Steam is out of the question (at least it was for CW1)
Virgil contacted them about it and he never ended up getting a response out of them.
That's too bad, but it's a somewhat common issue so i've heard, Valve is usually pretty swamped, which is understandable given their popularity, but unless they actually turned him down, i'd just figure it's because they were busy at the time.
Why would you want a game you can download and play on Steam? All that does is add the evil piece of Steam junk to the game and to your computer.
I like having the "evil piece of Steam junk" installed, besides, it is entirely optional.
Steam also takes 40% of the price of the game and they often want to discount the game. So say they discount it from $10 to $6 and then take 40% or $2.40, then Virgil gets $3.60 per game he sells on Steam. so he'd have to sell 3 games on Steam for each one game he sells locally (Of course, his current merchandiser also takes a cut, but it is a smaller cut). So only if Steam delivers huge quantities of sales does it make sense. Especially if it will cause sales to go through Steam that would otherwise have happened naturally here on Virgil's site.
I'd think he can look towards a mid-life kicker by trying to add it to Steam, once he got the bulk of sales driven by the Flash games he will put on Flash gaming sites. Then the discounting won't hurt so much.
Well all deals are different, and to my knowledge the default cut Valve takes is actually 30% and not 40%, and i've heard of only one exception which was Garry's Mod (It's a 50% cut due to the included Source Engine license)
Either way, i'm not gonna say i know a lot about those deals, but what i will say is that i think that CW1 and 2 are hidden gems, they are pretty good games, but not a lot of people know about them, One thing Steam atleast can do, is advertise for a product on their website, i think even with the cut that Valve takes, it's more than worth it in terms of gained customers than the loss in profits from the cut, and there's always the option of making the game Steamworks, which in my experience leads people to try and find cheaper alternatives than Steam, alternatives that may give you a bigger cut of the cake than Valve does.
