on Caves of Qud, but that's not the point of making a commercial release of it. The income lets us at least partially defray the personal costs and invest in making even more game (Qud and otherwise) for people to enjoy. The only reason to be in games, particularly Roguelikes, is the love of the thing; the financial side of it is laughable from any kind of legitimate business profitability standpoint. I know I'm not here because I'm trying to make the most money with my hours, but any money we can make with Caves of Qud gives me more fuel to improve on Caves of Qud and/or work on more projects to entertain people (commercial and otherwise). That seems like only a good thing to me.

...by the same margin though, it means that the attitude wherein I'm so privileged to have every single customer that I should snap to whenever any one of them has a disagreement about something is also a little askew (in the specific context of Caves of Qud, at least).

I'm working to make something that's not a commodity, that isn't just a replaceable commercial unit, at the cost of things like 'making a living off your work', and I feel like we really share a passion with our fans for our particular style of game. We work hard to make something that doesn't exist elsewhere, and if you're going to write a nasty diatribe, I'll truly be happy to give you your money back so you can find another game to patronize. I'm not salty about it, I'm just not here to take the maximum number of people's money, I'm here to share a collective passion and do what I can to make awesome stuff. I can do that better with some money, and if you want to help out with some of your money, that's fucking awesome and I love you for it. If you're not happy with what you get for your money, I'm earnestly sorry that's true, I'm doing the absolute best that I can and I'm happy to give it back so you can spend it on something else you can be passionate about.

[AgingMinotaur]

Absolutely.

(eppur si muove, still happy in the pitch black block )

As always,
Minotauros

[unormal]

(That said I'll try to get an updated build of Sproggiwood and Caves of Qud up on humble. )

[getter77]

From tales I've heard---this really boils down to Humble dropping the ball as Their Star has generally careened WAAY on out of control versus their, well, somewhat humble origins.  If you can do well, and not be Desura, you can surely try to achieve parity with at least the likes of Steam, itch.io, etc in terms of ongoing support on such a fundamental front with their developers availing themselves of the storefront.