Minetest on Steam

[cornernote]

Hey everyone,

For a while I been playing a lot of games on Steam. They have a free-to-play section that Minetest would be perfect for.

To get a game onto Steam costs a once-off $100, and is voted in by the community More info

If the game was on Steam, it would be a huge (like really really huge) boost to the community population, however there are a few considerations:

• Can the servers handle the volume of players that may join, or at least limit the players so servers dont die?
• Is the game ready (stable, easy to use, etc) for usage from types of people that will come from Steam?
• Any other considerations you can think of?

[hoodedice]

Yaay cornernote is back!!!

Hmm, Steam will indeed launch this game into awesomeness, but are we ready yet? We haven't fixed the camera, lighting, gravity, or entities completely yet. And it doesn't look like it could be done in this very year. I don't think we are, of yet, ready for the green light.

[onpon4]

I don't know much about the Steam community, but my guess is Minetest isn't ready for that audience. I'm sure a lot of them would compare it to Minecraft in a negative way: no mobs, not as many servers, a lot of servers being slow, etc. I don't imagine they would experiment very much with mods, either.

[rubenwardy]

I don't think it should be added to Steam.

We don't gain too much by having lots of players: the community it currently fairly close.

More developers would be nice (mod/c(++)). But then more fighting and politics.

[webdesigner97]

I think we should wait at least until entities are more stable, cause if not there will be hundreds of people complaining "Why are there no mobs?", "We need mobs" etc...

[Casimir]

I like it when changes happen slow. That gives you the time to think about it.

[aldobr]

more players = more developers.

simple as that.

[sfan5]

more players = more developers.

simple as that.

Sadly it is not as simple as that..

[Evergreen]

I don't think minetest is ready for a mainstream audience yet.

[aldobr]

theres no such thing as being ready.

you go as you go.

"You cannot know how is to be something without being that something." (I believe the original Hegel phrase was not like that, but this is a translation from the portuguese equivalent).

[philipbenr]

I don't think minetest is ready for a mainstream audience yet.

I think we should wait at least until entities are more stable, cause if not there will be hundreds of people complaining "Why are there no mobs?", "We need mobs" etc...

Now, I don't know if the devs would like this idea, but why can't we develop the main 0.4.9 and have another minetest, developed just for those certain people mentioned above. It would be some more work, but I think the devs could pull it off (slowly).

Still , this idea might be just too much work for our already hard working devs. :)

[onpon4]

more players = more developers.

simple as that.

Reality is much more complicated than that. The guys who coined the term "open source" have been claiming ever since then that free/libre and open source projects tend to involve massive collaboration, but this is usually wrong:

http://media.libreplanet.org/u/libby/m/mako/

If more players come along, a few of them might happen to be programmers who want to help develop Minetest. But you have to consider the likelihood of that. Steam is a community centered around proprietary games that often have digital restriction mechanisms, and a proprietary program with its own digital restrictions mechanisms used to download these games. This community doesn't appreciate free/libre and open source software. Even people in that community who do appreciate FLOSS will be unlikely to see the value in a Minecraft clone, because they have Minecraft. We can expect these people to just play Minetest as it is; maybe they'll add some mods if it's really easy, but most if not all of them are not going to even think of contributing to Minetest's development in any way.

[Inocudom]

more players = more developers.

simple as that.

Reality is much more complicated than that. The guys who coined the term "open source" have been claiming ever since then that free/libre and open source projects tend to involve massive collaboration, but this is usually wrong:

http://media.libreplanet.org/u/libby/m/mako/

If more players come along, a few of them might happen to be programmers who want to help develop Minetest. But you have to consider the likelihood of that. Steam is a community centered around proprietary games that often have digital restriction mechanisms, and a proprietary program with its own digital restrictions mechanisms used to download these games. This community doesn't appreciate free/libre and open source software. Even people in that community who do appreciate FLOSS will be unlikely to see the value in a Minecraft clone, because they have Minecraft. We can expect these people to just play Minetest as it is; maybe they'll add some mods if it's really easy, but most if not all of them are not going to even think of contributing to Minetest's development in any way.

I agree with this statement. Thank you for posting it.

I feel the need to remind people that Steam is owned by Valve, which is a big corporation. I do not want Minetest to be affiliated with an international corporation in any way, shape, nor form.

[BlauerEisRegen]

I think it shouldn't be on the platform because not everyone has an account and I think not everybody would like to create one... And it is much easier to download minetest from the offical webisite, you don't have to be logged in in an account or something!
propably we need some more adventure maps or servers to make the game more intresting!

[sfan5]

I feel the need to remind people that Steam is owned by Valve, which is a big corporation. I do not want Minetest to be affiliated with an international corporation in any way, shape, nor form.

Why not?

[aldobr]

Do you know the drake equation ?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation

Lets suppose that the ammount of persons who play games is proportional to 0.3
(Numbers are aleatory just to make a point).
Now lets suppose that from all game players, 0.2 like building games.
Now lets suppose that from all players of building games, 0.1 are programmers or artists.
Now lets suppose that from all those programmers and artists, 0.5 will want to help.

0.3 * 0.2 * 0.1 * 0.5 * N = X

Where N is the total number of persons and X is the resulting amount of people helping the game.

IE.: Make N bigger and X will become bigger too.

I cant see how can anything be different from that.

[mauvebic]

Perhaps more to the point, having more developers doesn't necessarily imply having more development, only more disagreements about how to develop.

