There a chance any Wing Commander games could be sold on Steam?

O

Oxford_circus

Spaceman
I remember Steam uploading the X-Com trilogy onto their online store a couple of years ago and it actually making a bit of a splash; the original X-Com made it to their number one seller list for a short time.

This is pertinent to the WC series because a new X-Com game (albeit nothing like the original) was introduced at this year's E3, which I want to say was within two years of the original X-Com being sold on Steam. I have to wonder if there was a link between a strong showing on Steam and a major publisher, 2K games, deciding to make a new game for the series.



It's wishful thinking of course but I wonder what would happen if somehow the WC series could be bought and sold on the Steam store.



-OC
 
Any interest in the originals won't hurt. Though from the looks of it the new Xcom is a FPS...
 
razgriz21 said:
It could happen if Electronic Arts gets there act together.
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What would you know about how Electronic Arts acts?

Edit: I suppose that sounded snarky. Sorry. Simple point is that it's just not as easy to release old games on steam as it would seem. This isn't a case of EA being resistant to steam (They do have their own service though but new EA games like Mass Effect 2 are on steam). It's a case of how much work would be needed to do so. It just isn't a case of putting it up there. They also need to make sure it will run properly. It just doesn't make that much financial sense at the moment without a new game to promote and with cheap copies that work great in dosbox available on ebay.
 
AD is correct. Putting up Wing Commander is a bit more complex than some of the other titles available on Steam.

Think of it as being like a car that has been sitting in a garage for years that no one has taken care of--you will have to do a lot of work in order to sell it (versus a classic car that is old but has been maintained regularly, which would be something like DooM or Space Quest).

That said, I don't think EA is an especially big fan of Steam--they're still hoping to launch their own service in a way that would compete with it (... for this small market).
 
AD said:
What would you know about how Electronic Arts acts?

Edit: I suppose that sounded snarky. Sorry. Simple point is that it's just not as easy to release old games on steam as it would seem. This isn't a case of EA being resistant to steam (They do have their own service though but new EA games like Mass Effect 2 are on steam). It's a case of how much work would be needed to do so. It just isn't a case of putting it up there. They also need to make sure it will run properly. It just doesn't make that much financial sense at the moment without a new game to promote and with cheap copies that work great in dosbox available on ebay.
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Naw, it's cool.

Maybe if a large enough audience exists to sell it too, then it would be a hit.

Well, there is always gog.com
 
It just isn't a case of putting it up there. They also need to make sure it will run properly. It just doesn't make that much financial sense at the moment without a new game to promote and with cheap copies that work great in dosbox available on ebay.
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The old X-COM games on Steam are using DOSbox.
 
Prometheus said:
The old X-COM games on Steam are using DOSbox.
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Yeah, and there's commercial boxed rerelease software that uses DOSBox as well (Space Quest Collection). Some companies would view this is as a sloppy way of doing it though, even if it works okay. There's just a feeling that DOS is so many computer generations removed from the year 2010/Windows 7, that it's not okay to do - even a Windows 95 version could be preferred.
 
ChrisReid said:
There's just a feeling that DOS is so many computer generations removed from the year 2010/Windows 7, that it's not okay to do - even a Windows 95 version could be preferred.
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Eh... I don't know about that. I certainly have far fewer issues getting DOS games to run in DOSBox than I have getting a Win95 game to run half the time.
 
Max Gene said:
Eh... I don't know about that. I certainly have far fewer issues getting DOS games to run in DOSBox than I have getting a Win95 game to run half the time.
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Yeah, me too, but that was my point: that doesn't matter. :) From a major company's point of view, you have to provide technical support for whatever you release, and supporting Windows to Windows is a different animal than DOS to Windows. You can have an entire support workforce today that's never even used a command prompt interface, and someone like EA isn't going to support getting a game release to work via some retro gaming third party application anyway.
 
Falcon988 said:
Yep, Wing Commander is more GoG's cup of tea than Steam's. I can see it being released on there sometime.
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I've seen a lot of people repeating this since the DOSBox re-releases were, ah, 'rumored'... but: do not hold out for Wing Commander on GoG. The thing that's preventing GoG from putting out Wing Commander isn't that they don't want to or that they need someone else to do the work porting it or anything like that... it's that they aren't willing/able to pay Electronic Arts the licensing money they want for their back catalog.
 
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