Sorry about that 'backstab' from earlier. English is not my native language and I didn't know that this word may have such negative meaning. It just boiled my blood when I saw that a project for which I was hoping for many years (since good old Detroit possibly?) is taking a turn only a bit better then shutting down - from my point of view of course.
One thing that Daffyflyer mentioned seems to clarify things for me. As I am not much into a multiplayer in general, I didn't realise that this may be such a big problem. Yes, I see that going for Steam may be the best solution here - not too hard and still of good quality. And if there's a chance to get the launcher only limited to single player then I'm into it.
VicVictory wrote:Clearly you do not produce a good or service yourself that you distribute through an electronic medium, or you would never make such a statement.
I do (not games, book). What you just said is tantamount to "I'd like to buy your books directly through you, because Amazon is a middleman, and that's stupid to go through them". Quite the opposite. Going through Amazon makes my market and audience so much larger it's ridiculous, and it would be stupid of me NOT to use them.
Pretty much the same here with Automation and Steam.
Do you sell e-books or normal ones? Because there are a lot of differences between physical book (or any other good) and any e-thing, be it a game, book or picture. From my past experience I can tell you that very few people can handle it. One of the most silly things I heard were words of some book publisher about e-books. He was wondering how can they be cheaper than normal books if he have to manually scan the book, then convert pictures to pdf or something and then publish it - that's a lot of additional work, isn't it? Quite obviously he didn't know how printing a book looks today, poor thing.
And as we're about the middleman problem, there are cases when such agent is needed and cases when he's not - and I see the latter ones just too often.