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The only part of the Steamworks SDK you're required to use to sell your game on Steam are the parts to upload your game. See https://partner.steamgames.com... and https://partner.steamgames.com.... You are not required to recompile your game.

The only part of the Steamworks SDK you're required to use to sell your game on Steam are the parts to upload your game. See https://partner.steamgames.com... and https://partner.steamgames.com.... You are not required to recompile your game.

It's a shame I bet the files stored on my SSDs likely wouldn't share data and if I dual installed [the same Steam game for multiple operating systems,] I'd have to pick between.

That depends on how an application's depots are configured. Each depot is a package that can be for one or many operating systems, one or many architectures, one or many languages, and either the base game or a particular add-on. A well-packaged Steam game would come as three depots:

• Program: Specific to one combination of architecture and operating system but shared across all languages
• Non-program localization: Those parts shared across all architectures and operating systems that pertain to one language, mostly strings, fonts, and pre-rendered signboard textures
• Non-program, non-culture: Shared across all architectures, operating systems, and languages

(Many developers refer to non-program depots as "assets", but others claim that the term "assets" devalues non-program works.)

Thus you'd end up with a program depot per OS and non-program depots shared among OSes.

> I imagine that Unity and Unreal both have a plethora of off the shelf modules for doing DRM.

Nope and nope. They don't waste their time when:

a) Other people already provide solutions (e.g. Denuvo, etc.)
b) they could be working on improving their toolset instead.

> What's your experience with integrating DRM with your games in recent years? How long does it take?

Depends on which platform. On consoles you (usually) don't have to do anything.

On PC: Anywhere from minutes (Steam) to days.

Also, DRM causes you to re-test *everything*.

> I used to be a pirate, back in the days when CDROM was all the rage ... Considering the sophistication of some of the cracks I used, I'm guessing it took a hacker a considerable amount of time breaking the DRM for the game as well.

Before I became a professional game developer I _cracked_ games on 8-bit (Apple), 16-bit and 32-bit (PC). "Cracking" took anywhere from minutes to hours.

> I don't think a hacker will bother breaking DRM on a game retailing for $20.

Incorrect.

We do it for the challenge -- the price of the game is irrelevant -- although the price will tend to reflect the difficulty of protection employed. One would naturally expect a $60 game to have better protection then a $20 game.

The _fastest_ way to motivate a programmer is to tell him he can't do something.

citation provided. I believe that this is the requirement GP was referring to:

Q. Can I sell my Source Engine game on Steam?
A. Yes, but there are a few requirements:

• You will need to complete an additional agreement for distributing a paid Source Engine product on Steam.
• If you are using the RAD tools included with the Source SDK, you will need to contact RAD for information and cost associated with licensing MILES and/or BINK.
• For any Source Engine game that charges money, Havok needs to be paid a licensing fee of $25,000 for the physics engine. You will need to pay this fee up front before making your game available for sale on Steam.
• You can only sell your Source Engine game via Steam unless you get a full Source Engine license.

That says that if you sell your Source 1 game on Steam you must either pay for a full Source Engine licence or you can't sell it anywhere other than Steam. (There's no mention on whether you can sell it outside Steam if it's not on Steam at all though)

As for The Stanley Parable HL2 mod, that's not a counterexample because that was a free mod - it wasn't being sold from Steam or from elsewhere. What you see there on ModDB are free downloads.

I can hardly find information about that, but the Steamworks documentation refers to the Valve titles (Half-Life 2, Counter Strike Source) as being under Steamworks, yes.

Don't run! Is only sandvich!

http://www.steamgames.com/tf2/heavy/sandvich.htm
  Ah ha ha ha ha! Baloney!

Already taken: http://www.steamgames.com/steamworks/ov_cloud.php

I still don't get how buying from steam is any different to buying from me, other than you may already have an account on steam.
For the record, I'd love to get my games on steam. I wish it was that easy.
[...]
I'm really hassling my payment provider to support amazons one-click method. For me, I think that's even more convenient than steam.

Well, that's basically it for the digital distribution point - people don't like to fill out forms, they don't like to give away their data; not their email, not their name and especially not their address, so the common accounts most people already have, Steam and Paypal, should be used whenever possible.
Since your payment provider requires people to fill out that boring form every time someone purchases something, why don't you support Paypal directly? Just return a page with a download-link and/or serial key like other services do. One of your competitors when it comes to getting money from pirates, Rapidshare, does exactly that. If that's not possible on part of your payment provider then you should consider switching to a different one, perhaps one that doesn't support Paypal on it's own. Even if you drop it altogether and use Paypal as the only payment method, you might be better of.

For the record, I'd love to get my games on steam. I wish it was that easy.

Didn't they create Steamworks and recently released an SDK so that every developer can finally get their games on Steam? I didn't really look into it but where is the problem? Do they have some kind of requirements you can't meet?

Bad assumption. Source doesn't use directx 10 yet.
From the stats:
http://steamgames.com/status/ep2/ep2_stats.php

72.91% are dx9 sm3
12.17% are dx9 sm2 (i.e. old radeon x800's and the like)
9.36% are dx8.1!
5.38% are dx8

with 0.18% unknown. This doesn't tell us anything about vista takeup, but it does tell us a number of people playing hl2ep2 are doing so with old technology. nvidia 5900's default to 8.1 for example (their dx9 shader performance sucked), and that's a 4 year old card. Native DX 8 cards are even older!

http://www.steampowered.com/status/survey.html
from the hardware survey, directx10 capable (vista with dx10 cards) players make up 7.38% of steam users, while 14.10% overall took the survey on vista.

Looking at the other stats page:
http://steamgames.com/status/ep2/ep2_stats.php

There is a chart for:
Highest Map Played (percentage of players)

Which probably is a more accurate representation of exactly how far most people have gotten. As mentioned in other comments this includes people still playing through, but my hunch is those numbers aren't going to go up a whole lot. I wonder how other forms of entertainment where leaving is easy suffer from it? Say television movies? Or TV series with high continuity?

When a submitter writes a sentence like "Valve releases game stats" then one would think that would point to the site where Valve actually released the game stats. A more accurate sentence would be "Arstechnica 'analyzes' Valve's released game stats".

Or you could just link to the actual stats:
http://steamgames.com/status/ep2/ep2_stats.php