Our company is approved to publish a game page on Steam. If we want, we could set up a Coming Soon page. This would widen exposure and potentially yield higher site traffic. However, this would lead players to believe we plan to publish on Steam. We do not.

Our core reason we’ve chosen to publish on an independent launcher is that, spiritually, Chaoscraft clashes directly with the controlled structure and rules of Steam. Use of the term “spiritually” may come across as disingenuine to some, given there is no spirit left in the modern industry, but it turns out some devs do still have a soul. Steam is its own entity with its own rules. We have no interest in being obliged to adhere to any specific constraints on what this game can be, nor do we find the game aesthetically belongs on its interface. We have our own launcher with its own aesthetic planned, which we’ll release for download in the future.

Note we could still ‘use’ Steam for exposure, by making a Coming Soon page, even if we don’t plan to publish there. This would be in bad faith. We choose instead to be authentic to who we are: An indie studio making our own game, just like Blizzard made World of Warcraft and Jagex made RuneScape, on their own launchers, decades ago. They did not launch on Steam at their original launch. Neither will we. If you don’t believe we can make a new MMO like they did, we welcome you to review the true history of indie devs.

For this next part, we ask you take the time to ensure you carefully read and understand this:

Steam also takes a 30% cut from developers. There is one big reason we refuse this deal, and although this may be very difficult for many to believe, it has nothing to do with money. It turns out some devs are real artists and real gamers who don’t care about money. This sounds unbelievable for obvious reasons, given the nature of today’s industry.

A 30% cut is significant for this studio because we plan to invest heavily in high-quality art teams, high-level hardware, and extreme anti-cheat. We plan to do so for five titles and other future projects. We love this planned anthology so much we want to invest as much as possible into our hired team so we can make the game just as vast and rich as we paint it on our site.

“Hollow deceptive corpo speak blah blah.” This is what many people hear above. This is an illusion we will work to dispel as we show players our anthology.

People today have lost faith in the ability of an artist to love art for the sake of art, and have no interest in anything else. It sounds like a fairytale. When we say we’re going to make some big goddamn games, we mean we’re going to make some big goddamn games. There is no logical sense in paying Steam 30% when Blizzard, Jagex, and other companies have proven you can make millions using your own launcher.

Notice how we’re transparent about this. We tell you straight why we’re not on Steam. We don’t want to adhere to any of its present or future constraints, we find this MMO is unique and clashes with the platform’s standardized interface, and, just as importantly, we find it pointless to divert funds/resources from hired devs and company infrastructure when we’re making such a massive MMO, and we know for a fact once this game is made, players will love it and know it by name, like any MMO.

If any of this sounds weird, it’s because you have to understand it from the perspective of an artist. We are artists on the level of game design, world design, and a love of literature. Artists do not all want their work to be sandwiched into a synthetic system like that. Again, if this sounds weird, you really must mingle with some artists and see how some of them feel about where and how their work is presented and published.

We will not sit here and bullshit you and give you some imaginary reason why we’re the odd-one-out using our own launcher and rejecting the Steam meta. We don’t need a distribution platform to market this game. It will sell itself. We tell you why we’re not on Steam so you know our actual reasons. For those who still find us somehow insincere, impractical, or otherwise doubtful, we in good faith refer the reader to the Our Response to Criticisms and Doubts page. We know this game is wild, folks. You really don’t need to tell us how bizarre, non-standard, and speculative this game is. We know.

We’re making it. You can choose to believe this or not.