It started off pretty typical, you have a flyer/elevator pitch about your game and you send it to various publishers and distributors in a hopes to hear back from them if you may host our game on their platform. This is normal in the gaming industry and happens all the time... it's normal to wait for a couple weeks for your reply and you normally get a simple Yes! or a No! with a explanation as to why and you go about your business.

These conventions stop when you approach companies so monolithic from their own success that they can make a games distribution platform for their game and be the only game on it at launch and force you to use it if you want to play (*cough* Half Life 2). Don't get me wrong, Steam is a great service and I have grown to like it over the years and enjoy playing games with it so it was an obvious choice in the list of companies to try and get a hold of when we had Incognito Episode 1 ready to ship.

After waiting and trying to get ahold of the folks over at Valve software for OVER A YEAR, yeah I said it almost 13 months... sending my emails every 2 months and wondering if anyone there actually reads email until one day I sent this fateful message just for kicks to see if anyone really does work the inbox there:

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Dear Jason,

I have sent you several emails over the past year and a half, but have not heard back from you yet. Is this the right email to contact Steam Publishing?
We have a game we have developed and would like to be able to publish/distribute it with Steam.

Could you please contact me to confirm your are the correct individual to direct this inquiry to?

Sincerely,

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Then a day later we get a nice reply from not Jason:

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Hi Ron -

Jason Holtman forwarded me your email regarding publishing on Steam. You can check our publishing FAQ here: http://www.steampowered.com/steamworks/FAQ.php

Anna

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Oh my look at that a reply! Well the guy they list on their website (Jason Holtman) never replied to me but now I am talking to a nice lady named Anna it appears. OK, well I review the FAQ link they give that I already looked at (it's where Jason's email came from in the first place) and resubmitted the EXACT SAME information to her on Nov 19th 2009 and 19 days later....nothing...so maybe they are playing hard to get, I fire off another email:

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Hello,

I submitted the information a little over a week ago to try and get our game on Steam following the required FAQ. It's been a little over a week not and no word back so I am just sending this along to see if there is anything I can do or did I miss something?

Hope to hear from you soon,

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Another 8 days goes by and I hear nothing. It's snowing now, 8 days away from Christmas December 16th 2009 I get a reply from them! Oh wow! This might be it! Our game might get on steam! The excitement builds:

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Hi Ron -

Thank you for submitting your game to Steam. Unfortunately, I don't think it's a good fit for our service. Please feel free to send me future titles for consideration.

Anna

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Good fit? The heck is she talking about? I write up a quick reply since it might be 2010 before I hear back from them at the rate things have progressed so far.

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Anna,

I am confused. How could it not be a good fit for your service? I am not sure what that means. It's a game, you sell games. I am left to assume you don't like it or it encroaches on something of your [Valves] personal interests.

I don't want to get into an argument if it's a good game or not but for all intensive purposes Steam is for selling games I don't see how I have come to the wrong place.

Hope to hear back from you,

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This time I must have hit the nail on the head. Less than 35 minutes after my reply I amazingly get another one. Holly crap two emails from Valve in a single day special me...

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Hi Ron -

Unfortunately, we don't comment on our decision making process.

Anna

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So there you have it, our experience with trying to get on Steam. It has us all down here and it really sucks that we could not even get a simple "Hey, screw you and your game guy!" that would at least be resolving and I move onto the next company. I have never encountered this kind of lip service from a companies approval process before. (*cough* App Store)

This is unprofessional in my opinion and represents the current state of PC gaming and video games as a whole. In these times you have to know someone in the industry, have a ton of money or be backed by equally massive publishers and binding contracts.

It's simply not enough to make a game as they say... creating and programming your game means absolutely nothing if the people who sell them constantly look the other way until you say some secret pass phrase I am to this day unaware of.

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Labels: distribution, fail, incognito, publishing