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[Tartiflette]

Not to mention that from a legal standpoint, if someone stole assets from your mod to make a game you can't fight them. Only Valve is legally allowed to do so.

[Serenitis]

The original point is about piracy.

I still argue that no, the Steam Workshop does not dissuade piracy; pirates can easily just copy popular mod packs into a big archive.  I know this because it has already happened....

This, right here is the meat of it.
Steam absolutely does not do anything to deter piracy, and for some people would act as an incentive to pirate something just to avoid DRM and/or simply to have the convenience of a working copy of whatever that isn't bound by online connectivity issues or is subject to the whims of a third party.
Diff'rent strokes.

Also:

DRM just doesn't work

Just this bit. That's all you needed to say.

[Megas]

I do not have a Steam account, and do not plan to get one.  But even if I (changed my mind later and) did, I would not (want to) put my mods on the Workshop.

As for piracy, unrepentant pirates will need to answer to God someday.

[Cycerin]

Steam Workshop is trash. It is not made with modders' interests in mind.

[AgroFrizzy]

As for piracy, unrepentant pirates will need to answer to God someday.

Ha. No.

Like you've never heard a song or other that isn't supposed to be on YouTube.

I used to pirate all the time when I was a kiddo with no money. Do I think that was unethical? No. And considering the percentage of folks that do/did (read on!), in spite of how utterly vile and God condemning it is, I don't think Alex will ban me for doing it as a kiddo.


Now I own 400 games on the platform. I do a lot to support developers, albeit I'm still pretty poor so I get a lot of games via sales or humble bundles. I'm a proud supporter of StarSector and maybe a dozen or so other games outside of steam too.

There is a study that shows piraters turn out to be larger consumers in the long run. I have a brilliant (and much older) economist friend that predicted where YouTube would go back when developers (of many industries) didn't want any of their stuff there. As data continued to show that getting your material to the world via social media is more important than having absolute control over it, people relaxed a lot. Many people will want to own your song slash whatever if they like it compared to never being exposed in the first place. And nearly half of americans pirate casually. Seriously. If you understand piracy, you know offering convenience (Netflix, Steam, Spotify) or a multiplayer aspect is an excellent way to combat it.
Here's a link to an article that summarizes a study done by a college: http://www.dailytech.com/Nearly+Half+of+Americans+Pirate+Casually+But+Pirates+Purchase+More+Legal+Content/article29702.htm

Anyways. Back to the point. I'm saying, as someone who understands pirating from personal experience, how convenience (steam in general without steam workshop does a lot to dissuade it, it's a form of DRM that is actually a rewarding experience) is a really important factor. Sure, there are piraters that will go the hardest route. In my teens, there was an awesome mod that checked the crc32 of the executable to ensure it wasn't pirated. Nobody had a fix for it. I independently figured that that's what it was doing, researched how to change the crc32 value, downloaded a patch to be able to get a look at the original .exe, and then made the pirated .exe match. Not as complicated as it was time consuming. There will always be people willing to spend many hours. There will always be people who will blah blah blah. These people grow up though. They get jobs, and suddenly their time is at a premium. And maybe they're a bit insecure about needing to support cool stuff too, so give them an excuse to spend. Some will continue to be scrubs for the rest of their lives, but in the world of gimme gimme gimme it really does come down to convenience, even for piraters. And is steam workshop convenient? Yes. Asking if it rewards a player for buying as opposed to pirating is just as valid. I think Space Engineers is the best example of a game where the steam workshop really makes the game. There are so many mods, and in many different formats like blueprints (additional building parts or other aren't in a BP, it's just a convenient hologram in game that makes building the ship easy). There are probably illegal mod packs or whatever, but where there is something cool and new on the workshop every day, and mods are constantly being updated... it would conversely be very inconvenient to go the pirating route. Games like Fallout walk the middle ground. A pirater could download a ton of mods without it being too inconvenient, and indeed not all mods are available on the steam workshop (possibly due to the respectable stance some modders here take), but it is still more convenient to own it on steam and have your mods automatically update opposed to uninstalling each one and downloading the latest update on Nexus all the time. And that brings up another point that I'll reiterate. Modders that don't want steam workshop can still be supported. I'd advocate for that, even. When a person sees 'steam workshop,' and takes a look at the modding scene for the game there, they may not nessarily know how easy it is to get mods on StarSector outside of steam too. Most piraters are casual piraters. I'd translate that to lazy piraters who want to consume more than your average Joe. That means seeing StarSector during a steam sale, and seeing that it has steam workshop support, can literally make the difference between just getting the cool game on steam with all of these cool accessible mods vs checking some pirating site for it.

[Grievous69]

Here are my 2 cents:

Let's say this game is on Steam right now without any mods whatsoever, this alone would make more people buy it as it is seen by more and easily buyable (don't forget the sales too). Now about the Steam workshop, you say people will more likely get the game as it is more "convenient".

From my point of view, the deciding factor if someone wants to buy a game is its price and if the game is good enough (how much play time can you get out of it). If you're living in a poor country like me, mods won't change a thing. The only 2 reasons people here buy games is:
A) They want to support the developer
B) They want to play multiplayer

Of course there are exceptions who buy pretty much anything just because they can. Mods are just an icing on the cake.

So yeah, imo Steam workshop won't change much but Alex said that SS will probably end on Steam when v1.0 hits so only time will tell.

