SWTOR's on Steam, but What Does It Mean?

On Tuesday, the team at Bioware ran its first community livestream in a while. They talked about a couple of different things, but the main occasion was... SWTOR launching on Steam?

This is one of those things that's simultaneously huge and completely irrelevant, depending on how you look at it. It's huge because it's undoubtedly a good thing for the game - launching on Steam is the digital download equivalent of selling your product on Amazon, which is to say that it gets put in front of a huge number of eyeballs that wouldn't otherwise have known about it. Lots of new players plus more money for the developers are good things in my book!

For someone who's been happily playing without Steam all this time though, it's simultaneously kind of a non-event. Sure, the starter planets might be a bit busier than usual (but then, lack of new players has never been an issue for the game from what I could tell - it's the mid-level zones where population sometimes drops off), but it's not like there's any new content to play through or anything.

So what does this mean for existing players? Is there any point in "moving" to Steam?

I had to have a think about this myself because I have a slightly weird relationship with Steam in that I do have it installed and also allow it to run on startup, but almost never actually use it. All I ever play is a small number of MMOs and I just install and play those through their native launchers! In fact, the only reason I have a Steam account at all is that a number of years ago when I went through a pretty rough time in real life which also included several months of unemployment, my significant other pushed me towards getting an account so he could gift me games through Steam to keep me busy and distracted, heh.

Anyway, after reading up on it I learned that there are some advantages to linking your SWTOR account to Steam, beyond the obvious "Steam stuff" such as tracking your play time, showing your Steam friends what you're playing, trading cards and whatever other gamification things Steam has going on these days.

First off, you get extra payment options! I've been on a stable income with a functional credit card for a while now, but that doesn't mean that I've forgotten that this isn't necessarily the case for everyone. As far as I remember, when I first started playing MMOs I used to pay with physical time cards from a store, and later when I switched to paying by credit card I recall having payment issues more than once. SWTOR stopped selling physical time cards where I live quite some time ago, so payment options have been limited ever since. (Though while researching this I found that there's a thing called "EA game cards"? Don't recall ever seeing one of those before, and not sure if they work without going through Origin.)

Anyway, Steam gift cards are pretty common and if you link up your Steam and SWTOR accounts, you can pay for your subscription or Cartel Coins that way as well. Plus if people gift you money that way and you haven't known what to spend it on in the past because you only really play MMOs all the time (cough) you can now turn those gifts into subscription time or Cartel Coins too. A guildie also pointed out that since there are ways in which you can earn money on Steam (from selling trading cards and so on), you could even "finance" your subscription through playing other games. It's nice to have options!

I also mentioned giving gifts through Steam earlier, and this is a big one for me. I've long been baffled by the fact that SWTOR doesn't allow you to gift sub time or Cartel Coins to other players. Considering that this would be another reason to give them more money, you'd think they'd be able to justify the dev resources for developing such a system! (Fun fact: when I went back to WoW for a few months back in 2013 this was purely because my significant other gifted me the then-current expansion and some game time to "force" me to play with him and I didn't have the heart to reject the gift - just one way to get more people to play your game.) Anyway, my point is that by linking your SWTOR account to Steam you gain the ability to gift both sub time and CC to other players or receive either from them in turn. How awesome is that? Swtorista describes how it works here.

Anyway, what does it mean to "link" SWTOR and Steam anyway? Well, just linking your accounts for the purposes of making payments or giving or receiving gifts is very easy: Select to install the game on Steam (which initially just installs the launcher), and then launch the game through Steam and log in, which will link the accounts. You can stop the actual game download and never go back after that if you like.

However, if you want to do things like track your play time, you need to actually install the full game through Steam, which is a bit more annoying simply because like most modern MMOs it's a huge download and feels a bit redundant if you've already got it installed and are happily playing away. Sadly, unless you previously switched from the default to the non-streamling launcher (which you wouldn't have done as an average player), you can't just copy the files from their current directory to the Steam one either but have to re-download the whole thing. I did decide to go through with that anyway and therefore have two copies of SWTOR installed on my PC right now! Let me tell you, it's not good for your hard disk space... I'll probably delete the duplicate eventually, maybe once they add a few more pixels to the Steam launcher icon so that it doesn't look completely atrocious.

All that said, the reinstallation should only be a one-time nuisance and I don't think there are any other downsides to switching, as you're logging into the exact same game afterwards, so things like your characters, preferences etc. will be there as they were before.

What about you? Have you made the switch or has this development not affected you in any way?