Comment and discussion on Valve Software’s digital communications platform.
DiStream have requested that the games mentioned in this post be removed, as some or all of the titles from it are demos from providers which do not actually have a relation to the Triton. Seeing as that’s all the post was about, I’ve just binned the whole thing. Some Comments have been deleted/edited too. Sorry!
Frozenbyte‘s old-school top-down shooter Shadowgrounds has been added to the Steam roster with an early May
, $25 release planned.
“Making Shadowgrounds available to Steam’s eight million gamers is a great opportunity to get the game out to a wider market,” said Steven Milburn, Director of Marketing at Meridian4. “Shadowgrounds’ high-octane, addictive gameplay will be a good match with Steam’s audience.”
“Steam is the best online distribution channel, end of story. They are really pushing the online distribution model and I am glad Shadowgrounds is part of that,” said Frozenbyte CEO, Lauri Hyvarinen.
Two things jump out from this piece of news: firstly, that Valve’s figure of active Steam users has increased to the tune of two million, and secondly, that Valve have elected to distribute a game so similar to Black Cat Games‘ Alien Swarm: Infested, one of the first games developed outside Valve to be announced for Steam.
Not only that, but the two are the only remotely mainstream top-down shooters I can find in today’s market, competing, unlike Day of Defeat: Source and Red Orchestra: Ostfront, for almost identical audiences. Indeed the only core difference I can find between them is Shadowgrounds‘ focus on single-player compared with Alien Swarm‘s on multi-player.
Frozenbyte released a 395MB Shadowgrounds demo in February which can be downloaded from the official website through Steam. Having stumbled across it before I don’t think it’s unfair to recommend a look; it provides honest entertainment for the duration of the demo areas at the very least.
Attentive reader Sarkie has spotted the new brand name and website for DiStream‘s Steam competitor, formerly known as Game xStream, in the newly released Prey Super Trailer.
The trailer ends with an advert for downloading the game through Triton, and provides a link to www.playtriton.com, an address registered to DiStream, with whom Prey producers 3D Realms and developers Human Head last year signed a distribution contract, and clearly a part of Game xStream’s pre-launch re-branding.
The site currently consists of a Coming Soon
message and a flash video player of the logos of four games, providing our first hint of Triton‘s launch titles:
While the list covers a wide range of titles, the fact that DiStream are advertising their service with such low-key (save Prey) games does not bode well. It gets worse: Air Raid‘s Metacritic score is 39, Armies of Exigo‘s is a slightly more respectable 69, and Battle of Europe isn’t even listed (Prey is currently unreleased). In the fact the sole consolation that can be taken away from the scores is that the games’ respective pannings have not been unanimous.
Prey now has to not only compete with Half-Life 2 as the face that launches a new digital distribution platform, but also take up the slack of an otherwise mediocre launch line-up, discounting any aces up DiStream’s collective sleeve that they are not yet playing.
While derision will likely be the general reaction to this news, it is important to remember that fair competition is always beneficial. It drives customer service, lowers prices, improves products and creates a better market for everyone. If xStream can’t deliver, Steam will retain its quasi-monopoly over heavy-duty, connected digital distribution for some time to come.
Three new games have appeared on the Triton website:
These new figures add one new Made By Kiddies title alongside Air Raid: This Is No Drill!, and two new Strategy First titles. Perhaps SF have a deal after all?
Since this post, the Steam virtual drive has been dropped and loading times are no longer abnormal.
The long load times that currently plague large numbers of Red Orchestra: Ostfront 41-45 users have been traced back to Steam and its new ‘virtual drive’ system, used by Ostfront to access its GCFs.
testbedfor new Steam technologies.
In a post on the official Ostfront forums, users experimented with extracting the contents of the game’s two GCFs and found that standalone versions, which can join local games when steam.dll is copied to the /system folder, saw load times three times shorter than the unextracted version of the game run through the Steam interface.
The Steam Virtual Drive was introduced with the release of Ostfront, currently the only game using it, to allow use of the GCF filesystem without developer input. Whereas the standard implementation involves replacing file calls in a game’s source code with Steam versions, the virtual filesystem allows the game to see its GCF as a collection of loose files on the disk
. Why developers Tripwire Interactive decided to use a new and untested system when the established one was readily accessible, especially when VAC integration shows they were prepared to implement other Steam features, was revealed by Tripwire rep Yoshiro, who described Red Orchestra as a testbed
for Steam technology during an impromptu IRC session last week.
When Tripwire staff replied to the thread, they defended their decision to distribute through Steam but did not mention loading times or their cause, suggesting that the users’ findings are accurate.
Let me say this right now – there would be NO Red Orchestra: Ostfront if it weren’t for Valve/Steam, period. Tripwire as a company exhausted all our possibilities for standard distribution initially. We were about to go out of business and just become a footnote in modding history – The team that won an engine license but faded away before they ever got a chance to do anything with it. With Valve/Steam we were able to get the game into gamers’ hands, attract the attention of a standard retail publisher, and become a sustainable game studio.
I’ll be the first to admit there has been some unexpected bumps while Steam expands to handle other 3rd party software just like there were some initial issues with Steam back when they first introduced it for their own games. The truth is though, the majority of the tens of thousands of people playing RO have a pretty smooth time with Steam. And for the people that do have issues, those issues are getting sorted out rapidly, just like the AOL issues, “connection failed” issues, ZoneAlarm issues, etc.
Tripwire’s ‘exhaustion’ of distribution options before talking to Valve echoes both Garry Newman’s situation, where Steam distribution gave the stalled development of Garry’s Mod a new drive, and Introversion Software’s near-bankruptcy before negotiating a Steam deal for Darwinia. How many other games and developers could be saved through digital distribution?
Having defragmented my hard drive, RO load times have now returned to normal on my computer.
Garry’s Mod, the Source-powered physics sandbox famed across the games industry, is to be sold over Steam for $10 US (convert), with profits split 50/50 between Garry and his team of contributors and Valve. What is currently known as version 9.1 will lose its number and become the initial paid release, while the current version (9.04) will remain as a free demo. All updates will be free. The sanctioned selling of full, third-party mods is new territory for the games industry, and with no sign of Black Cat’s Alien Swarm: Infested it seems that Garry’s Mod will be the first to cross the line.
The practice has both its advantages and drawbacks, and I spoke to Garry to see where GMod falls among them.
I’d just like to draw your attention to the site’s new theme, Skinny. Both Skinny and the new metadata layout (including the straplines) come after some well-deserved constructive criticism from a magazine industry veteran.
If you found yourself getting lost among the site’s long lines of text before, or found the bright white page background a little too much, select Skinny from the Options section of the sidebar (or click here). Click ‘Slim’ to revert to the default theme if you prefer it.
Skinny is now the default theme for new visitors.
