The Steam Review

You may by now have heard that “Steam” was broken into a week and a half ago and “consumer” credit card details stolen. As the quote marks suggest the breach has been played up by those behind it, whose exaggerations have been somewhat naively passed on by a number of big sites today. In actuality:

• Steam was not compromised, only a regular Valve file server. In fact according to Valve it was a “third-party site” — though what sort of third party stores the sum in their corporate account I don’t know.
• Consumer credit card information has not been stolen. The numbers in danger are all held by cybercafe owners, who have recurring subscriptions to their Steam games and have probably all long been informed (or not?). Consumer data are only stored in enough detail to fight mass fraud, not make purchases, and weren’t compromised anyway. Paying at a cafe does not put your card at risk.

All this will certainly make sure that when consumer subscriptions do arrive (as they will with Pirates of the Burning Sea) they’ll be properly secured, but given that it isn’t really a Steam issue there’s not much more for me to talk about. If you see anyone worrying, send them here!

Update: Valve’s statement, from 1UP:

There has been no security breach of Steam. The alleged hacker gained access to a third-party site that Valve uses to manage the commercial partners in its Cyber Café program. This Cyber Café billing system is not connected to Steam. We are working with law enforcement agencies on this matter, and encourage anyone with more information to e-mail us at catch_a_thief@valvesoftware.com.

Previews of Team Fortress 2 and Left 4 Dead reveal that Steam’s in-development matchmaking service will include persistent “achievements” in the vein of Xbox Live and Games For Windows Live, along with the new concepts of lower-order “awards” and troll-shaming “demerits”. Valve don’t have a collective name yet, so I’m calling them badges.

Left 4 Dead will punish disruptive players.

Left 4 Dead 411‘s excellent preview dedicates an entire page to the new system, explaining how it works to provide both real-time feedback and scoreboard summaries. As can be expected, the game’s badges encourage co-operation between Survivor players:

There are three kinds of awards: Achievements, which include difficult goals like surviving a map without dying; Awards, which are good things you do, such as reviving a teammate, giving away a health kit to someone in need, and saving someone from a zombie about to attack them from behind; and Demerits/Faults, which are bad things which include blowing up a Boomer near teammates, friendly fire, angering the Witch, and jumping in front of someone else’s bullets (reckless). There are a ton of these achievements, ranging from being an Expert Headhunter to completing an entire campaign without using the flashlight at all.

From what we hear in IGN’s Team Fortress 2 interview however, its badges are more personal. This may be because we haven’t heard about the teamplay ones, or perhaps because it’s harder for a computer to accurately detect its particular brand of teamwork. Either way, personal bests will pay a prominent part:

We do a huge amount of stat gathering, like the thing [IGN] saw with the persistent stats stuff, where the game is identifying how well you’re doing and rewarding you for it saying “hey check it out! On that run where you thought you did well, guess what? You did well, you broke this record!” So we gather all that data and use it for game tuning. Steam does that for us for free.

The Achievement game

Badges clearly owe much to Xbox Live’s Achievements, Games For Windows Live will be a competitor to Steam’s online gaming service mechanisms, and (if you read the previews in full) Valve are making a concerted push to build more accessible online games. These are not unrelated facts.

Microsoft’s web services are very well established and easy to use.

Live is a success for many reasons, and Achievements are a large one. It’s fun to play games on the Xbox 360, but each purchase, at retail or from Live Arcade, is a macro-transaction (to mangle a phrase) in the social, gotta-earn-them-all Achievement meta-game. It’s Microsoft brand social glue, working in a similar way to MySpace and other such sites: you do something, then talk about it among your friends, by way if you so desire of your summarised Gamercard. The easter egg nature of many Achievements makes finding your trophies all the more fun, and the expansion of gold farmers into Gamerscore padding should give some indication of how much store people place in their record.

I’ve had a hunch that Valve would be gearing Steam up to better compete with GFWL for some time now. Badges aren’t conclusive evidence that Steam is being repositioned, but it’s fair to say that it would be a waste for them to be used strictly for ranking players and votekicking. The biggest challenge is redistributing the data widely and in a way understandable to the average user; and to compound things, Microsoft have set the bar very high.

No matter how much talent is thrown at them however (Valve have been and are still hiring web application developers and user experience designers), badges are facing the fact that the potential for their social use is limited by Steam’s paucity of the core games that would be needed to keep them fresh and relevant.

