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[Major Monocle]

Would it be possible to give this game steam support? It would provide publicity for this game and more people could see how amazing it is. Not selling it, but just letting it out as a free game, would that be possible, or too hard to sync updates?

[JanusTwoface]

Possible? Yes. Anything is possible. Likely? Not really.

Publicity would be a given, yes. But I'm not sure that's a good thing. The public already knows surprisingly well what DF is, it's been in some really big name interviews over the years. But if it were on Steam, the random user that tries it is going to immediately hate it. It isn't exactly user friendly...

As a free game, why would either Valve agree to that? They're a business. They make money. So far as I know, there's no such thing as a truly 'free' game on Steam--all of the ones that are free are free to play: they involve micro-transactions or subscription fees.

Syncing updates wouldn't be a problem. That's actually something that Steam does really well is provide a powerful automatic update system. The biggest problem there would be that people may just not *want* to update, particularly if they've heavily modded the game. I can imagine this could be fixed by keeping separate subdirectories for each major version or perhaps better factoring the modding code so you can more easily have multiple mods installed at once (you can already do it to some extent since raws are now copied to the save directories, but it's still a pain). Still, auto updating is probably the best argument for.

If you'd like a more in-depth analysis, this thread was pretty decent: With announcement of Steam Greenlight, is there a chance of steam availability?

There's a bit more focus specifically on Greenlight, but enough of it is about the pros and (mostly) cons of DF on Steam.

[Major Monocle]

Possible? Yes. Anything is possible. Likely? Not really.

Publicity would be a given, yes. But I'm not sure that's a good thing. The public already knows surprisingly well what DF is, it's been in some really big name interviews over the years. But if it were on Steam, the random user that tries it is going to immediately hate it. It isn't exactly user friendly...

As a free game, why would either Valve agree to that? They're a business. They make money. So far as I know, there's no such thing as a truly 'free' game on Steam--all of the ones that are free are free to play: they involve micro-transactions or subscription fees.

Syncing updates wouldn't be a problem. That's actually something that Steam does really well is provide a powerful automatic update system. The biggest problem there would be that people may just not *want* to update, particularly if they've heavily modded the game. I can imagine this could be fixed by keeping separate subdirectories for each major version or perhaps better factoring the modding code so you can more easily have multiple mods installed at once (you can already do it to some extent since raws are now copied to the save directories, but it's still a pain). Still, auto updating is probably the best argument for.

If you'd like a more in-depth analysis, this thread was pretty decent: With announcement of Steam Greenlight, is there a chance of steam availability?

There's a bit more focus specifically on Greenlight, but enough of it is about the pros and (mostly) cons of DF on Steam.

Hm. Thanks alot for clearing that up! it was just a thought, and your insight is very well appreciated.