[borgrel]

it doesnt matter if steam prevents piracy or not (though i agree that it doesn't)

what it DOES do is steal 70% of the income due to Alex and give it to people who don't care, won't care and will actively ruin the game and call it the price of 'administration'.
what it DOES do is make modding impossible because steam auto-'update' games into ruin ...... especially if they are aren't all identical.
what it DOES do is make the game inaccessible to people anywhere except america, brittain and japan where they have internet good enough for steam.
what is DOES do is add multiple extra layers of virtual machines to make compatibility even more tedious and problematic.
what is DOES do is advertise 3000 nearly identical games to take players AWAY from SS all for the 'good' of steam's little greedy piggy-bank
what is DOES do is make the game about 40% slower.
what is DOES do is make patches, fixes and updates even slower because of all the red tape.

in short ....... **!! NO !!**

[AgroFrizzy]

it doesnt matter if steam prevents piracy or not (though i agree that it doesn't)

what it DOES do is steal 70% of the income due to Alex and give it to people who don't care, won't care and will actively ruin the game and call it the price of 'administration'.
what it DOES do is make modding impossible because steam auto-'update' games into ruin ...... especially if they are aren't all identical.
what it DOES do is make the game inaccessible to people anywhere except america, brittain and japan where they have internet good enough for steam.
what is DOES do is add multiple extra layers of virtual machines to make compatibility even more tedious and problematic.
what is DOES do is advertise 3000 nearly identical games to take players AWAY from SS all for the 'good' of steam's little greedy piggy-bank
what is DOES do is make the game about 40% slower.
what is DOES do is make patches, fixes and updates even slower because of all the red tape.

in short ....... **!! NO !!**

Wow. Okay. For the first point, see this message from Gabe Newell at Valve regarding steam and piracy http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2011-11-28-valve-piracy-a-non-issue-for-steam

Did you use steam in beta like a couple of decades ago? All of your claims are utterly baffling. Even the internet claim. Auto updates can be disabled, and steam can be ran in offline mode too. So a game isn't going to be bigger to download in steam. In regards to performance, it leaves such a small footprint that my laptop - which is so old it has to have Linux to run fast (old, slow dual core processor. One of the first) - is able to run steam in an emulator called wine and play simple windows games. Even using said emulator doesn't have a 40 percent performance hit, provided it's in the wine compatibility list. Native games, in comparison, have very little overhead indeed.

Virtual machines? Steam isn't a VM. It's not like virtual box, exagear, or other virtual machines that I actually use. And given that it has a native client for Linux, and that this game has a Linux binary... you shouldn't be using a virtual box unless you bought a Chromebook with an arm processor, stuck a full Linux distribution on it, and are trying to run binaries meant for mainstream architectures (been there!). Or if you have a raspberry pi or something, but you'd have to use a VM in those situationa anyways.

Steam actually simplifies update distribution. The ability for the majority of the playerbase to have the most recent hotfix so seamlessly saves a lot of headaches from a customer service perspective. Other stuff too. I mod some for certain games, and it's pretty user friendly. And advertising on an additional front takes away nothing. And 70 percent of his income? No. That's over twice their cut. Someone stated earlier in this thread that Alex does plan to go on steam once it's finished, just FYI.

[Grievous69]

what it DOES do is make the game inaccessible to people anywhere except america, brittain and japan where they have internet good enough for steam.

Hahaha no.

what is DOES do is make the game about 40% slower.

Can I have some of the stuff you're smoking?

[Cik]

modding is already convenient

download the mods
shift click copy+paste
bandbox
right click unzip all

wait like 20 seconds

done

[AgroFrizzy]

modding is already convenient

download the mods
shift click copy+paste
bandbox
right click unzip all

wait like 20 seconds

done

Good point.

Counter points.

Steam workshop subscription keeps your mods up to date.
You don't have to dig through a forum periodically to see if there is anything new.
Steam has mod categories.
Ratings and other data make it easy to find the gems.
A user considering buying the game isn't going to assume it supports modding outside of steam when seeing the workshop indicator (most of mine don't).

[TaLaR]

Good point.

Counter points.

Steam workshop subscription keeps your mods up to date.
You don't have to dig through a forum periodically to see if there is anything new.
Steam has mod categories.
Ratings and other data make it easy to find the gems.
A user considering buying the game isn't going to assume it supports modding outside of steam when seeing the workshop indicator (most of mine don't).

Version checker mod shows when you need to update as well, so no manual checking needed either.
Mods forum section already offers nice overview of what's popular/good.

No need to "fix" what already works quite well.

[Deshara]

Actually, the same thing is happening already. The upkeep on this game's pirate uploads is abysmal, and the lack of mods/getting dem new features once an update drops until some unforeseen, potentially never-coming future time when the update gets uploaded is what made a good friend of mine break down & get a paypal credit account just to be able to buy this game

[Creepin]

As long as we, players who are not going to touch this Steam horse dungheap with a stick, are able to get and install our mods manually, sure, go ahead, why not.

[DownTheDrain]

Steam workshop subscription keeps your mods up to date.

And completely screws up when a modder uploads a new version without proper playtesting.
Not to mention the hassle when Steam auto-updates and renders all your mods for the previous version unplayable. Admittedly that has gotten a lot better and doing a rollback has gotten a lot easier, but I distinctively remember the times when Steam murdered modded games on a regular basis.

You don't have to dig through a forum periodically to see if there is anything new.

Maybe not, but the forum is where all the interaction with the modders happens and where you can leave feedback, make suggestions and get quick answers. And please don't bring up the Steam forums as a counterpoint. I've spent quite a bit of time there and about 80% of it is pure cancer.

A user considering buying the game isn't going to assume it supports modding outside of steam when seeing the workshop indicator (most of mine don't).

Isn't that a point against the workshop then?
Either way, with a game as niche and as indie as this I'd say we can assume that the average user will probably do enough research to figure that out.