Indie godfather Cliff Harris

Yeah, possibly. It was early days of Xbox and stuff like that. I still thought it was weird that people didn't see that Steam, and services like Steam, were going to be really big. I thought it was obvious. Thing is, though, I worked for a company that sold all their games as boxes on shelves - so to them it seemed a little bit strange, I guess. I'd already done quite a few games by then that were selling online and making a little bit of money, so I knew it worked. I just wasn't good enough at it or didn't know enough to scale it up. It seems absolutely crazy, all those companies like Lionhead continued to go along, effectively taking bank loans from publishers in order to make games. It seemed crazy then and it's still crazy now.

I've been pretty ambiguous about that... [laughs] I love Steam, I buy all my games from Steam. Though I don't buy many games at the moment, just because I don't like the majority of games that are made... But I like Steam, it's been very good to me. I've made good money through it. The deal that you get through Steam is obviously confidential, but it's good, far better than all the casual game portals - Bigfish games, people like that. Much, much better. And obviously there's all these people who buy online because of Steam, who otherwise would be very wary of it. I get a lot of people who say to me 'no offence, but I'm not going to buy games direct from you, I'm going to buy them via Steam because I don't trust fly-by-night websites." Which is particularly annoying for me, because I've been selling online for longer than Valve [laughs]. I point this out, but obviously it doesn't get me anywhere...

My wariness of Steam isn't really to do with a wariness of Steam, it's not got anything to do with Valve - it's the whole concept of there being a single platform holder. A lot of developers on PC, I think, are there because nobody can tell them what to do. If, with my next game, Steam said 'oh that's great, but we want 90 per cent of the money' then I don't have to immediately panic and become a plumber. I can still sell online. Whereas if they did control the entire market, they become the de facto platform holder. That's one of the reasons I don't do console games, even though I've looked at XBLA, and some publishers wanted me to do that. Nintendo wanted me to do stuff... But the thought that there is a guy in a room somewhere who will look at my game and ideas, that are sometimes slightly strange, and say 'oh no, we don't like that, we think you should change it...' If I wanted to put up with that, I'd do it in business software or something really boring. I'm wary of the fact that no online portal should get big enough that it can actually dictate what gets made. I don't think they are there yet with Steam, and I think that's a good thing.

I am confident about other sources. I've been doing this full-time for quite a while, and I made a good living before I was on Steam. I've only ever had one game on Steam, which is Gratuitous Space Battles and its various expansions. Even after Gratuitous Space Battles had sold quite a lot of copies and made quite a lot of money on Steam, I went back and said 'I do this politics game, Democracy, it's very popular and I've lived off it for years, do you want that?' They said 'oh no, we don't know if it fits in with Steam.' Which is entirely up to them and that's not the point - the thing is that if I never got another penny from Steam again I could still do this for a living. Which is something I find incredibly reassuring. Not that I think there would be a problem because I think that GSB sold quite well and that I'm hopefully reasonably confident that I can keep selling on Steam. And I would want to.