QCF Design Community

I'm talking in the sense of a stand-alone PC version.

While the web-version is something, I'd like to have an offline option. My internet connection at home is haphazard. There are some days where I'll have outages for hours at a time, so a single-player game that requires internet connection to play is completely unacceptable for me. If it's free-to-play or a beta test I'll accept that, but for the final release of a product I've paid for I expect it to run stand-alone on my PC.

Steam will allow it run stand-alone on PC without an Internet connection.

You're asking for DRM free, which is a completely different thing. DRM sucks, but unfortunately ethics seems in short supply among computer users, which ruins it for those of us who actually buy the games we play.

That's a... complicated argument that I'd rather not get into.

I assume a offline option will be available for computers as well as iOS.

Yes, the web version won't go away. We're not using Steam for DRM, we're using it for patching, support and visibility. Selling the game ourselves is exhausting and takes up tons of time in dealing with PayPal queries, etc. Steam gets you more sales as well as handling those sales for you - freeing up your time to work on more content or other games. That's a big deal.

I can't say exactly how the offline build is going to play with Steam for sure, seeing as we haven't started working on that yet, but I appreciate how Binding of Isaac still lets me play the game without starting up Steam by just running the executable. Great for when I'm traveling. That said, Steam isn't actually a DRM platform - it allows developers to implement their own DRM as needed - generally I'm not too upset with a once-off "are you logged in or have you logged in in the past?" check, that Steam does. Not the end of the world.

I'm not an expert, but I see a lot of games sold through online stores other than steam that say the game will "register with steam", so isn't it an option to have the game downloaded and installed separately but still able to be hooked into steam for achievements and the like if you decide to do so?