To steam or not to steam.

My concerns about it.

I understand how selling a game through steam can drastically increase the profit of the company, therefore helping significantly the development of the game which in the end, should provide a better experience for the player.

Nevertheless, I've seen in my gaming experience, that is is not always the case.

Let me please give 2 recent exemples.

"Super sonic acrobatic rocket powered battle cars" :

I've played this game since it's launch on PS4 in 2009... what a blast. And I can't remember situations when the gamers were unfriendly, rude or insulting... it was sort of a niche game that you'd hear about from a friend. Games were pretty convivials. Then, years later, it went on steam, with a dumbed down name and became Rocket league. Still a great game. For someone almost only playing ranked games, I must say, at the very least one out of two games has its chat polluted by either insults, or simply bad atmosphere... You can't say ONE word about the game without the typical moron automaticly responding : "Salty" or "u mad" The game is still great, but the experience is NOT the same. Steam's public has made it more toxic.

"Elite dangerous" :

Elite is a niche game. It is NOT for everybody. And before getting on steam, apart from people having too much high hopes about the state of the game at launch, it received some well deserved love and praise. Then it went on Steam ... And the negative comments from people who don't understand what is a game which doesn't take you by the hand just accumulated. People complaining about "content" without even trully understanding what "content" is... people accusing Frontier Devs to have removed the Horizon's extension and changing it into a DLC, simply to make negative review disappear, when in fact, Frontier simply, as often, listened to the community who asked for that change... People giving negative reviews about the DLC being a rip off for only offering planetary landing for 50 bucks, when these people didn't even read that it would be a one year worth expansion with tons of stuff... So at the end, A great game ends up with a mixed review, because let's face it, a vast number of people buying games on steam, may not be mature enaugh for all sorts of games.

Now ! that being said. I don't want to get into particular details of these games. I just wanted to enlighten my concerns about a steam release.

Some could say : Negative reviews don't impact your gamplay. Sure... but it can impact the reputation of the game, therefore it's income and development as well. Plus, you get all the trolls that just can't fathom the essence of the game and therefore would just YOLO it.

You could say... they won't YOLO it very long due to the mechanic. I would disagree, since they still could YOLO it 6 months... then the guys joining in 6 months later would YOLO it at best for 6 other months... at the end of the day... you wouldn't be able to play the game without a constant amount of immature toxic players. (and I think we have already enaugh "PKing guilds" as it is - wink wink)

Now.. I know a lot of us play on steam, heck I play on steam, and I know there's ton of good people on steam... but there are the others, and I'm aware I'm probably depicting the worst case scenario here, but it is something that weighs heavily over games aiming at a more mature audience such as CoE and I needed to voice it :)

Thanks for reading, and please express your ideas about a steam release. Can we do without ? is it inevitable ? is everything gonna be easy peezy lemon squeezy ? Is Steam, even worthy of CoE ? :)

EDIT : Apparently I should have clarify that a release on Steam is not planned by the devs. I just wanted to reach the subject of games for a more mature audience and Steam