The Steam Review

PC Gamer UK have published some thoughts on where Valve, Maxis and Blizzard are going. Their resident Valve fan-boffin Tom Francis says of Steam:

The amazing thing is that the guys churning out regular additions to these four games are half of Valve. The other half are working on Steam, constantly.

Seventy-five people. There’s certainly enough in the pipeline to occupy them: Steamworks, Steamcloud, matchmaking, minimum requirement checks, ongoing Community improvements, non-game/driver downloads and a P2P network to name merely what we peons know of today.

And yes, P2P is still being worked on. Gabe said recently:

One of the things we’d like to do is to understand what types of applications people have on their PCs. For example, if a whole bunch of people are running Firefox, then make sure that’s one of the applications they can get through Steam.

[Then] there are community features that we want to continue to add. There’s peer-to-peer functionality: the community has this tremendous amount of bandwidth. There’s a whole bunch of content that they’re downloading right now, and being able to replicate that throughout the community using peer-to-peer would be a really good idea. What they need is a structured interface on top of that so they can find the content that everybody’s already downloading. Those are the kind of things we’re looking at.

Other Tom goes on to talk about how he expects Steam to become practically an OS of its own within Windows one day, and it’s getting harder and harder to disagree with him.

Too many crossings out, time for a rewrite!

Five mods have been given special access to the Steamworks SDK and will be releasing future versions over Steam. The news was announced by the co-op HL2 mod Synergy, probably earlier than it was supposed to be:

I would also like to inform you that we will be releasing Synergy and future updates through Steam! Valve Software has allowed us to do so by giving us access to the Steamworks SDK.

We are honored to be one of the four (sic) first selected mods to be given this opportunity. We will certainly put this to good use!

For you players, this means that you will see Achievements and Stats coming to Synergy in later updates. (Not to mention the automatic updates, provided by Steam.)

This plugs the final gap in Steam’s handling and presentation of mods; now they are to all intents and purposes they are free games, including, apparently, support for sub-mods. Previously mod teams had been told they were too small for Valve to support, and before that that their work was one day going to be distributed over Steam’s Peer-to-Peer network.

Although Steamworks doesn’t by itself give a game a presence in the Steam store, the more popular mods are already listed and are unlikely to be removed just to comply with Valve’s rules for commercial games.

The names of the other four mods have been found referenced in Steam’s content registry (thanks AciD):

• Age of Chivalry
• D.I.P.R.I.P.
• Insurgency
• Zombie Panic: Source

Any Synergy, of course. There’s no known date for when Valve will start extending offers to other mods, and knowing Valve most likely isn’t one at all!

Steam’s player statistics were taken down the other week, to a small amount of wailing and teeth gnashing in the forums. Now they’re back, and better than ever.

Because every damn game on Steam is up there.

Valve are tracking the statistics from the Steam client instead of their master servers now, enabling absolutely everyone to be counted: from the one person playing RIP 3 to the 61 enjoying Bioshock. All that’s missing are mods.

There is an additional discovery waiting beyond the realisation that the stats no longer include those playing pirated games. Could that change be behind the precipitous drop of Counter-Strike 1.6, which now trails CS Source by some ten thousand players? It’s been suggested that the massive piracy of the former in Asia was inflating the actual figures of legitimate players — although it’s arguable that they should be included to create a full picture. There’s something for Zeh to ponder over.

We might not have any sales figures, but at least we now have the most accurate and broad set of playing figures in the world!

Impulse isn’t inspiring much writing from me at the moment (executive summary: Steam without residency), but CD Projekt’s freshly-announced Good Old Games is another story. Shacknews has the details:

Located at GOG.com and slated to launch in September, the online store will sell DRM-free digital downloads of old-school PC games at $5.99 or $9.99 a pop. A closed public beta will go live on August 1, with the site currently accepting beta applications.

Each game sports full compatibility with Windows XP and Vista, and does not require any sort of online activation. To eliminate compatibility issues, the team has source code access to most games and will be creating custom installers for each title.

Once purchased, a title can be re-downloaded an unlimited number of times, allowing users to install the game on multiple machines.

In addition to retro game downloads, the site will boast a number of community features, including message boards, user reviews and game guides for select titles.

Ohle revealed that LucasArts’ beloved catalog of PC games represents one of the “holy grails” CD Projekt hopes to offer one day. That lineup includes adventure games such as the Monkey Island series, Sam & Max: Freelance Police and Grim Fandango, along with Totally Games’ space combat simulators X-Wing and TIE Fighter.

I’ll buy Sacrifice again any day if I saw widescreen support and revitalised online play for my money.

It’s CD Projekt’s commitment to bringing the games up to modern compatibility standards that shines out here. It can’t be inspiring work, setting up compile environments for and crawling around in the guts of decrepit codebases, most of them unique, and for that I salute them!

Further warming the cockles of my heart are the requests from gamers for CD Projekt to partner with Valve and sell GOG’s games through Steam. But as desirable as that is, it’s stretching the money a little thin. Valve would collect the money and pay CD Projekt a cut, who would pay the game’s publishers a cut, who would finally pay the developers a cut (assuming they’re still around).

With GOG’s prices no higher than $10 that’s hardly worth anyone’s effort, not to mention that fact that it goes a long way to re-introducing the tangle of middle men that bogs retail down. CD Projekt could feasibly have taken the role of a consultancy, collecting a one-off fee and/or modest share of revenues for their compatibility work on each game, but that just hasn’t happened — and fair enough.

If you missed it in the quote above, beta sign-ups are being taken at Good Old Games’ site right now.

Hurrah!

Found via this Steam Forums thread. TSR’s massively-linked post from the time is here.

You’re probably all aware of Valve’s recent “Steam and the PC platform in general” press conference — if not, head over to Rock, Paper, Shotgun for a liveblogged rundown of what happened.

Steamcloud is the headline announcement of course, and very good news it is too. But our old friend John Cook also listed a few other upcoming developments: among them automatic driver updates (once again), “Calendar functions” of some sort, and improvements to the sales process that include displaying prices in the user’s local currency. And these:

Official communities

Any developer, anywhere, will be able to start an official Steam Community, er, community for their game. This is the missing keystone of the Community and something I called for as soon as I realised it wasn’t in.

The game pages will presumably surpass the functionality of today’s Groups, not least in the fact that they will have a group of paid-up developer employees behind them. But will they be used? Developers are notorious (on this site, anyway) for passing over Steam’s benefits. On the one hand creating and maintaining a Steam Community community doesn’t require changes to a game’s code and all of the QA red tape that involves, but on the other, as of yet even Valve haven’t done anything with their network besides create and maintain it.
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