The Steam Review

The interview hints at a matchmaking service (unofficial mock-up shown).

Mod HQ have carried out an interview with Erik Johnson, which reveals another morsel of 3.0 news.

“We’d like to take a look at storing persistent data along with statistical information. It would be cool to know what is the most common class people choose in Day of Defeat for instance.”

This immediately suggests a new feature in Steam 3.0. Long-term readers may remember a series of articles on Steam’s latent potential, including the possibility of a matchmaking service. Giving Valve an overview of each player class’ popularity is all very well, but if any stats system is not also turned to also collecting kills, deaths, captures and other competitive values it will be an enormous waste. From there, generating a rank and comparing it to others’ when looking for a server is not a huge leap. With that said, it’s important to bear in mind while reading this that nothing is confirmed, and that reading from Erik’s quote research into stat gathering hasn’t even begun yet.

That last assertion does seem unlikely however. Ritual Entertainment’s community-based outcome feature for their upcoming SiN Episodes series takes anonymous statistics about player decisions and uses them as ‘votes’ to decide future story twists, character attitudes, and so on, in an overwhelmingly similar manner.

A slightly mixed message overall, but undoubtedly a positive one.

Steam’s new UI has now been out for two weeks, which allows a retrospective edge to this analysis that would have been lost were I able to post it earlier, and happily it is almost entirely positive. Were it not for a crash bug when launching mods from a path with a space, only minor and personal complaints would remain and it would be fair to describe the release as entirely successful.

One area in which the release was entirely successful was the public beta it went through before release. Valve have commented on how helpful they found the process and intend to run another beta for the upcoming SDK update (currently pencilled for next week). Rag Doll Kung Fu has also made use of the feature in the UI’s wake.

Steam’s new UI is a throwback to the program’s beginnings, as this image of version 1.0 shows.

In a general sense, Steam’s new UI leaves the vector-driven 2.0 and takes a step back to the more graphical 1.0. This gives Steam a clunkier feel with far more unused space, which though some will hate on principle isn’t necessarily a bad thing when it comes to widespread perceptions. The main focus of the redesign, though, are these three key ideas that are repeated throughout:

• Reducing the number of separate windows
• Blurring the lines between games and mods
• Giving users greater control over how they organise products

We will look at each area in turn to see how these changes have been applied.

Analysis

The redesigned Browse Games has been merged with Play Games and the main menu.

Nowhere are the three clearer than the main screen. We can see that Browse Games, Play Games, Monitor, elements of the Properties panels and the main menu, and, through the View menu, the systray context menu have all been merged into one frame, using a tab bar to keep the interface uncluttered. My Games, the tab shown to the left, no longer forcibly separates mods and games, conforming to the second point. The default sort on the tab, by status, puts them below full games, but this can be changed to anything you like – a part of the third ‘pillar’, control of organisation, which also extends to choosing columns and collapsing different categories (Games/Tools/Not Installed) in the mini-list. The control isn’t quite complete though: you might be able to sort your lists, even hide them, but there is still no way to completely remove products that you own but aren’t interested in, nor form a truly custom order.
On the developers’ end, gameinfo.txt can now be used to give team names, a homepage, and an icon, each of which are displayed in the list like official titles.

Every game and mod now has its own unique page in the redesigned Store.

Store, the replacement for Browse Games which is designed with standalone browsers in mind as well as the client, also holds to all three pillars. Games are displayed in tables which can be sorted by columns, there is now a search function, and the improved structure has been justified in the short term by merging the previous tabs, individual games and mods, into the one list with only price to tell them apart. The packages on offer have been tweaked too, with not entirely benign results. The new package structure will be covered in an article of its own.

Store is far more flexible than Browse Games, but poorly optimised.

As well as bulking Steam’s offerings up quite nicely for casual users, the longer list reveals the woefully inefficient HTML used to render it. Quite why five lines of code are needed for what should be a simple link and CSS button (or at least image) is a question best left unanswered. Equally mysterious is the odd choice of colour scheme: turquoise and maroon against the UI’s green and black/grey. Feel free to make a comment if you’ve any leads. The last Store oddity is Valve’s continuation of remotely hosting it, when something that is updated so infrequently would clearly be better off stored locally. Only the new search feature can justify its serverside location.

The new Properties dialogue seems to go against some of the UI’s design principles.

As you might expect, not everything has been moved into the main screen. Preparing to Play (now Preparing to Launch) remains for one, with only the subtle change of naming the mod that launches and not its parent game. Properties also remains, though with the somewhat hypocritical change of splitting the settings into three tabs (left) and in dire need of memorising the last used tab. On the other hand it is now partially available for mods, breaking down yet another barrier between them and full games. Bandwidth Monitor, a late addition which now sports a counter to show how much Steam has downloaded, also has a separate window, and there is also, at long last, a UI option to validate a game’s local content.

