HAWKEN moves to Steam to pick up more players

There’s a big change in the world of HAWKEN as Meteor Entertainment realise that most PC gamers are using Steam these days.

From now on if anyone wants to play HAWKEN they’re going to have to go through Steam as all accounts will be transitioned on to the Steam platform this month. The launcher that has been used up until now  will be closed down and all future game updates will be delivered directly through Steam.

The process of moving accounts will take a little time so over the next week current pilots will be granted access through Steam before the game is made available to new players. It’s worth reading the transition guide that’s been posted if you’re a current player.

What is effectively happening is the game is being relaunched on Steam so until it’s fully functional on the new system new players won’t be able to join.

“Steam is the premier platform for PC gaming reaching millions of gamers worldwide and will allow us to introduce HAWKEN to a brand new audience. As we continue to focus on a full release in 2014, expanding our reach is a major priority for us.Today, we’re bringing LIVE services down to begin our transition to Steam.”

This is an interesting move by Meteor and it sounds like the player base may not be as strong as they would have hoped. By moving to Steam they can target more new players. It’s not a massive surprise this really, you don’t read or hear much about the game these days.

Meteor’s Paula Cuneo made this bold comment last July regarding the game’s promotion:

“If a game is really good, it should be all word of mouth, in a perfect world.”

“We’re not spending any money against advertising and we’re not doing any paid media. We’re really making sure that the product itself and the experience you get interacting with the company means you want to stay around.”

The idea was to have the community spread the word about how great HAWKEN is but it looks like that might not have worked out as well as they’d hoped. Now they will be relying on Steam to boost player numbers and it’s perhaps something they should have done some time ago.