You’d think that Minecraft and Steam were a match made in heaven. On one hand, you’ve got the indy game that has taken the community by storm, and it hasn’t even released officially yet, teasing players with its Beta-ey goodness. On hand two, there’s Valve and their digital distribution platform, Steam, which is slowly becoming a preferred method for PC gamers to get their fix.
But things aren’t always quite as perfect as they seem, and Minecraft creator Markus “Notch” Persson explains why.
“Being on Steam limits a lot of what we’re allowed to do with the game, and how we’re allowed to talk to our users,” Persson wrote on his blog. “We wouldn’t be able to, say, sell capes or have a map marketplace on minecraft.net that works with Steam customers in a way that keeps Valve happyâ€.
“It would effectively split the Minecraft community into two parts, where only some of the players can access all of the weird content we want to add to the game. We are talking to Valve about this, but I definitely understand their reasons for wanting to control their platformâ€.
“There’s a certain inherent incompatibility between what we want to do and what they want to do. So there’s no big argument, we just don’t want to limit what we can do with Minecraft.”
Perrson doesn’t feel any sort of enmity towards Steam however, and has described it as “awesome” and the “best digital distribution platform I’ve ever seen. “I’ve spent incredible amounts of money on itâ€.
Source: Eurogamer
Last Updated: August 30, 2011