The About dialogue gives several clues to future features.

The final area of interest is, perhaps unusually, the About dialogue. It gives us two very important hints to some of 3.0’s functionality: firstly that it specifies the Windows client, implying that there will be a Linux version too; and secondly that it mentions the Steam API, information that is only useful for third party developers – as far as Steam in concerned, plug-in writers. It is a theory that fits nicely with the new tabbed interface, and how much room it has for additions.

Conclusion

Did the interface achieve its goals? It has stuck very well to the three keystones I identified at the start of this analysis, but seeing as they were identified by working backwards that means little. Insofar as the usual aspects of usability and efficiency are concerned it has made great strides with minimal error, which is the best conclusion we can reach. Here’s hoping that the remaining bugs will be fixed, and the tantalising clues scattered throughout the redesign turn one day into fully-fledged features!

The Steam Review’s new home is open for business. I’ve tried to keep the theme as close to the old Blogger version as possible, but some things simply can’t be changed without PHP hacking and there are still a few bugs too. Hopefully it is similar enough to keep everyone happy. You’ll also find that the site retains WordPress’ XHTML validity. Many thanks to Andrew Timson for kindly offering hosting space, and answering my pesky and largely obvious questions!

Later today I’ll be posting the long-overdue analysis of Steam’s new UI, once the few remaining loose ends are tied up.

This article has been imported from The Steam Review’s previous host, and has had its original posting date retained.

Steam 3.0’s gradual approach continues, with news of a large visual update covering the Browse Games interface and more at some point before October the 12th. Erik Johnson had this to say on the hlcoders mailing list:

“We’re getting ready to release a fairly significant overhaul of the look and feel of Steam, ahead of the release of Rag Doll Kung Fu. Part of this release is going to give individual games more space for people to see screenshots and information about individual games, including MODs.

Currently if you go to the Third Party Games area of the Steam store you’ll see a listing of the most popular MODs currently being played, along with a text description and a couple of screenshots. You can also get to this web page directly by going here:

http://storefront.steampowered.com/3rdparty.php

What would be really helpful would be for any MOD that is currently listed on this page to put together some of this material and send it on to me. What we need is:

1. A short 50 words or less description of the game.
2. 5 screenshots in .jpg format to include. The width of the screenshots can be no greater that 1024px, but the aspect ratio is up to you.

Once you have these together, .zip up all of the materials and e-mail them to me and we’ll make sure this gets into the update coming up.”

The update is ‘mostly a visual overhaul’ to ‘accommodate the release of more products’ and won’t contain many major code upgrades such as the new version of Friends. It’s not hard to come up with ways of improving the current system, though Valve requesting five images would suggest that each game now has its own unique page.

Don’t think the update is entirely a sideline to 3.0: it ‘falls under the umbrella of some of the next set of things [Valve] are working on for Steam’. Erik continues:

“Along those lines, we’re pretty actively thinking about/working on a distribution system that will work for free content. It’s not far enough along to give out too many details, but it’s something that should be pretty useful for MOD developers.”

This is of slightly more substance. Previously I would have guessed at a new heading in Play Games, ‘Community Games’ or similar, to hold mods distributed using the existing framework. This comment suggests things are going slightly further however, perhaps somewhere near Resource Packs. Alternatively it could be something as mundane as a P2P connection manager to download free content without bothering the main content servers – let’s hope not.

It’s also worth pointing out another feature suggestion that has caught Valve’s eye in the past. Even though there’s been no suggestion of its inclusion beyond ‘we’ll keep it in mind’, Lunchtimemama’s updated Play Games interface may well be introduced in part or in whole with the update.

More news as it arrives. Infodumps are available on the Steam Forums, or through the hlcoders mailing list.

This article has been imported from The Steam Review’s previous host, and has had its original posting date retained.

A post on the halflife2.net forums has revealed some more 3.0 news. It will feature true autoupdates, where the client doesn’t even have to be restarted to receive one (discounting updates to Steam itself, of course). Interestingly enough, this was originally a feature anyway, though I don’t personally recall how well it worked.

It is ‘one of many reasons’ for which 3.0 moves away from the ‘connectionless approach’ 1.0 and 2.0 had – that is, the client doesn’t maintain a constant connection. You can see this yourself: load Steam, run netstat, then wait a short while and run netstat again. Maintaining a persistent session is presumably at least part of the architectural solution to Friends’ instability mentioned in last week’s interview report.

