Another announcement came out this morning… Second Life is going to be available on Steam. (Reference)
As some sharp-eyed developers have speculated, we’re going to make Second Life available on Steam in the next month or so.
Many of us have friends who are avid Steam gamers, but if you’re not familiar, Steam is a very popular online game platform that offers a wide range of titles (and will soon also offer other software as well).
What does this news mean for Second Life? You’ll still be able to access Second Life just as you can today; there won’t be any change to that. But, the more than 40 million people who use Steam will also be able to get Second Life as easily as they can get games like Portal.
We’ll make an announcement on the blog when Second Life is actually available on Steam, but in the meantime, if you have friends who are Steam gamers, let ‘em know it’s coming!
The announcement seems to lack any kind of explanation why the average of those 40 million Steam gamers would care for SL at all. It hardly passes as an increasingly popular “indie game” and even less as a publisher hit blockbuster title.
Or is SL intended to be part of Steam’s software portal that is due to be released within the next months? The timing seems suitable.
As an alternative, a union with the creator of Minecraft might have had potential, if you focus on the sandbox mentality of both plattforms.
Steam is a distribution method, a way of selling stuff. Here in the UK, the physical retail side of computer gamining is pretty sick. Virtual stores, of one sort and another, seem to be the way to go.
Sl is still going to struggle to sell their “game”. What can they do to make people stick around? What they currently have is a damn poor fit with Steam. But can they afford to ignore Steam?
We’ll have to see what happens.
The percent of gamers that like to modify games is in the 2 to 5% range, as best I can tell. So, of the 4 million steam players there are 200,000 players that are likely to enjoy SL.
From my experience with Myst people that have never considered building/modeling that began building in SL, I would say joining steam is an interesting idea.
I have already heard some concern that LL would make Steam to only way to access SL. While that is not how I read the tea leaves, the concern is legitimate. Steam is rather invasive, making changes to your HD without saying “may I”. You must agree to this when installing Steam and some people just will not stand for that.
I agree. Steam is unlikely to ever be the only way to access SL.