Dapper is a web service that tries to build RSS feeds from any web page you throw at it. It’s still in its infancy and disconcertingly buggy (character encoding and analysis of the class property are missing for a start), but I’ve managed to put it to use all the same. If you’ve ever been annoyed that the official Steam feed doesn’t reliably list new releases, New on Steam should sort you out. 🙂

There are lots of advanced usage options for anyone who needs something besides a feed, including iCal output. Pretty cool stuff.

There is now an official feed for new games.

As a co-op game, L4D is particularly vulnerable to disruptive players.

It’s come, it’s gone, it’s come back again. Eurogamer have now confirmed that a “bespoke matchmaking system” is in development for Turtle Rock’s Summer 2007 Left 4 Dead.

As a four-player co-operative game, L4D clearly needs to regulate the people playing with each other in the public server space. With the increased intimacy from your team-mates being close by at all times there is very little room for poor players — in both senses of the word.

Although perhaps at first only Left 4 Dead and RACE (which we can say with reasonable confidence was planned to ship with a version) will make use of the system, other games are sure to benefit; Arkane’s enigmatic The Crossing is bound to have an unusual use for it in particular.

Strings for two new system requirements were added to steamui_english.txt in Monday’s platform update. One warns that unspecified games will “within the next few months” no longer be able to run on CPUs without SSE (presumably relating to Source’s multithreading), and the other regards Steam itself:

Support for Steam on Windows 98 and Windows ME operating systems will end on June 30th 2007. This means you will no longer be able to run Steam.

In order to continue running Steam on this computer, you must upgrade to a newer version of Microsoft Windows.

An automatic update increasing the requirements of a game (let alone the platform itself!) was one of the first fears to develop when Steam was released to the public. While it’s true that according to the Valve Hardware Survey only 1 631 or 0.14% of all Steam users still have Windows 98 (Windows ME isn’t listed), those one thousand and six hundred people, a few of whom are complaining on the forums, will shortly have their currently perfectly functional software rendered useless unless and until they upgrade their systems.

Single-player gamers with pre-Steam boxes will be able to continue running their Half-Life 1-era titles, albeit with very outdated builds, or try to remember never to start Steam while online. Online players and everyone who bought the game in stores after its Steam re-launch, or on Steam itself, will have no realistic choice but to buy a new operating system.

While a more significant 11 876 or 1.03% users don’t have SSE, it isn’t unreasonable to assume that most of them will be playing Half-Life 1-based games on very old systems — SSE being a standard feature in all even vaguely modern processors.

Of wider interest is what could be happening on 30 June to actively exclude older operating systems. Vista support comes to mind: Microsoft’s recent code libraries have many features unsupported by pre-NT versions of Windows. A new authentication system is another possibility, although relying on OS components would almost certainly break Steam’s long-maintained — and in this age of rootkits and hardware layers thoroughly commendable — OS-independence.

The Game Developers Conference is Steam’s E3 (or Leipzig if you want to be picky) and as usual there are several sessions relating to it scheduled, this year predominantly in the wider context of the indie-to-AAA development path discussed a few days ago.

Console/PC Distribution Gatekeepers

Jason Holtman, Valve / Steam (and others)

This vital panel talks to the employees who evaluate submissions for some of the major indie game distribution channels on both console and PC, talking about how to pitch your game to get on these services, exactly what the gatekeepers are looking for, approaches to royalties, and much more.

Your Own Game Studio in Six Months: Bootstrapping Core Through Casual

Charlie Cleveland, Unknown Worlds Entertainment / Natural Selection

Forget all about years of contracting, flaky investors and precarious publisher deals to try to get your studio funded. Stick to what you know and like best: making great games. Instead of wasting years writing a business plan, finding business partners, doing unsatisfying contract work or trying to convince investors and publishers to let you make your “dream” game, make a casual game, retain your independence and fund your future development yourself.

The First Year of Media Molecule

Mark Healey and Alex Evans, Media Molecule / Rag Doll Kung Fu

Media Molecule is a new independent studio, working on an unannounced game exclusively for PS3. The central theme of this talk is how Media Molecule has bridged the apparent contradiction between maintaining a lean team while maintaining a very high ambition. Founders Alex Evans and Mark Healey look at how they have taken the studio from its starting point of four friends who decided to make a game to, just over a year on, a thriving developer that is on track to deliver its first full price game.

Transcripts of GDC sessions, even summaries of points, have proved elusive in the past — anyone going and want to help out?