This article has been imported from The Steam Review’s previous host, and has had its original posting date retained.

Friday marked the final day of 1UP’s Valve week, with the feature’s climax being an interview with Gabe Newell. Frustratingly, the Steam segment is split between the two video files.

• Video 1 – Gabe Newell Takes on the Industry
• Video 2 – Gabe Newell on Next-Gen Frustrations

This article will consist of a transcript of the interview followed by an analysis of its implications.

Transcript

Sections unrelated to Steam removed

Changing the Game: Episodic Content via Steam (7:18)

Video 1

There were two big, painful periods for Steam. One was when it went from being optional to be the way that everybody needed to get updates, that was pretty painful for people. And then the Half-Life 2 launch where we got swamped with not having enough capacity. Those are both painful memories for us. At least right now we’re not setting anybody on fire: we seem to be getting updates out on a really regular basis…that process [is] really smooth right now.

Right now we’re rearchitecturing Steam. People are actually running two versions of Steam right now — they might not realise that but they are running Steam 2 and Steam 3 alongside each other. The nice thing about having a system like this is there’s no reason not to have your old system and new system co-exist while you’re migrating functionality from one to the other.

One of the problems we had was architectural problems that made Friends unreliable, and so the new version’s approach to connections and how it manages connections should make Friends a lot more reliable. So just from a technical perspective it’s evolving, and from a not-annoying-the-hell-out-of-our-customers perspective I think we’re out of that hole. It’s certainly turned out to be a great way to sell products: we were worried that people might not want to purchase products that way and now that’s not really a concern of ours.

Video 2

I think what we have to do is continue to look for ways to make Steam more valuable to people, to solve problems for people. There are huge numbers of support problems that we can just make go away by proactively solving them, but [for example] we still aren’t getting display drivers out to people automatically which makes me crazy. One of the biggest problems out customers have is that they don’t have an automatic update facility for display drivers, and it’s been obvious for a couple of years that that needs to happen, yet we still don’t have that.

Steam is the Future: The Next-Gen Headache

(2:03) When I look at what I need to compete with, the most interesting game property right now is World of Warcraft. Huge retail sales and huge recurring revenue, and not only that but they have a great experience wrapped around them, whether it’s their forums or community art or whatever. They’re not only getting their customers to play the game, they’re getting their customers to make the experience more valuable for other people who play the game. So I’ll go off and download music and watch the movies that people have created and see fan art and all these other things: when I look at what a platform needs to help a software developer do right now, it’s figure out how to beat World of Warcraft. And when I look at the strategies that are being put forward by Microsoft on the systems side, the Xbox side, Sony, or Nintendo, they’re not making my life easier.

The Playstation 3 makes my life as a software developer much harder…[parallelism] was not a problem that we were lying awake late at night for, saying ‘oh, we would really like to take this on right now’. We were worried about little things like billing, and forums, and Wikis, things like that…Steam, essentially, was ‘here’s a set of tools that software developers need, focused on solving the problems we have with this next generation of games’. Billing, updates, product support, connecting our customers together, things like that. I would think that for a lot of developers things like Steam are going to be more interesting and will solve more problems for them than this next generation of hardware and operating system platforms.

The [Sega] Saturn came out and that was intended to take this previous generation of games and create this super-complicated chunk of hardware that would help you make the ultimate sprite-orientated game. Then Sony came along and said ‘no no no, it’s not a sprite problem any more, it’s a 3D graphics problem’. I think that a lot of developers are going to say [to the next generation] ‘that’s not the problem, that’s another Sega Saturn’. What we really need are [solutions to] ‘how do we connect to our customers, get updates to our customers, have closer relationships’. ‘How do we compete with the customer experience that you get out of being a WOW customer’ more than ‘how do we blast another set of pixels at what is essentially a 640 by 480 screen’.

Analysis: Steam vs. World of Warcraft

Gabe’s interview gives us the new or newly invigorated Steam strategy: to help developers make games, not game technology. It is a plan is in direct opposition to that of the upcoming consoles. Hardware independent, with little to no additional workload and the opportunity to oust the middlemen, Steam is to become even more the platform developers, not publishers, want in the next generation.

In the most general of terms Valve want to achieve this by ‘making Steam more valuable to people’, and Gabe identifies two key areas where this will be attempted. The first and largest is what he terms the ‘customer experience’ — the parts of the community a player experiences; everything about the game except the game. Steam can’t make your title interesting, but it can emulate the many of the MMORPG characteristics that help make World of Warcraft’s customer experience so compelling without you actually making one.

