Hey everyone,
As some of you may know, when a game is launched on Steam, payment of microtransactions (in our case gold purchases and subscriptions) in the Steam version of the game have to be handled via Steam wallet. No other payment options are allowed and Steam takes a significant portion of those transactions (we can’t disclose the number but you can probably google it) as payment for services rendered.
This makes sense for a business when when you acquire new players via Steam, but in our case we already have a large existing player base who is primarily financing Albion Online via gold packs and subscriptions.
We don’t have the option of increasing the price of gold and subscriptions on Steam to compensate for the share Steam would take, so by moving existing players to Steam we would lose a significant amount of our current monthly income. This would directly result in a reduced budget for developing the game.
This is why we’ve had to decide that it will not be possible to use existing Albion accounts to play on Steam - a decision many other MMOs going to Steam have had to make as well.
We are not happy about this, and would have liked a different outcome, but do not see any valid alternative right now.
We have updated the FAQ accordingly.
Sincerely,
Robin ‘Eltharyon’ Henkys
----------------------------------
Note: Manually adding games to Steam
It is possible to manually add existing games to Steam without purchasing them on Steam. If you do it this way, you can use pre-existing accounts within Steam as well.
This allows you to launch the game from Steam as usual, and allows your friends to see what you are playing.
Here is how to do it: support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=2219-YDJV-5557
There is a small downside to this though: you will not be able to get the in-Steam achievements this way. To mitigate this problem, we have duplicated all Steam achievements within the normal in-game achievement system - meaning that you can still get all these achievements without having the Steam version of the game. While is not the perfect solution, we hope that it helps.
As some of you may know, when a game is launched on Steam, payment of microtransactions (in our case gold purchases and subscriptions) in the Steam version of the game have to be handled via Steam wallet. No other payment options are allowed and Steam takes a significant portion of those transactions (we can’t disclose the number but you can probably google it) as payment for services rendered.
This makes sense for a business when when you acquire new players via Steam, but in our case we already have a large existing player base who is primarily financing Albion Online via gold packs and subscriptions.
We don’t have the option of increasing the price of gold and subscriptions on Steam to compensate for the share Steam would take, so by moving existing players to Steam we would lose a significant amount of our current monthly income. This would directly result in a reduced budget for developing the game.
This is why we’ve had to decide that it will not be possible to use existing Albion accounts to play on Steam - a decision many other MMOs going to Steam have had to make as well.
We are not happy about this, and would have liked a different outcome, but do not see any valid alternative right now.
We have updated the FAQ accordingly.
Sincerely,
Robin ‘Eltharyon’ Henkys
----------------------------------
Note: Manually adding games to Steam
It is possible to manually add existing games to Steam without purchasing them on Steam. If you do it this way, you can use pre-existing accounts within Steam as well.
This allows you to launch the game from Steam as usual, and allows your friends to see what you are playing.
Here is how to do it: support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=2219-YDJV-5557
There is a small downside to this though: you will not be able to get the in-Steam achievements this way. To mitigate this problem, we have duplicated all Steam achievements within the normal in-game achievement system - meaning that you can still get all these achievements without having the Steam version of the game. While is not the perfect solution, we hope that it helps.
