Just to get it on steam.

historically games that have come to steam that were previously on another client
which I have had give a key to the original buyers of the game to activate on steam.

I am a big steam user and find it is the easiest platform to gather groups around because they can see me in game, get updates and generally just get around without having to manage 10 game clients.

I have not played BOS much at all thus far because of the fact that I need to work to get the client and game updated.
With steam I just sit back and it happens because I always run steam at boot like 99% of my other friends.

Valve doesn't let them, lets hope this will change.

Yeah from what I understand it's now Valve policy not to give Steam keys away for games that weren't purchased through Steam.

In a way it makes sense for Valve.... why let people use Steam's servers to download a product Valve didn't get a cut from because it wasn't purchased on Steam?

Dems da breaks. Just add your executable into Steam as a non-steam game shortcut, the overlay still works fine (this is what I do). Almost literally the only thing you're missing is the news and achievements pages.

Having to run a launcher to update a game for under 5 minutes shouldn't be a reason not to play a game... the only ones I ever update manually are sims so it's not a big hurdle considering the time between normal patches.

Heh, while personally I don't care, as I wouldn't be running it through steam anyway. Although seem to remember way back them talking about how it wasn't going to be like it is with RoF regarding store purchases through them and stuff bought on Steam. Guess I'll have to go digging to find that tidbit.

Yeah would have been nice to have it on Steam. Whenever an update released, Steam would do it in the background without me having to do anything. That way when I wanted to play, I just click play and off I go. Now I click play, and then have to wait for the update before I can. I generally lose my interest in playing when that happens.

Is that a blanket policy now? In the past I have transferred game keys to Steam,most recently Kerbal Space Program. I just find Steam a more useful place to keep all my games where possible.

Nope that's a lie. BeamNG released A YEAR ago and guess who sent me and every other alpha backer a steam key when, get this, they got their store page up...not even being sold on steam yet. They managed to get everyone keys with no one asking and their store page just came up last week.

777 Is taking you to the bank and hoping that you will buy it again to keep everything in your library. There is no other excuse, unless 2 teenage developers from Germany have more pull with BeamNG then 777 with IL2. Or another thought, they don't want to sell steam keys, which is what they should do. They should be the ones to accept steam keys not steam Accept their keys. But that's crap as well. The developers of a game can distribute steam keys to all backers.

It's a conspiracy

I pity you if you really believe that.

Yeah - more or less sums up my feeling on the matter.

I've recently (this past week) received 3 steam keys for games I bought off steam and last week I got my BeamNG key which I bought off of steam.

It has less to do with the way that steam allows people to give keys and more to do with the way 777 has chosen to use steam. I think it has to do with DLC sales. In either case 777 is not telling the truth in one way or another... either that or all these other people who are giving out free steam game keys are really lying and having to pay steam for the keys they give you... which I doubt since most of them are indie game studios who could not afford to do that.

It's really quite simple. Steam is not in the habit of giving out keys to games you've bought elsewhere. Why would they? How would they make money off that? And if the developer has to pay Steam for them, that defeats the purpose.

Steam takes a cut of every sale it gets, so if you buy BOS on Steam guess what? 777 gets LESS money than if you buy it on their site.
So if you plan on "getting it anyway", you should NOT buy it on Steam because at the same price 777 makes less and if there's a Steam sale it's a double whammy. Better to buy it on sale direct from them than full price on Steam probably!

Jason could tell us one way or the other (without getting into specifics which I know companies don't want to) which method gives them the most money, but personally if it's going to cost me say $20 for a plane why would I want to give some of that to Steam instead of all of it to 777? Steam's not going away, it's pure profit for them.

Conjecturally I would guess that 777 gets less from you spending $20 on Steam than buying it direct from them for $15.



The Jedi Master

Well, even DCS warned about keys bough on their store not working on Steam.
Maybe it's a conspiracy, or maybe it's a thing...

Yes I'm leaning more towards it's 'a thing' than 'a conspiracty'

So, you really think 777 are a bunch of liars?

Are you serious? I don't know the deal between 1c or ED and Valve, but what you're saying is simply not true.

Example:

https://www.humblebundle.com/

Right now there are 112271 bundles sold. There are seven titles in the bundle, each comes with Steam key if you pay at least 1$, that makes 785897 steam keys Valve is not paid for. And there are a lots of these bundles these days, most of them with Steam keys.

Valve literally gives away a tons of Steam keys daily without any fee. I'm not saying that 1C or ED are liars, but what they say is very uncommon.

BTW, BIS added all Arma 2/OA keys to Steam not long ago. None of them were bought on Steam.

Because when you buy a humble bundle, part of the deal is you are buying a steam key. Where as with this, since IL-2 was not guaranteed to be on steam and when you bought it, you were not promised a steam key as well. If they are to give out steam keys to those bought off the site, they would be doing it retroactively, and in the eyes of steam, each of these keys would be a lost sale. Since these keys were not promised to the buyer when they purchased off the IL-2 website, steam nor 777 have no obligation to provide steam keys to those who have already purchase, and it would take some haggling from 777 to get steam to give out free (in their eyes lost sales) keys.

Of course they have no obligation, just like Bohemia had no obligation to update all Arma 2 copies to Steam when GameSpy was closed, yet they did that.

My point is that saying that it's Valve fault or it's a 'lost sale for Valve' is wrong. Valve doesn't care. They want to increase Steam bodycount and 3rd party store key activation is a perfect way to do that.

I assume it's just a part of the deal between dev/publisher and Valve/Steam, and it could be handled in a better way, but there was no good will to do that.

Lot's of people talking about what Valve would do or not, but so far we don't have any official word from Valve.... on the other side we have official BoS dev words.
So either you believe them or not... but every "argument" is so far a pure guess.