Bemused at no Steam Workshop Support?

Just saying, with like the 300+ mods that are around, with the mod tools and the very open ended about mod support, I'm really surprised that this game never had themselves steam workshop support. Wouldn't have that made it a lot easier for the modding community and better for the game overall?

Probably yes but I thubk Pamm is way easuer to use. The only problem is the completely niche circle that knows it exist. It should be In the main game page that there is a community driven mod hub and how to get it.

I don't want to use steam for all this. Pamm is totally great and PA works best without steam.

Could PAMM be put on the steam workshop?

I love PAMM a lot, its been our savor for how many years now? but it would be much easier on steam workshop I would think, and better access to mods, most people from steam never come to these forums so probably don't even know about PAMM or most of the mods that are out there... Steam Workshop not only gets the mods out to the masses, but it will work better also. PAMM is nice because we don't have any other way to easily add or take out mods, so steam workshop would do that, just better, in my opinion. You don't have to stop using PAMM just because PA finally had steam workshop, but I think it would be much less of a hassel on whats compatible with PAMM and version issues etc..

What about the people who don't use or want Steam?
Splitting up the modding distribution into PAMM and Steam Workshop is just another recipe for disaster.

not really, games like skyrim do it just fine.... as i said, your not forced to use it, but it would be a lot easier all around

Imho the only good thing possible with the steam workshop would be to distribute pamm via it. (not exclusively ofc)

But distributing mods via steam on top of pamm is just a recipe for chaos indeed.

Steam Workshop is a MUST for mods to thrive, the majority of the community is ON STEAM if you like it or not and probably never heard of PAMM. To get mods to the front and center of things we need that easy to use workshop support.

Isn't skyrim kind of a mess when it comes to mods precisely because of steam workshop?

Skyrim is a exception for one simple reason, the popularity of its nexus mod hub that was there BEFORE the steam workshop. Of course PAMM already exists but it isn't"Popular." If PAMM had a large following in the majority of the community then workshop support would be pointless, but the majority of the PA player-base haven't even HEARD of PAMM, nor do they use the PA forums, or fan web sights ETC. Because of this, if PA wants to be a large thriving mod platform that attracts not only more players but good modders as well, it needs the exposure that the workshop gives it.

Citation needed.
No really, it would be interesting to know how many play on or off Steam, since this would help to interpret the usage numbers of Steamchart.

Yeah I'd like clear numbers of that as well. I'd say pamm is widely used among the people who play online.

I wouldnt consider 5-digit numbers of download for the top mods as a niche circle. Unless the number gets a +1 download for each update the mod has.

Well steam spy is rather good at numbers but not always accurate

http://steamspy.com/app/233250

Thats Planetary Annihilation as the base game

http://steamspy.com/app/386070

And there's Titans numbers

Also in terms of downloads, I think that's TOTAL downloads, ever, I'm not exactly sure about this though. The point is the amount of people who play PA vs those who know about PAMM is rather low. Its especially bad when the original PA has such high sales numbers but the amount of people who would stay and play the game was minimal. If steam workshop was a factor the staying power of PA defiantly would have been much larger as people had a easy way to download mods.

Also the steam charts don't count the PA players who use the actual PA launcher and not steam, so the concurrent players is probably a little higher than steamspy thinks. This is especially important when you realize that the inner community of PA (The niche circle that has PAMM or posts daily on the forums) is playing most likely on the PA launcher not through steam.

The download counter displays every successful request to download a mod. Whether you had an older version installed or not is irrelevant to the dl counter.

It doesn't count updates as a new download though does it? Because then every update would double the downloads.

No, every update wouldn't double the downloads.

Mod releases and gains 263 downloads.
The mod gets updated and 211 of the people who downloaded it update to the new version, the remaining 52 having left the PA community or just being too derpy to launch PAMM to check for updates. Download counter increases to 474.
In between the next update, 327 people download the mod. The download counter has increased to 801, but there are only 590 unique installs.
An update is released, and 445 old installs download it. The download counter increases to 1246. Another 111 people download the mod in between the next updaate, bringing the number of unique installs to 701 and the total download count to 1357. When another update is released, 560 people download the update, and the download counter increases to 1917.

Numbers are obviously made up and I have no idea how the conversion rate for old version to new version is, but you should get the idea.

Okay that is in half of the puzzle.
The missing part is how many people play PA without Steam. As you mentioned those users get not tracked down by any tool that is accessible for us. (That's why I hoped you have some new insights we may have overlooked)
Just as a reminder, you said

By the way: If I remember correctly, @cola_colin did after the introduction of Offlineplay a rough estimate of the people playing offline based on the usage numbers of PAStats. It turned out to be remarkabiy high (I don't remember the numbers, but I can try to search the post later). I wouldn't be surprised to see something like that on the Steam numbers as well.

Reminds me a lot of the difficulties SupCom had honestly. FA even had the Mod/Map Vaults directly integrated into GPGNet with Halycon Chat to boot.

A big part of the problem in my eyes is that modders don't have the ability to reach out to players, you get the small minority that take part in the online community outside of the game itself and even then it's only a portion of that minority that still know about mods.

It's something that needs to be addressed at a higher level than what the community can readily achieve IMO.

Mike