The Steam Review

Last December Rag Doll Kung Fu developer Mark Healey announced that he had left Lionhead. On Friday his new studio was named, and it appears that Media Molecule has chosen the ‘old media’ path. The team of ten at the company—Healey, Alex Evans, David Smith and an unnamed collection of others—are currently three months into development of a “next generation” game, and working towards a demo to “secure a good publishing deal”.

Rag Doll Kung Fu earned plenty of attention and many positive reviews.

Going for a publishing deal first is an unusual choice given the success of Rag Doll Kung Fu on Steam. Developing a next-gen game is also an unusual choice given RDKF’s indie nature, and it is likely that the two are linked somehow. But why has Healey chosen them in the first place, and for his studio’s first game to boot?

The strong retail deals negotiated by Tripwire Interactive and Ritual Entertainment followed on directly from the publicity and stability gained from the Steam distribution of their games. It seems like madness to step back into the gauntlet of courting publishers from the start of development, and although we know next to nothing about Media Molecule’s game it is difficult to imagine an situation that would force Healey’s hand in such a direction. I can only hope that the message given by the press release is misleading.

Struggling publisher Atari’s new GamersFirst initiative seems set to push either a portion or all of their extensive PC back catalogue onto Steam and Direct2Drive as part of a new budget range (thanks Andy T).

Fahrenheit is a confirmed title…

GamersFirst will begin on June 1st at participating retailers and will include a new price point of $19.99 on all existing console titles…[and] all existing Windows titles (excluding the recently launched Dungeons & Dragons Online). Additionally, all Windows titles included in the program will be available for immediate download at Valve and Direct2Drive, also for $19.99.

Atari’s entire back catalogue going online seems unlikely, not only due to the storage requirements on Content Servers, which would surely stretch into the hundreds of gigabytes on each, but due to the varying license agreements with different developers. It is unlikely (but not impossible) that Epic would be happy with Unreal Tournament 2004 being sold through Steam, for example.

Gamasutra seem to have a proper list of titles, and mention Fahrenheit (Indigo Prophecy), Marc Ecko’s Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure and Dragonball Z: Budokai Tenkaichi among others. I have requested a list from Atari and will post as much as I can when and if it arrives.

While storage and bandwidth might prove a headache for Valve, recent Steam technology will keep the workload down for Atari and their developers – crucial if a large number of games are to go online. It’s certain that the Steam Virtual Drive will be used to manage each game’s GCF and extracted content, and it is probably possible to feed Steam-generated CD Keys to multiplayer games, keeping their connectivity without requiring Steam integration. Needless to say though, games using this non-intrusive process won’t be protected by VAC. Neither will they stream, but we’re used to that by now.

Wasted opportunities?

…but UT2004 is not.

In some ways, it is a shame to see Steam used as a simple download service (assuming of course that Atari don’t pull something wonderful from their hat). What sets Steam apart from Direct2Drive, GameTap and other such services is its residency and emphasis on communication between developers and their players, and players between themselves. Friends, the desktop server browser, VAC, content streaming, Update News and auto-patching are rarely used by developers other than Valve, and the new functionality of Steam 3.0 hasn’t even entered the equation yet.

This is not to lay the blame at the developers’ doorstep: of the third-party games on Steam today, most are largely or purely single-player, and only Red Orchestra and SiN Episodes were developed with Steam in mind. We also have Valve’s acceptance of back catalogues. None of these are ‘bad’ per se, but still, we have to wonder when third-party developers (those developing for Steam from the start, at least) will begin to make full use of the platform’s potential.

Trokia’s Source-powered Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines turned out to be the company’s last game before their financial ruin and closure. The closure might have been the end of Troika, but it certainly wasn’t the end of the company’s experimental, screw-the-workload style.

Michael McCarthy, former lead artist (and a bit more) at Troika, has since founded his own company, Laid Back Gaming, and is now busy developing a currently unnamed turn-based Action RPG in the style of X-Com. Like Bloodlines, the game will be built on Source – but unlike Bloodlines, it will be distributed on Steam too. McCarthy spoke to RPG Codex about the game (thanks SomeCrazyIdiot), and more importantly for us why he chose Steam.

I have chosen Steam because if you buy Valve’s engine to make your game with, you get to keep 100% of what you sell on Steam. That’s right 100%. So using our math from above, if I can sell the game on Steam for 30 bucks and cost 6 million to make, I’ll be seeing a check after the game sells 200k units instead of 2 million. AND the check I get for the units I sell will be 10 times more than it would be from a publisher AND after all this wonderfulness, you guys all get the game for 30 bucks instead of 50.

Bloodlines was Troika’s last game, but Source’s first third-party release.

