Toribash Next has initially been designed to operate as independently from our own servers as possible, so the solution of using Steam for most of the community related stuff made most sense as they have a fairly robust system for UGC sharing and basic economy / inventory management. We still had to essentially replicate the inventory system on our own for the Epic Games Store version of TBN though, which also left that version without trading + UGC sharing functionality due to time constraints and lack of resources - which wouldn't be the case if the game was using our own systems to begin with.



Migrating Toribash market or UGC sharing to Steam (or just adding it as an option) would mean the following things:

• We need to introduce a system to synchronize Toribash item database with the Steam setup.
  From what I remember, there was no way to programmatically update Steam Inventory Schema definitions - which means there'd have to be someone with direct access to our Steam Partner page (me or hampa) able to manually upload a new version of item definitions each time items get released, making IF work more complicated than it already is.
  
  
• We have to somehow make the 7+ million existing inventory items (with all their parameters like applied effects, games played, etc) compatible with Steam inventory system.
  To do this, we need to introduce some way of converting Toribash inventory items (linked to your Toribash account, tradable using existing systems within Toribash) into Steam inventory items (no longer linked to Toribash accounts but linked to your Steam inventory instead, tradable only on Steam Marketplace) and back - because there's no solution where you get to keep both at the same time.
  
  
• We need to essentially overhaul the way mod management works if we want mods to be available on Steam Workshop.
  While there's no good way to get mods in Toribash now, when you use the /dl command you can at least be sure that the mod you've got will work both in Free Play and Multiplayer. With Steam Workshop, that will only be the case if there's a system in place that mirrors any uploads done to Workshop to our own mod bank. Then to implement proper support of revisions-based UGC system on the Workshop, we'd also need to implement a similar system in our own mod sharing, which potentially means dropping backwards compatibility for all game clients predating the update as Toribash mods are currently designed to be final with your game client not performing consistency checks on mod files if they're already located in your local mods folder.
  We would also likely need to do mass uploads of all (or most popular) mods (+ replays and any other types of UGC we'd want players to be able to share) to Workshop, because otherwise you'd just have like 20 mods available there in total.

In the end all this would lead to is community fragmentation as you'd have a good chunk of players (mobile platforms + standalone) not being able to use functionality available to Steam users, which is the last thing Toribash needs with its already small community.