I don’t normally post straight news, but this deserves reporting. Via Rock, Paper, Shotgun:
- Jim Rossignol [RPS]: What do you think about Steamworks?
- Steve Gaffney [Splash Damage]: It’s great. We need someone to look after the PC platform, and only Valve are really in a position to do that. There’s no downside to it.
- Paul Wedgwood [SD]: And there’s a big upside for Valve – to control the PC platform via more Steam subs. But that is a positive thing for other developers.
- Jon Hicks [Official Xbox Magazine]: You’re not worried that Valve could turn around and start holding the platform to ransom?
- Gaffney: Perhaps, but Steam is like a third platform now. It’s that big. There’s the 360, the PS3 and Steam…do you not think?
- Tim Edwards [PC Gamer UK]: I completely agree, I’ve just never heard anyone say it out loud. Every gamer I know has a Steam account, and uses it regularly.
That makes Splash Damage’s next game a Steamworks title in my book! There are some vague details about what we can expect from it in the full interview.
Needless to say, I also agree with Gaffney and the other Edwards that Steam is the PC platform now — it would be madness for a developer to forgo Steamworks, even if they were to employ only its simple distribution and update functions.
(The updated Quake Wars demo Wedgwood talks about was released on Steam unannounced. Oops…)
Steamworks is a very large and profound change for the PC industry. Unfortunately Valve don’t appear interested in talking to me any more, so there is little I can do for the conversation surrounding it but add unanswered questions. Which I would rather not.
I will instead leave you with Andy Simpson’s guest opinion piece from last year, for reasons which should become clear as you read it, and Rock, Paper, Shotgun’s interview, which does an excellent job of demystifying a press release that left a lot of its readers in the dark.
I’m sorry about this.
I started writing about Steam because the changes it was creating weren’t properly understood by the gaming public. As it became more and more important there was more and more to talk about, and what began as a collection of guides and explainers I could paste into threads on the Steam Forums turned into a surprisingly popular, well-read and on rare occasions very important ‘news’ site.
But as anyone who’s been following my updates for long enough knows, these are lean times. Even the Steam Community has provided remarkably little to talk about: like Steam today in general, it’s there and it works, but nothing of particular interest is happening with it.
It’s clear to me that Steam’s development has plateaued, at least for now. I don’t intend to shut the site down (hopefully that will never happen), but with the articles I have notes for today either entirely speculative or concerning another distribution service there seems little point in continuing to try to produce them. Nor in working myself up over whispers and rumours that turn out to be nothing.
Consider The Steam Review, then, in official hibernation until something comes along so big that it convinces me to pick it up again. Which having made this post will probably be some time next week…
Murphy’s Law strikes again! Eve Online is an addition I’ve coveted for a very long time, and I’m trying to arrange an interview about its future relationship with Steam right now.
If there is one thing about the sale of video games that digital distribution hasn’t fixed, it’s the final action of making each purchase. You either pay or you don’t, subscriptions aside, and the binary nature of that choice has a large role to play in the industry’s unhealthy appetite of review scores and constant defecation of sequels.
“Rent-to-Own will be massive”
Reviews, demos and cheaper games all help, yet every one of us will have a story to tell of the time when one or more of them failed us. While other luxury goods are sold in part instalments to resolve these issues, games have always been seen as too cheap to buy and too easy to duplicate to be worth the same treatment.
As I’ve been discovering, A World of My Own’s genius is its realisation that in the age of digital distribution those roadbumps no longer exist. Enter: Rent-to-Own.
Buying with confidence
“Rent-to-Own will be massive as soon as people understand just what it offers them the opportunity to do,” says Game Domain International’s Rob Donald during our interview. “Any registered user can play a game by paying by the hour, at a rate determined by dividing the full price on AWOMO by the maximum rental period (currently five hours). If the user plays the game for five hours then they will have paid the full cost of the game and won’t be charged any more for playing it. They will own it.”
Add to this scheme Free Time, which provides free access to full versions of games in the programme (Donald assures me these will include recent releases) until the clock ticks down, and it becomes clear that buying from AWOMO is not the moment in time we are used to but an ongoing event. We might start with the demo, move on to Free Time if we like it, initialise Rent-to-Own when we’re more confident, and if we’re still enjoying ourselves later in the day own the game forever and be automatically topped up with Free Time again. Change your mind half-way in? Just step away.
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Gloucester student Robin North asked if I could link you all to his academic survey on Steam’s user base. To wit:
I am currently in the process of researching and writing my university dissertation on the subject of Valve Software’s Steam digital game content distribution system and the impact it has had on the games industry, and the way in which it may potentially shape the future of the industry. As part of my research, I am trying to find out some information about the current usage of various features of Steam and how they are rated (or not) by Steam’s user base — that means you!
I would greatly appreciate it if you could take 10-15 minutes to fill out this questionnaire to aid me with my research. It’s nice and easy — 95% of it is multiple choice — so all you have to do is read each question carefully and choose the answer or answers that you feel is/are most appropriate.
Take the survey here. The survey has been closed.
The Valve Hardware survey was reset for the seventh time yesterday. This time archives of all the previous surveys have also been made available, going right the way back to March 2004!
I’ll leave any comparisons to statisticians. What drew my eye more was the “Installed Packages” result that is now tagged onto the end of Survey seven’s results. It reports that Firefox is installed on my system — why I don’t know but, having recently started browsing the Steam Community with Firefox instead of solely with Steam’s embedded IE control, can take a hopeful guess at. Pretty please…
Has anyone seen any other packages appear in their results?