That there is some form of incentive for developers to distribute their licensed Source projects on Steam, and/or to develop their Steam-distributed games on Source, was a known fact. That it is a 100% profit margin on sales most certainly wasn’t. For the engine license at a rumoured price of $200,000, plus however much a Steam license stands for, the only thing eating at your profits are government taxes. That’s quite something.

You may also find the interviewer’s closing list of Steam “horror stories” worth a grin. What could ever have caused this strange pattern of posts from 2003? And what is behind these busy discussion threads in which everyone derides the original “steam sux” poster? Clearly, your guess is as good as mine.

Lastly, it was not long ago that I asked how many other developers could have been saved had they chosen digital distribution. It seem that we have our first name:

If Troika was able to sell the games they made through Steam and sold only a 1/4 of the units they did, they’d be thriving today and everyone would have really cool RPGs to play. The more people who download, install, and actively use Steam the better. It’s really small developers’ only hope to get their games out to people.

Uh, oops. I’ve corrected the studio’s name.

Earlier today I was asked by DiStream to remove the list of Triton games in this post, as some of them were demos of games which weren’t set for distribution. By way of making up, they’ve got back with an official list of games both on and soon to be on their system.

• Age of Sail 2: Privateer’s Bounty
• Age of Wonders 2: The Wizard’s Throne
• Air Raid: This is No Drill!
• Alien Blast
• Avalon
• Chariots of War
• Clans
• Clusterball
• Cops 2170
• Cuban Missile Crisis
• Diggles
• Disciples 2: Dark Prophecy
• Gates of Troy
• Gun Metal
• Hover Ace
• I of the Dragon
• Jagged Alliance: Deadly Games
• Jagged Alliance 2
• Jagged Alliance 2 Gold
• Legion Gold

• Man of War
• Man of War 2
• Necromania
• Nexagon
• O.R.B
• Patrician 2
• Red Shark
• Road Rush
• Rune
• Robin Hood
• Shadow Vault
• Space Empires 4
• Starfury
• Strike Fighters
• Stronghold
• Stronghold: Crusader
• Tropico Mucho Macho Edition
• Tropico 2: Pirate Cove
• Submarine Titans
• Uplink

Phew – and judging from the absence of Prey, that isn’t even a complete list!

Particularly interesting is the presence of Space Empires 4, a game already on Steam, albeit in its deluxe iteration, and Uplink, Introversion Software’s first game (their second being Darwinia). There are also numerous Strategy First-published games.

Are Valve regretting lax licensing terms right now? It depends on their attitude; I would say not.

A Steam platform update has been released enabling the downloading of videos, adding a new error-handling system, making various other tweaks, and introducing a range of glitches.

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I’m taking a slight diversion from TSR’s usual purpose today, but for a very good reason. Yesterday, Blue Security saw an orchestrated attack on their web servers and an attempted con on their user base attempting to coerce subscribers into ceasing their use of the Blue Frog service. Why? Because as the first pro-active anti-spam tool, Blue Frog is working – and the spammers behind the attack don’t like it one bit.

Real Tech News has the story:

In what appears to be a last-ditch attempt at scaring subscribers to Blue Security’s “Do Not Intrude” registry, one very prominent spammer has started to resort to scare-tactics targeted toward members of the Blue Security community. I received one of these emails today, and while it sounds forboding it is, as one Blue Security community member said, “like a sheep in wolf’s clothing”.

Blue Frog is an anti-spam tool that actually fights back at the spammers, rather than filtering their messages and pretending they do not exist. The response begins with unsubscribe requests and, if the spammers ignore them for long enough, ends with a DDOS attack on their domain(s), keeping them unavailable and worse than useless. A Small tray application run by Blue Frog users provides the bandwidth required. Thus, the more popular the service, the more effective it becomes.

Legal? No, not strictly, assuming things progress as far as disabling domains. Effective? Yes, very much so, as yesterday’s events amply demonstrate.

Today is Israel’s Independence Day. It’s a public holiday in Israel, but all of us in Blue Security are working. But we are glad we’re working. We’re helping the community fight the Blue Independence War. We fight for our freedom from spammers and cyber criminals. This is our big chance to reclaim the Internet. We must not let it slip from our hands.

The con is conclusive proof that, at last, the tide has turned and the war against spam is being won. Blue Frog hurting the spammers, and their hollow attempts to scare people off are an excellent endorsement of the service (which, incidentally, is free). New users will be able to sign up at www.bluesecurity.com when it has fully recovered from a DDOS attack of its own. The service itself is running normally for existing users.

Needless to say, I encourage everyone reading or merely passing by to bookmark the site and start running the Frog and reporting spam as soon as they can. Both Firefox (supporting GMail, Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail) and Thunderbird extensions are available; other browsers/webmail services and programs require the manual forwarding of e-mail to Blue Security’s servers, but will still work. The client is available at this address.

Blue is back online, and unsuprisingly the spam has stopped.