In reply, Steinke mentioned:īringing the game to Steam was an expensive endeavor. Besides the engineering that needed to happen, the path to Steam is not assured, so the increased marketing expense to get the game through the Greenlight process dwarfed the original cost to get the game on the Xbox initially. For instance, part of this was building up our own distribution channel on our website. Having done this, I can tell you that I am simply unable to give the game away on our site for the $1. Based on per unit costs associated with a purchase, we would lose money on every unit sold. It is not uncommon for other games from the iPhone or Xbox indie games to have a different price on the PC, because they are much different marketplaces and eco systems. Different platforms come with different requirements, such as Steam’s need for approval or development kit costs on consoles.
Therefore, I asked to elaborate exactly how the decision of a distribution channel on would aid in the PC release no Steam. Our website is a digital marketplace where we can sell our games, and in the future, the games of other indie developers. Also, we could sell games to countries that Xbox doesn’t support. For example, currently we are very popular in Chile and Brazil countries where indie games were not supported by Microsoft. We currently have about 300,000 users and growing rapidly since we opened it in July 2013. The Xbox is a marketplace where you can make a game and simply put it up for a $100/year fee. On Steam your games needs to build a huge critical mass of the PC market, before you are even allowed to be published. Despite being the best-selling Indie title on Xbox, the PC marketplace was largely unaware of us. Building up our PC Marketplace made a huge difference. To give us all an idea of how this all contributes to a slight price increase of between $7 and $9, depending on your views, I asked for a ballpark figure on what all this infrastructure costs. The initial creation of CastleMiner Z cost about $10k, the cost of building and promoting our digital marketplace, to build a critical mass around the PC version, was closer to $100,000, which, although doesn’t seem like a lot of money in terms of game development, is a bigger risk than we have taken on any project up to this point. We didn’t ask for any crowd-funding from our fans for this and took on the risk entirely by ourselves.A hand to hand weapon. It has the best durability of all the knives.