Email or not email?

This week I had to work around a pretty busy schedule - a lot of things to wrap up at my employer, as I still have a full-time job, and random things that prevented me from having a good block of quality time to work on Outsider. In cases like this, the best is to try to do things that don’t require a lot of time continuous time. After getting the trailer out, I went back to work on the story, music and trying to get an email signup page up. Yes, it seems that people still use email based on what I heard from some of you… This feedback was actually good, especially because of my recent frustrations with Steam; the store creation tool requires “5 screenshots” to get any page on the service, but at the same time their documentation states that you can create a “Coming Soon” page with simply a teaser and some branding image (2 items). So how can I get my page up with the teaser/branding, which I do have?

Well, I contacted their support, which was very unhelpful despite this not being a free service ($100). It takes days, or even weeks, to get an one-liner answer that is neither helpful not relevant, frankly a lot worse than a ChatGPT answer. Despite Steam being responsible for singlehandedly resurrecting the PC Games market, we see right there why it’s so bad to have a single vendor dominating the marketplace. That’s why I don’t understand the hatred towards GOG and Epic. Sure, I don’t want to have a bunch of downloaders installed on my computer, but I want even less to live with a monopoly. Hopefully my Steam experience as a maker will eventually match my experience as a player.

I will talk about more about the story crafting process some other time - right now you can check our mailing list signup in the new (and brief) Outsider webpage at https://www.galantrix.com/games/, although if you are a regular on this Server, the mailing list might not be as useful to you.