Half-Life 2: Capture the Flag’s match broadcasts may well be the seeds of a TV-like schedule.

Chief amongst these is communication, both player to player and thanks to the direct and constant link to them player to developer. Friends, when it works, is the clearest example of Steam’s inter-player communication — anyone anywhere anytime, including from single-player games and the desktop — while Valve’s weekly Update News items are examples of player-developer contact and the HL2:CTF matches between Valve and the mod’s developers the first sign of attempts to merge the two. Also attempting to bridge the gap are Ritual, who look set to take a slightly different approach with their community-based outcomes for SiN Episodes, where the in-game decisions a player makes count as a vote towards what will happen in future releases.

The second area is one where Steam has a distinct advantage given its status as a background app as opposed to a self-contained game like WOW. The idea of driver autoupdates hark back to Steam’s inception when it was claimed that both ATi and nVidia were ready to use Steam to deliver their software. The deals fell though (probably due to the atrocious state of the network back then) but now it seems they are back on the agenda. The reasoning behind such a feature is reducing the support burden of people with outdated video card drivers, something Valve do in their own territory with a brief version check before a Source game runs. This proactive approach to troubleshooting is to be expanded to cover Steam itself, with a future feature to diagnose as many identifiable problems as possible, and beyond.

The two big assumptions with this take on the industry are that developers think like Gabe does, and that customers think like Gabe does. The latter isn’t as big an issue as you might expect, with Steam changing market perceptions and introducing a try-before-you-buy model that is available and immediate to every customer. Nobody will browse to the Steam store and pick a game based on its screenshot and blurb like they would at a retailer — they will download the demo first, assuming it exists, and get a taste of the actual game.

Developers, too, are a surprisingly small problem. Those who are or become interested in Steam have already abandoned the system where pretty screenshots alone sell games, and surely in many cases will have abandoned the system where the resources to make those pretty screenshots are available to them. All that’s left to do is make the games.

So we’ve talked about what Valve are doing in the future, but have yet to touch on how. I’ve already made it clear what I think should happen, and if you will excuse my self-indulgence now is the time to look at the evidence and try to predict what will happen. There are many possible moves that are in the spirit of Gabe’s words, but I will keep the list solely to what I can pin on something that has already happened or been announced. Confirmed features will also been omitted.

The Natural Selection and Sven Co-op teams have both been approached by Valve with offers for Steam hosting.

3rd-Party Plug-ins

“I think what we have to do is continue to look for ways to make Steam…solve problems for people.”

Valve can’t solve the problems they don’t know about, but the chances are the people who are having them can. Besides problem solving, allowing plugins increases Steam’s value to plug-in users and generates a whole new community around their development. It is also a natural use for VGUI — if nothing else plug-in support would allow future mods to extend to the desktop, useful for persistent worlds. While plug-ins may create a security risk, it is worth noting that mods are essentially engine plug-ins but pose no such threat to Source. Nevertheless plug-ins would be a large step, one that is unlikely to be taken in one stride.

More mod adoptions and map additions

“They’re not only getting their customers to play the game, they’re getting their customers to make the experience more valuable for other people who play the game.”

Where Blizzard has fan fiction and homemade videos of a character’s epic quest, Valve has mods and maps. Both already fill the brief of increasing value, but only to those who go out and find them. Steam is made for bringing Valve’s content to a gamer’s desktop and according to this new outlook, the community’s content is just as important. The HL2DM map contest shows that Valve are not opposed to the idea of taking on others’ maps, and the Natural Selection and Sven Co-op mod teams are already known to have been approached with offers of adoption.

Official ‘Add-Ons’

Add-On is a new term coined at the release of the Half-Life High Definition pack: optional content that can be enabled and disabled on a whim. The feature is decidedly basic in its current state, and it is more than likely to see improvement in 3.0. Driver autoupdates may well use a version of this feature.

Match broadcasts

The most interesting feature of SourceTV to me is its ability to relay the broadcast to other servers, distributing the load across an unlimited number of machines for a potentially unlimited number of spectators. Add this to a communication tool as powerful as Steam and what else could happen? The first major broadcast has already been announced: the HL2:CTF match linked to earlier. It isn’t a great leap of imagination to see a new page in Browse Games or whatever replaces it covering scheduled matches across the network from week to week.

Conclusion

I hope I’ve provided a fairly accurate and comprehensive dissection of what we can expect from Steam as the industry enters the next generation. Valve clearly see it as much a next-gen platform as the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, but focused on solving the problems of those making the games rather than those promoting them. Whether or not they succeed depends on their understanding of what a community wants and needs — something that Valve do not have a particularly good reputation for. Here’s to that changing.