Bitfighter Forums

Another topic that has been brought up before, Should we try and get this game on Steam Greenlight?

I know there's a fee, but that's little compared to the chance to get on what is perhaps the biggest PC gaming platform around.

Discuss, and feel free to call me an asshat if I'm missing something.

I think we should go the browser route and try to get it on Kongregate or something similar. After that maybe steam. The reason I think this is because I've seen more inde-games on kongregate, but maybe I'm wrong (I don't know enough about either kongregate or steam to figure out an "average" kind of game on them, but I have a friend who suggested kongregate might pull more success for us... they only accept browser games though.)

Oh if we got a browser version we could definitely put it on Kongregate.

I think.

They might have certain restrictions for what type of game it is.

I.E. flash, unity, ect.

I agree for bolth Getting it on sites like kongergate and sites like steam.

However im concerned about our lousy server setup it can stand more than 35 users in a room without kicking everyone out there are many ping and server connection issues.....

Before we post the game on a big site like Kongregate we'd have to establish server limits (where servers can be full) so that they don't crash, and also improve the quality of private connections.

I have fast internet but my server is always PTO for everyone. So for people who play online who want to host their own server (for their friends or if the Official servers are full), they wouldn't be able to get people to connect if the screen is just full of PTOs

I think servers have a default limit of 127 players, but this can be changed in the .ini, right?

Right!

That's the limit in the code but not the actual limit of how many people can stably play on a server at once. Apparently the servers crash when you get more than thirty or whatever. So the actual hardware and software limits need to be implemented in the public servers so that they stay up.

Or optimized so that doesn't happen lol

Its also maybe a good idea to change the Master Lobby Setup with a Large number of players There Will be a very long list of servers to choose from.

This is a Huge Change but maybe instead of having the master server host the sub server on the clients computer and having everyone connect.

Have it so rooms are hosted on the master or a larger server and have people connect to that instead.

I know that we're necroing threads left and right, but Steam removed greenlight and replaced it with something called "Steam Direct", basically anything goes, but gets curated by the users, with an entry fee of $100 USD if Im not mistaken, the game's gotten a bit more active recently with the parties/contest and stuff, could we try getting it into steam and see if we can get some players over there? Even an average player count of 20 players would be more than what we have right now.

I don't think anyone wants to foot $100 right now for that, especially when development and support for it is slow. I'm not sure if raptor could handle it if we suddenly got 100 new people pinging him whenever they break something

I'd chip in like $50 if there was a realistic chance of it being accepted. I'm sure we could crowdfund that amount with the amount of users we have now.

I don't use Steam much, how do free games tend to fare on the platform? Do they get much attention?

They get a moderate amount of attention. Steam is a great hosting platform, but how much your game gets out there really depends on what media is promoting it, and if you ever get featured by Steam itself. I know lots of people browse the "Free to play" section, so if we did get on, and all rated it very well, it could jump up near the top of that section for a while.

But because Steam already has lots of free to play games, and their library is already massive, it's not the best place. Free games on something like Discord or Nintendo Switch would get a lot more traction, because of how few other free games there are

Now THAT'S opening a whole new can of beans.

I agree, I think Discord would be easiest and best for the moment.

Like the discord team literally had to add a section about "no you don't have to charge for games on Discord if you don't want to" on the Discord help section simply because I pestered them about if I could add a free game to Discord. There aren't many on there

Is there a fee for adding to Discord?

Yes but I've already paid it lol
All we need to do is code the integration and release it

There comes a question though IS the game ready to be pushed out to public domain?

The initial release of a game is one of the most important things that determiunes if a game is sucessfull if a game is release in a inadiquite state it can cause the game to have poor feed back and prevent it from being sucessfull..

A good counter measure to this is to release a game as alpha or beta so people know that the game is still in a developing state.

whats interesting in bitfighters case is since its open source it would bring in more players to help develop the game which ofhandely I cant think of a good example but would be a good thing.

The game was released in 2008. I think after 12 years of development it’s ready to be played.

What kind of
I don't even
The game is already in public domain. This is a public forum. Just because devs are adding updates doesn't mean the game isn't finished

Ah I mean that is the game in a state that the public will recive it well on release should be considered.

if a game is released to early and not recived well it will fall flat really fast ( usally in 2 years or sooner) I have seen it happen often with games.

Also I still think Steam greenlight should be considered as even though there are tons of free games on it having a platform with more people gives more chances for people to find it.