0.0 The gates have opened, folks. I'm speechless at this announcement. ...I'll be buying the Mega Drive Classics game when it comes out. And you should too.
Huh, cool. The hub itself looks alright to me, I guess they want to add a bit more buzz to the fact you can buy all those old Sega titles. I might have to try this out with my Steam copy of Sonic 3. VR, wooooo! (In all honesty, really wish the gaming industry would chill out about VR...unless we get a major game release alot of this feels like pointless tech demo's to me...)
This is huge news. But there has to be some sort of catch. I bet they would test ROMs we submit before giving it the green light. Otherwise you'll have any old silly ROM up there. Someone will just hack a ROM and change sonic red and give awful palettes and hope that'll go onto Steam. Surely SEGA wouldn't want that on there, so they'll test it, and if they approve, then it would go onto Steam. So I could see hacks like Big's Fishing Derby, Knuckles Emerald Hunt, Sonic 1 Next Level, Sonic Bash, S Factor, Classic Heroes, etc making it onto Steam. This is of course speculation.
If Sega does test hacks before approving them in, would copyrighted chars on their games be an issue? such as having their formal arch nemesis in Sonic 1, I'll be sorta damned if they're totally fine with that. I'm very curious to see how this goes next week.
I think copyright could become an issue. Like a hack from the top of my head, say, CrazyBus. It has Rick Astley's "Never gonna give you up" and that could get SEGA into trouble. Actually, MarkeyJester's "Sonic 1 Next Level" has Alex Lee's Take It which could be an issue too. Makes me wonder how this will all work out...
I am kinda hoping that they do test hacks though. Who knows if their hacks are compatible with their emulator. Plus, they'd wanna make sure the rom hack works before hosting it on the service. This will serve to make hackers debug their hacks too. I kinda hope they charge for the hacks so we can support the hackers that made the hack. 99 cents a rom hack sounds good to me.
Without wishing to sound rude, have you ever seen the Steam workshop before? It's mostly garbage because it's not even slightly vetted for quality I think it's very slightly vetted for obvious flagrant ToS violations and nothing more, there's some good stuff on there to be sure but the entire point of the Workshop is that literally anyone can upload a thing and share it with other people with minimal fuss. Tabletop Simulator has Steam Workshop support, people (including me) very openly create and share modules for games they do not own the rights to and Steam by and large doesn't really do anything. Largely. Sometimes a board game company takes issue and stuff gets pulled but generally it's smooth sailing, I cannot fathom the situation where a random music clip or using Sega's own characters would get anyone nailed for copyright on this. This was attempted before on the Steam workshop and bombed really fucking hard and is almost certainly not coming back to the Workshop at all.
That honestly really surprises me considering the first time they did it, it was pretty much nothing but a huge disaster and I would've imagined it salted the earth pretty thoroughly. Apparently not. Still probably not coming to this game's workshop, at any rate.
We have gotten some more details on the update from SEGA Europe at the show floor over at PAX East. The Classics Hub will not come with any first-party modding tools from SEGA itself but any fan-made tools that currently exist or will exist in the future are fair game. Next week's release is also worldwide.
...Wait, so they'll gladly let us use disassemblies of their ROMs to make hacks and post it on Steam Workshop? That's just insane. Did a former ROM hack developer get an executive job at Sega or something?
I would assume that how they'll do this is when you put a ROM on the service, you'll specify a base game it was made off (say for argument, Sonic 1). Then that hack becomes available to those who have Sonic 1 in their Steam Libraries, but only those that do (thus incentivising you to use money on more games). The sheer fact this is even a thing is still bonkers, though. I'm amazed Japan said yes - assuming they even know.
Considering this is getting a worldwide release, they must at least know about this unless Steam's not as big in Japan as it is in NA and EU.
This all sounds way too good to be true but I also can't find any other way to remain skeptical. That's kind of amazing.
To me, the most exciting part about this is the prospect of being able to subscribe to a mod and have it update seamlessly in the background -- would really drum up motivation to push out individual features and bugfixes as they're ready instead of holding out for a traditional "big release".
This is a great way to reach a whole new audience with the hacks we've all been enjoying for years, it's really exciting stuff. Can't wait to see what people think. Now if only there were worthwhile hacks for games other than Sonic out there.
Well, if this takes off it could mean people might bother to make hacks for non-Sonic Mega Drive games.