[Dopium]

Personally think its a great idea, like has been said before larger community equals more everything

[Pitriss]

Personally think its a great idea, like has been said before larger community equals more everything

Especially more problems..:D

[rubenwardy]

Personally think its a great idea, like has been said before larger community equals more everything

More close community?

More noobs.

[Dopium]

I think it shouldn't be on the platform because not everyone has an account and I think not everybody would like to create one... And it is much easier to download minetest from the offical webisite, you don't have to be logged in in an account or something!
propably we need some more adventure maps or servers to make the game more intresting!

I don't see why you still can't download it from the site, just because a game may be on steam doesn't always mean you need to create an account. It is more to attract those using steam looking for games to download, steam is hugely popular and most PC titles use it.

[Josh]

Adding it on steam would be a good idea because,

-Many people use steam
-Minecraft isn't on steam and you know how many people are looking for a free alternative to minecraft, so it might make minetest more popular.

P.S, Welcome back cornernote!

[Dopium]

Personally think its a great idea, like has been said before larger community equals more everything

More close community?

More noobs.

Got to start somewhere, everyone is a "noob" when they first join/play something. New people spark new ideas, new servers, new mods, larger development team and most of all a popular community.

As for arguments, well just like any forum there is always people that will disagree. Even at the moment every new idea suggested is a 50-50 split debate. Some wear their opinions on their sleeve others casually debate, happens everywhere.

[Pitriss]

As was said in previous posts, game is not ready for such a huge community and adding it as is to steam can hurt more than help. There is still a lot of needed improvements like entities etc.. So no. Adding it now will be huge fail.

[PilzAdam]

The real discussion in this topic seems to be whether Minetest should be more popular or not.

[rubenwardy]

I don't v want it to be more popular. I want it to be better.

[rubenwardy]

Personally think its a great idea, like has been said before larger community equals more everything

More close community?

More noobs.

Got to start somewhere, everyone is a "noob" when they first join/play something. New people spark new ideas, new servers, new mods, larger development team and most of all a popular community.

As for arguments, well just like any forum there is always people that will disagree. Even at the moment every new idea suggested is a 50-50 split debate. Some wear their opinions on their sleeve others casually debate, happens everywhere.

Some people in this community have been here for over a year, achieved 1000 posts, and yet still act like noobs-and immature children. They average 20 posts of cr*p a day.

You can start playing a game without behaving like a noob.

[aldobr]

Can someone CARE to PROVE that the game "is not ready" ?

This is a kind of mantra, is usually said to make someone appear wise, but i never see any substance on the argument, besides rote repetition.

If the game was ready, why would anyone need more coders ?

Makes no sense.

[onpon4]

Can someone CARE to PROVE that the game "is not ready" ?

I already did: it doesn't have mobs. We've already seen Minecraft players reject Minetest for this reason.

It doesn't matter that Minecraft isn't on Steam; everyone knows about it. Minecraft doesn't need Steam to attract an audience. It's not made harder to install by not being on Steam, either.

My brother is a Steam user, and when I asked him about the idea, he shot it down immediately. He expressed annoyance at Greenlight and the large amount of games appearing on Steam that feel "incomplete". Minetest is absolutely one of those games that would feel "incomplete" to an audience that is used to "complete" games. You can expect also that if people there download Minetest through Steam now and decide that it sucks, they won't try it again later; they'll have already determined that Minecraft is better.

It's plainly obvious that Minetest will gain nothing from being on Steam, and may even lose a large potential future audience from being on Steam prematurely.

[Excalibur Zero]

I think Minetest could do with more users, since the more users it has the more modders it will have.

However, I agree with some of the people in this thread that say that Minetest is not ready.

The way Minetest is now is geared towards people who can already code and understand how mods and other similar things work. If we want to have more constructive people playing and modding Minetest we need to make mods and coding tutorial much more easily available.

Right now we have a base minetest game (default) and a lot of mods which are used to add content to the game. Most new people don't realize this as most people are used to downloading a game which already includes all the content. So the new person downloads the base game (default) and believes that to be it. While that obviously doesn't describe all new users of Minetest, I'm sure it describes a good many of them. The best ways to stop this from happening would be to either offer a download of Minetest with a number of mods already installed (New Player Edition) in addition to the current offering of Minetest without mods. And/or have a clearly obvious message on the download page that talks about mods. These changes would allow Minetest to get more good users, even if we don't put Minetest on Steam, but if we do so it will make that change more effective in getting Minetest more users.

Currently there is also a notably high learning curve in learning to make Minetest mods. Most people don't know how to code in Lua, and even more don't know how to code using Minetest's api. It would be good if we had a lot more tutorials on modding. When I first found Minetest I didn't even know the Lua was a coding language (mostly because I didn't know many coding languages), so there was a very high learning curve in learning to make Minetest mods. The only real tutorials on modding that I could find showed how to make nodes, crafting recipes, and abms. Then there is also the development wiki, which is helpful, but it isn't always very clear on how to use certain parts of the api. If we have clearly available tutorials on modding more people will be able to learn how to make mods, and thus we will have more people making mods.

The main problem with Minetest is that it does not obviously convey important information to new users. New users have to do a bit of digging to find information that they need to be constructive users. If Minetest makes important information like mods and modding tutorials clearly obvious to the average new user, then Minetest will not only have more users, but it will also have a lot more constructive users, and thus more mods, and thus a better game.