NetHack on Steam

[Ravenmore]

Now this is interesting :)

http://store.steampowered.com/app/341390/?snr=1_5_1100__1100

Haven't bought it yet, wonder how their interfaces work.

[_Ln_]

It's funny how the trailer doesn't have to do anything with how the game looks.

[jonadab]

It is probably worth pointing out that most members of the NetHack community react to this in one of the following ways:
1. Shrug. Who cares?
2. Is that even legal?
2a. That's NOT legal, the Steam TOS violates the NGPL. (The iOS ports have a similar issue.)
2b. Yes it is legal, because [weird technicalities]. Maybe.
2c. Who cares if it's technically legal, if the dev team don't mind?
3. Tiles? They are evil and want you dead. tty forever.
4. Why did they base it on vanilla, instead of my favorite variant?

(Personally, I fall into the first camp: I never even heard of Steam until this came up, so it's immaterial to me.)

[Dogbreath]

To be honest, it looks like crap.

Well, I've played Vulture before, and unless they seriously beefed it up I think this is (unfortunately) a case of someone exploiting the recent success of other roguelikes on steam (see Dungeons of Dredmore, ToME, ADOM, Dungeonmans, etc.) for a quick buck. OTOH, it's only like 3 bucks, so it's not like anyone's going to feel screwed out of their money or anything, I just don't like the idea that they're making money off of something that is 99% other people's work.

I imagine this is a pretty strong vindication of TB's refusal to release the ADOM source code over the years, though. :P Imagine instead of the awesome ADOM we have now having a bunch of crappy variants for sale on Steam...

[Laukku]

IIRC I read an explanation from the people who authored this release that they have to charge some kind of amount because some Steam features (achievements, cloud saves) are not available for free games.

[D'Artagnon]

I know this is an old thread, but hey, it's still on page 1 in the forum. New here, and this is my first post/comment. I've played Rogue and -likes since 1982 and somehow managed to never try ADOM til now (now that I've played it, like crazy for the past weeks, it blows my mind it took me this long to get to it... it. is. awesome.).

I've played Nethack off and on for decades, and when Vulture (maybe originally called Vulture's Eye?) was developed in the early oughts, I played with it a fair bit. It was free for many years, and only more recently was a version of it (which doesn't seem to be much further developed than the one I played a decade ago) made available for sale via Steam. It's definitely a questionable area about it being sold for profit because of its root, being based on the defiantly-free Nethack, but I ended up playing it a ton and can say that the developer (it was almost completely just one guy, IIRC) did put a ton of work into it (graphics, music, interface, etc.), and I think it's appropriate for him to be able for him to get a small amount of $ for all that (assuming it's actually him getting the $!).

I bought but have still yet to even install and play the Steam version, I just wanted to get the guy my $3. I forget his name but traded emails w/him back in the day when he was still working on Vulture a bit and it was clearly a big labor of love. Also I just noticed he added "Vulture for Slash'Em" as a free DLC for it. Although I personally never bothered w/Slash'Em.