The Steam Review

RDKF’s pre-release box art for North America features neither Healey’s nor Media Molecule’s names.

Next-Gen.Biz and GamesIndustry.biz report that Mark Healey’s Rag Doll Kung Fu will be available on North American store shelves from August, through “developer-friendly” independent publisher Merscom. The release follows the founding of Healey’s new studio, Media Molecule, but does not currently carry its name.

Although not mentioned in Merscom’s press release, the game will also be distributed in parts of Europe through Frogster Interactive, who already handle Red Orchestra in Austria, Switzerland and Germany. A note on the game’s new German website encourages distributors in other regions to extend the game’s reach further.

The Offer

RDKF is the third independent game to see a retail release following a Steam deal (joining Red Orchestra and SiN Episodes), and to the best of my knowledge the first release at all with Steam as an option during installation and not a requirement. Those without internet connections will be able to access the game at the price of updates, multiplayer and “community support”. A wise move indeed considering the low public awareness of the game.

The retail edition will also include a collection of undisclosed “extras” to “provide even more value for customers”, regardless of their connectivity. Whether they will provide justification for the five dollar price increase is not disclosed, however: the release’s RRP is $19.99, while its current Steam price has remained at $14.95 for the nine months since the game was first released.

The price difference is either a harsh reminder of what retail can do to profit margins, a cynical exploitation of the game’s niche nature, or an indication of just how good the extras will be. We’ll find out which come August.

It seems that Epic weren’t happy with their games going up on Steam after all. The developer has already switched to Midway, and now its back catalogue rights have made the jump too, dashing any hopes for the appearance of Unreal titles on Steam as part of Atari’s GamersFirst budget range.

The range launched on June 1st and was meant to be available through Steam immediately; Epic’s apparent disgruntlement adds a second reason for the delay to its appearance after interface challenges.

The new (and incomplete) design does not yet provide any real insight into its purpose.

We might not be seeing a second Store, but the current one is undergoing an upgrade (thanks Master). Click past the front page of version 3 to see its new design, an incomplete but already stylish grey-tone page with more prominent metadata, a more efficient design, and greatly improved semantics.

Aside from minor new metadata fields and the clear visual upgrade (which moves away from the white background traditional in online stores), the new design does not yet provide clues to any deeper purpose, save perhaps that it may be part of a redesign of the main site, nor hint at Valve’s answer to the management issues posed by the rapidly approaching torrent of back-catalogue Atari titles.

The V3 directory is no longer accessible.

Eurogamer’s excellent interview with Valve yesterday (mild Episode Two spoilers) has thrown up the long-overdue news that Steam is, at last, being used as an automated upload tool for data as diverse as the weapons we use in Episode One to crash reports and, as last week’s update news suggested, the fragmentation of our GCFs.

One thing we’re going to do with Episode One is extending [playtesting] out to all of the people. Rather than having hundreds of playtesters, there are eight million Steam accounts right now, so we’ll have eight million playtesters. [Steam] tells us which weapons they’re using, so we can say “they’re not using this weapon, why not?”, here’s where people are getting stuck “huh, ok, they’re not supposed to be stuck here”. Here’s the stuff they like, here’s the stuff they don’t like.

Rather than having internal guesses as to what’s going on we’re going to really see how customers play, and really see what’s determining performance in customer’s hands, and that’s going to be big stuff for us.

While server stats have been reported for some time, the principle of client feedback, first suggested by Ritual Entertainment for Sin Episodes: Emergence, is relatively new. Ritual made some use use of the idea, but Valve have taken it a step further, and so far with great results.

The community’s reaction may not be so positive, however. Gabe’s claim that he receives a notification on his desktop every time a copy of Episode One crashes somewhere in the world is either reassuring or sinister depending on your viewpoint, and one noticeable absence from Valve’s implementation is any notification of its existence, let alone a mechanism with which to opt out of it.

But as the general lack of player uproar over Blizzard’s ‘Warden’ anti-cheat tool shows, gamers are accepting of a certain level of ‘intrusion’ if its benefits are clear. With results as visible as defrag tools and data as generic as crash dumps, I would wager that Valve are on safe ground.

Reports of a new storefront for Steam and the hosting of images from three Activision-published games on it (thanks Jobye and hahnchen) have been debunked by Valve as configuration slip-ups relating to run-of-the-mill development.

“We’ve been testing a lot of different games as we iterate on the Steam filesystem,” said Steam developer John Cook, “but that doesn’t mean any of them will be for sale”. The new Store sub-domain, storefront-dist, was explained to be the result of recent load balancing upgrades.

Valve’s use of third party games echoes DiStream’s use of demos to test the Triton filesystem, to the extent that Valve are likely responding to their technological advances.

However, the news leaves an important question hanging again. With Atari’s announcement last month that their GamersFirst budget range would be distributed through Steam, the risk arose of their sizable back catalogue swamping the indie offerings in the Store today, threatening a return to the shelf-space issues of the past and the loss of one of digital distribution’s most important benefits. The new server could well have become a ‘warehouse’ of sorts for such mass-distribution deals, keeping Steam’s indie offerings on even footing, but it now seems that this is not the case.

Unfortunately, while what will be done to avoid the situation is an “excellent question”, Valve are not inclined to give us their excellent answer just yet!

Ubisoft‘s first-person fantasy combat title Dark Messiah of Might & Magic has had its Steam distribution all but confirmed, with registration for its upcoming public beta requiring an account.

Dark Messiah is Ubisoft’s first experiment with the purchased Might and Magic franchise. [Full Image]

Powered by Source, speculation over whether Ubisoft would release Dark Messiah through Steam had been quashed for most of the game’s development cycle by the company-wide use of the StarForce copy protection system. While there are no known incompatibilities between Steam and StarForce protection (mainly because nobody has ever tried combining the two), distributing a copy of the game that did not require a CD for StarForce to validate would make its tight and largely unbroken security useless, with Steam’s current DRM scheme offering little protection for single-player games from anything but casual piracy.

However, with Ubisoft’s decision to cease protecting their games with StarForce Steam is an attractive option again, and it seems highly likely that Ubisoft have decided to seize upon it.

Will this develop into a wider relationship between Ubi and Valve, following on from Atari? The publisher already makes good use of other distribution services, primarily Direct2Drive, so it may well turn out that way.