The Steam Review

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.

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.

Valve want to find out how many Steam users have Firefox installed.

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?

Valve have begun to use region restriction as a front-line selling point for Steam. From their latest press release:

Speedball 2 Tournament will be available via Steam at the end of November 2007 and in stores this fall. The retail disc will use the same authentication technology used for Valve’s The Orange Box. Valve’s authentication technology enables Frogster [Interactive, Speedball 2's publishers] to use a single master for multiple languages, to time retail activation worldwide by region, and to control grey marketing and unauthorized activations.

The release is also the first time Valve have explicitly promoted Steam to publishers. This wasn’t done for the big fish like Activision or Take2, so it’s reasonable to conclude that they’re looking to attract smaller outfits now. It would certainly be a sensible move: exclusivity deals like this one are good business that larger companies would never agree to.

The press release also talks about the tournaments, leagues, clans, global leaderboards and matchmaking that are major features for Speedball 2. Hopefully these will be compatible with the Steam Community, but the release doesn’t go out of its way to suggest they will and with less than a month to go until release things don’t look too hopeful. Still, we may be surprised.

It’s really quite good…if you can play it.

Last Friday, Valve began preventing retail copies of their Source (i.e. post-2004) games bought in Thailand and Russia from being played outside their country of origin. The internet has exploded the story in the way only the internet can, and it’s high time for some rationality.

Who, and why?

It’s been pointed out that Valve are being undercut by themselves by this, which is an incredibly obvious thing for me to have missed and puts the ball firmly back in their court. Read the following two paragraphs with this in mind, but also consider that any decision by Valve (or agreed by them) could have been implemented from the moment Steam left beta and earned them a lot more coin.

It’s clear after a few moments’ thought that region locking is not Valve’s interest: Steam sells over the internet, making the reasoning behind and benefits of it utterly irrelevant. Though they may have been stolen, the CD keys were not pirated — they were all accepted by Steam — and were purchased at wholesale from Valve/EA at their asking price at some point.

The people who care about region of sale are retailers and local publishers. They reduce prices in regions with large piracy problems to see more net profit, and not unreasonably want to keep those low-priced SKUs out of regions where prices are normal. It seems clear to me that they have, again, not unreasonably, turned to Steam to enforce this.

What does stink about this whole thing is that it’s been done retrospectively. People who have been happily playing their HL2-era Valve games for up to three years are now locked out, unless they want to play Russian roulette with their account and authenticate over a proxy server (please, don’t try this!). It would have been fairer on consumers by far to stop at rejecting the activation and use of new keys, and I’d very much like to know who was pushing beyond that.

If you have been affected by the new restrictions, your best course of action is to contact Steam support and have them remove the game from your account. You will then be able to buy a normal, unlocked version, and be free to sell your hard copy on…preferably to someone in the country you got it from!

Thanks to Cam, who sent me a well-researched e-mail about this and offered to write an article on it. I’m not that much bothered about what retailers or publishers decide — but I’d love to find more of those sort of mails in my inbox each morning!