Re: considering selling our audiogames via steam
Shrug, I think another issue people seem to be forgetting in regards to something being playable if one put enough effort into something to play it an a programmer should inser tthis change here real fast is that most players don't know how their game was made. Sure it may look simple to do in concept, but if the developer designed the game to the point where they have to mess around with a lot of components to make this change work everywhere, and ten bug test for unseen errors, the time it takes to put in one simple change could cost a lot more money than what they get from the blind community since our player base for graphical games is small.
Half the time I find the easiest developers to reach out to are those who are extremely responsive during the development of the game and the game is mainly in free demo or beta. I've seen companies with the makers in the community respond to access changes, and our recent waste land example reached to an independent developer.
Also, unless someone really tried hard to work existing laws in trying to intergrate accessibility into Steam, the issue as Dark stated before is that the company running it is big, and is existing very fine without the blind community. To put this in prospective, if Steam had an option to work on new features for the cliet, are they going to work on new social features and advertisement/other developer tools or people to put more stuff on their sight, which will attract thousand and thousands of new users, or access changes that will probably attract a few hundred, or even less than a hundred people?
HOnestly, the only way your going to convince large developers to make access changes to stuff where a blind community is currently non-existant is if you tickle their need to gain more profit from the change, and considering what profit probably means to bigge r companies, a change that would attract blind players that would add neary a hundred thousand or more dollars to their stream of profits. The issue is that we currently lack a large enough and united enough population of graphical game players who are blind to make a strong case for this, and videogames are not exactly considered a vital product for a person to function or be content.
Also though, I think another problem with trying to amass a large enough population of graphical game users is that people's sense of fun is vastly different. Sure, some people find joy in conquering a hard level in a sighted game while blind, spending hours getting it just righ tto complete a ew battles to a checkpoint. However, others find that more of a chore and a colossal waste of time and money, and would more likely forma unied group of people thinking these attempts at playing sighted games are stupid, and be large r than the group playing. Considering most people reactions with games like swamp, who hated mouse controls when starting, despite the game being accessible, these people would probably not even considerdownloading the demo of a sighted game and immediately shaft the idea before trying. This is sad however, as this kind of hurts any attempts at amassing a large enough group to make a case for a company to earn profits from access changes.
Okay, now for a question of my own. How is the Steam community. Is it a fairly decent sight in which one can easily find conversation and plotting on games to play, or is it something with close populations to 4chan users, who if they saw an attempt for access changes, would form a massive troll group to spamm crash ext for screen readers, and harass blind users? Kind of want to know as usually a group of the second kind could fall under the perception a few sight ed friends of mine have with access changes. The fear that making a game more accessible would dampen or degrade the experience of the sighted user. Obviously in any cases this is probably not true, and there are probably thousands of ways for a developer to include access changes that do not disturb the original gameplay, or in fact can enhance it ( Like Adventure to Fate).
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