The Steam Review

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!

Update: the soundtrack has appeared on Amazon and at Valve’s Store, but there is no sign of it on Steam yet.

Steam is to begin selling music “in the coming weeks”, starting with the OST from Valve’s Orange Box.

So far the success of “Still Alive” can be measured only in indirect ways like word of mouth or the 149 comments on Coulton’s blog post about the song. Valve marketing director Doug Lombardi told me that the song will be released early this week on Valve’s Steam download service as well as through the iTunes alternative TuneCore. It will also be included on “The Orange Box” soundtrack which Lombardi said will be sold on Steam “in the coming weeks.”

I don’t think it’s likely that Steam is going to become a full fledged music store any time soon, and the songs on offer are unlikely to ever extend beyond soundtracks. But even within a targeted remit like that, how much commercial demand can there be? If you own a game you already have access to all of its songs (even if they take a bit of getting at), and, with the possible exception of Still Alive, there isn’t much music from games that would interest anyone who’s never played the title it came from.

It could be that enabling purchases was so easy that Valve decided to go ahead and do it anyway — or it could be that they intend to charge people again to download music that they already own. After the non-arrival of the Black Box package on Steam, I’m not as inclined to dismiss the latter as I once was…

Domain lookups show that Valve registered steammovies.com last May (thanks Michael). A whole domain for movies suggests very strongly that they intend to make a big thing out of the upcoming network.

Official trailers are a given and looking at the client’s hidden P2P controls community content is almost certain, but it’s Gametap-style programming that would really mark Steam Movies out — and play a part in Gabe Newell’s “comprehensive entertainment experience” strategy.

There is also a potential for direct commercialisation, that is to say purchasable media, though as was discussed when Steam first began delivering movies such a scheme would involve either a new DRM system from Valve or an improbable integration with Microsoft’s WMDRM tech.