Post by NP_Ghost in Any chance for a Steam key on purchase?

Viewing post in Any chance for a Steam key on purchase?

On the same boat as Lyskaju - I love your game but it's not available for customers with German IP. The problem is that games beingh able to be sold to German customers is that they need a rating, There are plenty of adult games on Steam that show a rating like this one:

It's not the official German rating but Steam seems to be fine if it's shown on a games shop site.

As a developper you should be able to tick it on on your Steam shop site/dashboard. If you are able to turn it on put it on a rating 18 because of nudity and still we should be able to see and purchase it,

Watsup269 days ago

Hiya, I answered your question on F95, I’ll just copy paste it here:

This is actually not correct, in order to check the box on Steam you have to have the rating approved by the agency. In order to get USK approval and get a rating you need to pay an upfront fee of 1200 euros. We would have to apply for this again every time we updated the game and added content (that only costs 300 euros per update though). The issue is we wouldn’t make that much back from German sales. Unfortunately, the game just hasn’t sold well enough for that. Also, Steam would remove our game if we were found to be checking those boxes without actually getting the game rated by the agency specified, so it’s not worth the risk to us.

We’ve been looking into this for a long time so our German players get an equal experience where we can offer it.

If we go viral or something and the sales are significantly higher than they have been, we’ll definitely consider it.

We offer the game both on itch.io and stream - and we sell game keys redeemable on Steam through Patreon if you actually want it on Steam and are German.

Also because I’m not sure if you knew this, Steam recently changed how they do ratings on the platform and they include a steam survey that lets you know what ratings you would generate before registering with the official agency and when you plug in any adult content game now with visible sex in it like ours, it comes up with this:

Anyone getting around age ratings for German is either grandfathered in or something changed between them launching and us.

NP_Ghost269 days ago (2 edits)

Hey Watsup,

thanks a lot for the clarification of the matter! I didn't know it's that difficult for you and fellow developers to obtain a rating on Steam as the image I posted for a German rating is not the official image from the German Rating agency.

Well, I'll see if anybody can gift me the game via Steam (of course i would pay upfront for it) or going the small step further and buy the key via Patreon.

As far as I understood, there is no automatism installed on Patreon that provides a Steam after purchase. I think you stated in another post that I would need to contact you to request a key. Should I contact you on Patreon after payment submitting a transaction number as proof for purchase/pledge for that tier?

Quite sad to read that the game didn't sell that well for your guys as I think it's very well done.

Watsup268 days ago (2 edits)

Steps to getting a key on Patreon:

Pledge at the Beta Tester tier listed below.

After you pledge for a key at the on LittleNapoleon’s patreon, send LN a message on Patreon or Discord (preferably a direct message, those notify him), he will get back to you asap with a key. You can even poke me here if you pledge and I will poke him to check his DM’s on Patreon if you want to be extra sure he gets the message quickly.

After you get your key feel free to drop the pledge as soon as you want. You should keep access to all the other tier benefits until the end of your pledge, so feel free to check those out.

There’s no automation for this method yet as we’re still working out how we’ll be doing a storefront and who can process payments for it and will still offer purchased to German users. It’s a surprisingly complex topic.

I said that it didn’t sell well enough to justify getting it rated, and that’s true, but getting it rated is very expensive compared to our budget. I will say the game itself is doing great in our eyes, it’s even doing better than we expected on steam and itch. Our real funding comes through Patreon and it will likely always come through Patreon, high quality games take a lot of crowd support to make in niche topics.

No mainstream game studio would ever tackle a game like this, and big studios are usually necessary to make games at the quality people want to see. Big studios or very long time-frames. That means if we want to make a game that’s as high quality as we’d like to see, it takes a significant amount of support, and thankfully we’ve always had that through Patreon.

Really happy we got to see this through to release and make exactly the game we wanted, now I’m looking forward to the next chapters! :B

NP_Ghost268 days ago

Thanks again for your reply.

Glad to hear that you are happy with the sale of your game :)

I'ff pledge via Patreon soon and follow your advice to DM LittleNapoleon directly for the key.

Wish you all the best for your team and the game!

Watsup267 days ago

Thank you! :B