Future Game Distribution

[Tenoch]

This may sound completely wacky, but why not a content distribution system similar to Steam?

<trashing Steam> I'm not sure this is what you meant, but I personally think Steam is an awfuly bad thing. It requires an internet connection, even to play local games that you bought at the local store, and this is a perfect shame. When I was at school, we had to go through a proxy for the most common protocols, and all the others were blocked. Even with my SSH tunnel trick, I could never activate my game, which stayed nicely shelved for two years.
And even now at home with a regular connection, Steam starts whenever I boot windows and eats a bunch of resources to update itself all the time, and to load a huge bunch of advertisment crap for the great eternal glory of Valve </trashing Steam>

Now of course, the idea of a central repository for Löve games could be cool, if the system is much less intrusive and overwhelming than Steam. But since it would distribute the .love data, you still need people to understand that your games are "based on an engine"/"accessible through the portal"/"whatever they want to understand, but clearly not 'download + double-click'". It might be a little too much for most cases.

Just launch Love and you've got wicked games on any platform.

I'm not sure if it is a rational to regroup games on the sole reason that they use the same internal game engine. The players don't know what the programming side has to do with their gaming experience.
Now, of course (again), it might also be a nice pretext to form a gaming/programming community.

Thinking about what I wrote, I eventually think a game portal would be a good idea. I'm just really angry at Valve :evil: (also, it should be an additionnal distribution medium, since everyone doesn't have internet, the good ol' "get the file and double-click" scheme should always available) (and I feel like I'm stating the obvious...)

[mike]

The concept of a Steam-like distribution system was tossed around when LÖVE was new (and our hopes of an epic system weren't crushed by the years of work it takes to get even this far) but it would take focus away from the engine itself, which is by no means done in anyway (referencing the roadmap here). The problem with a community-driven distribution system is that it would either be oversaturated with shit (ref: YouTube), pseudo-exclusive where only games of a specific type become popular (ref: digg) or we would have to play and approve/categorize the games ourselves which would be too much work for me.

Of course, there is nothing that says that it's impossible. A distribution system that runs the LÖVE engine is fully possible, but I doubt we will ever look into it as a feasible project.


And concerning Steam: I love it, but then again I am situated snuggly in the middle of the main demographic. My computer is connected to the internet 24/7 (or heads will roll) and I know how to switch off the auto-start-on-boot option (which isn't me making fun of you Tenoch, but some people are unaware of this option at all and as such are annoyed when things keep starting up when they don't want them to). I also love how Steam has replaced the classic "buy, install, insert cd-key, use cd to play, have problems with the anti-piracy not liking certain programs (CloneCD and the like),uninstall those, try to play, be told that an update is available but have to get it manually, finally get to play the game" with "download, customize, play". For my uses it's perfect.

[Merkoth]

It is feasible, the problem here is to find a common place where the games could be uploaded and updated, and the huge amount of work this would require. Since we don't really need to implement anti-piracy nor licensing features (I'm thinking of this as a community tool, not as a commercial distribution system), it isn't really necessary to be online all the time to play your games. Even if we implement some kind of rating system, ratings given while offline can be stored locally and synced later against the online backend once we get connectivity. On the bright side, the "game launcher" itself could be made smart enough to check what löve version a given game is supposed to use and run it with the appropriate love binary.

It's open source people, this might end up being implemented by someone, but IMHO it's not a game engine feature.

[mike]

It's open source people, this might end up being implemented by someone, but IMHO it's not a game engine feature.

RUDE: Is it possible to use the loev engien in this way? To, I dunno, create a love.dll and then create a project around it? Or did that idea DIE around revision 3? I haven't been that active since you added modules so I'm not really sure how it all werks.

[CandleJack]

You're going to need a standard place to upload .love files before you can make a Steam-like distribution system.

[Xfcn]

The basic concept, in my head, went thusly:

Add/Remove Program works great in Ubuntu. Why not do it for Love? That way people can classify their games themselves, everyone gets a chance to rate them, there's a central repository (someone's bound to be able to find bandwidth to support this sort of thing, as it's a Lua-based effort it would probably be easiest to find this in the Lua or gaming communities).

While there is the risk of a ton of crap, or a ton of similar genres, that's crowd-sourcing without control. Someone goes through and grooms the Ubuntu repositories every month or so, taking out utter crap and putting in new things for people to try. So you could in essence give people two options:

Groomed Repository - Wherein the best community-voted games are picked, and tend to be pretty popular and playable.

Bleeding Edge Repository - Everything that's been uploaded is accessible, and there's no grooming. Downloader beware.

This would NOT be an always-on connection, as there's absolutely no reason for it at all.

Anyway, it's just an idea and I think it probably does eclipse the system itself in favor of it being content distribution instead. Most likely it's best to just leave this idea where it is, or put it on the roadmap for "20X6".

[qubodup]

Opinion: I'm not willing to install a thing that will install things for me.

Info: There's a steam-clone project out there see OpenCDS

Be sure to not be daydreaming

[Merkoth]

My question is: How is this LÖVE specific? As qubo pointed out, there are already engine-agnostic similar ideas in the works, so what do we gain by reinventing it for LÖVE? Besides the possibility of stuffing it with ponies and rainbows, of course :lol:

Implementing such a system is by no means an easy task, and once you get it rolling you'd have just started. Administration, backup, taking care of bugs and scalability problems which will most likely arise, server costs, etc, etc. It's a huge undertake.

[mike]

Almost as big (dare I say it?) as LÖVE itself!

[Xfcn]

As I said however many posts back, it's a wacky idea. WACKY I SAYS!