As promised through our roadmap goals, the MistNFT Steam Store is now among us!
Check out the Steam store here, and Add Mist to your Wishlist! Note that the game is in the “Coming Soon” phase, so add us to your Wishlist:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1752700/Mist/
This article outlines some of many positives to this news and how becoming a Steamworks Partner affects not only the MistNFT game but its community as a whole going forward!
To summarize the enormous benefits of joining STEAM:
Proof-of-Game
One of the hurdles that we have faced throughout the process of development is skepticism behind the legitimacy and intentions of actually producing a game.
Now, as Mist has become a Steamworks Partner, not only is the work behind the business and game development very much apparent but the validity behind the project as a whole is now undisputable. All this wouldn’t be possible without having put massive gamedev work beforehand.
Valve follows a careful vetting process for every applicant who wants to be listed on the Steam Store, Mist included. Part of this process includes financial and tax information on top of other documentation, but most importantly — Valve requires testing of the game prior to approval.
The Mist project started out as a passion for gaming and the want to create a fun, exciting blockchain-enabled MMORPG that everyone can enjoy while earning and having true ownership of in-game assets. This desire is still going strong within the team and we will deliver!
Increased Game Exposure
The crypto space is still very new and the idea of true ownership of in-game assets and the possibility of monetization for the time put into a game is not exactly common knowledge for every traditional gamer out there. We can possibly help pivot that a bit.
The Steam Store is without a doubt the largest game store out there. With that, comes a lot exposure and the possibility of getting noticed by many other players. In 2020 alone, Steam had around 120 million active players!
Hopefully, with the help of the Mist Community, we can get the word out on our game and get the opportunity to get even more adventurers join us in the land of Midirim! Community members adding this game into their Steam Wish List and leaving positive reviews at full release will have huge long-term benefits.
Efficient Deployment, Faster Downloads & Increased Accessibility
We’ve recently released a very innovative way for players to access an in-game marketplace that accomplished a few things, most of which is something that no other blockchain-enabled game has accomplished: The ability for a player to directly purchase, trade, view and interact with NFTs while also getting to a hands-on experience of the game for the first time ever! No more boring browser catalogs without getting to at least touch the game beforehand.
This is all great, but there were a few loose ends that the launcher and installation had. Utilization of the Steam Store easily takes care of these problems.
Let’s break down these issues into pieces and discuss how this will help:
- Trojan Alerts — The Mist development team had designed a quick launcher installer that would give players access to the in-game marketplace. However, due to program signage and other technical issues, Windows Defender and other protection programs flagged our files as ‘Malicious’. Of course this was a false flag, but still raised concerns within the community.
- Using the Steam Store as a launcher for Mist game builds and access point for players, this flag will now be simply non-existent.
- Slow Launcher Updates — When the launcher first became available and new updates were made for new NFT sales thereafter, the demand and stress put on the servers were very high! A large flood of players were downloading at the same time, causing slow download speeds and in some cases even timeouts in the middle of update sessions. Needless to say, server upgrades could be made but doing so would be an inefficient solution.
- This time around, using the Steam Store should help alleviate this problem going forward as their servers would be used going forward for
downloading and updating game builds. Steam provides a unified download and update experience for customers that easily allows them to manage the schedule and location of their downloads, and can result in significant performance gains and cost savings to developers. - New Game Builds — As the game progresses new game builds will be available. This includes the marketplace as we have mentioned before that the plan now is to expand this for players to experience a tad more of what we have to offer. However, updating, maintaining, testing and troubleshooting a launcher is a tall order.
- Mist developers had now focus solely on creating the game and rest easy knowing that game builds and the general upkeep that goes with it is the only thing they have to worry about.
