The Steam Review

Two major developments in the Triton/Prey saga tonight–and you thought it was over.

Back from the dead, so to speak.

The most immediate is the surprise announcement that Prey, without an online distributor following Triton’s collapse, will be released on Steam later today (see the Steam homepage or this 3DR forum thread). Unusually, those who bought the game at retail and even from Triton will be able to register their CD keys: Take2 and/or 3D Realms are evidently still supporting their beleaguered customers.

Despite that fact, the asking price on Steam is still $50. Further, those who buy the game on the cheap today (i.e. at retail) are seemingly able to migrate without restriction to Steam, and become, for lack of a kinder term, leeches of the service. With Valve unable to take anything at all from those purchases, it’s safe to assume that Take2 is paying them a support-covering sum on each registration.

There is also Gamasutra’s interview with Scott Miller, which provides two points of interest on page three. Miller first reiterates his reasons for not wanting to distribute through Steam. The interview would have been made some time ago, so don’t take its context today as too much of a mixed message (although I will admit, it is quite funny).

His unfortunately-timed complaint is that for as long as Steam is an internal Valve project, other developers will be wary of offering a potential or actual competitor a slice of both their sales figures and revenue. While Gabe Newell’s riposte to this on the Next-Gen Podcast was a good one–that 3DR seem quite happy to overcome their inhibitions when licensing engines from iD–I’ve been wanting for some time to voice my agreement with Miller. It might make more sense today to keep things together, but there will come a point when Steam will be stronger as an enterprise of its own. Unless, of course, Valve are planning on creating a glass ceiling for its growth.

Returning to Prey and Triton, Miller hints at a new system being created from the midst of DiStream’s system’s fallout:

From the ashes of Triton, there’s a company starting up that will do things much better. Triton had some internal problems that hurt them from the beginning. They were a dead man walking situation from the start.

I haven’t been able to extract any further details on this new company, but Miller’s choice of phrase (“from the ashes”) has produced the textual equivalent of a knowing grin. How cryptic.

Update:

In our first release regarding RACE on Steam we mentioned the “retail copies of RACE sold for the PC in the EMEA territories will include Steam functionality for auto-updating, matchmaking, and anti-piracy encryption.” That sentence should have read, “retail copies of RACE sold for the PC in the EMEA territories will include Steam functionality for auto-updating, installation and anti-piracy.”

Original post follows:

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PayPal is now available through Steam, as part of a not-beta “preview” phase accessed with steam.exe -paypal. PayPal is now officially supported.

This preview release of PayPal on Steam is not being made available by default to all users because initially we want the overall number of transactions to be small. This lets us hand inspect every transaction and lets our support team interact individually with each PayPal customer.

As with all Steam transactions, all purchases are final and are subject to the terms of the Steam Subscriber Agreement.

There isn’t that much to say about the preview at this point, past the fact of its existence: you are redirected to a page on the PayPal website and go on from there, presumably like any other transaction. The disconnect may be slightly disconcerting for some, but if you’re using PayPal in the first place you are likely to be familiar with the process anyway.

If you’ve made a purchase through the preview, please feel free to leave a comment!

Take your friends into battle!

Regards to Andy S, who spotted a series of new strings added to Steam’s interface in the recent platform update. “Guest Passes” are on the way: you’ll be able to hand out free copies of participating multi-player games to your friends, through Friends or via e-mail, for them to play online with you. This is the first we’ve heard of the idea since it was mentioned offhand last March, and it seems to have survived the throes of development largely intact.

The big question is how the guess passes will be handled and restricted; the good news is that most of the story can be extracted from the steamui_english.txt file.

• There are only so many guest passes per game
• Passes can only be held in receipt by one account at a time
• Passes are returned to you after each use and can be resent
• You can only send someone a guest pass once every 24 hours
• An account cannot receive a guest pass for the same game twice
• Guest passes “expire” after an indefinite amount of time (minutes, hours and days are mentioned)

There are also some unconfirmed but probable limitations that we can safely guess at:

• Guest passes will probably only be valid for online play
• You may only be able to play on servers in which the sender of the guest pass is playing
• VAC-banned accounts will almost certainly be unable to give out passes
• Similarly, guest passes might only function on VAC-secure servers
• The duration of a pass’ validity will probably vary from game to game (for the same reasons that Red Orchestra had a free week while Day of Defeat: Source only had a free weekend)

Even with all of the conditions we are aware of, there are plenty of loopholes around. It isn’t clear how Valve will prevent malicious users from giving out a constant stream of guest passes to different accounts/computer combinations, for instance, and there will inevitably be a myriad of other issues to be contended with. We will have to see what happens.

The nature of guest passes is still somewhat uncertain, but there is one thing we can be sure of: the news of their return is going to be very well received! 🙂

Hot on the heels of Triton’s recent demise comes news of NeoEdge (thanks hahnchen), a distribution service promising a series of new twists on the Steam/Triton formula.

Its pitch is a delivery system based on a proprietary peer-to-peer technology, supported by an astonishing variety of advertisement models: in-game, pre-game, around-game, you name it. The result for NeoEdge Networks’ clients, across “casual”, “core” and “MMRPG” markets, is “free” distribution and a recurring, ad-based revenue stream.

Bioshock is present on the NeoEdge homepage. But are Irrational or Take2 actually distribution partners?

But what really makes you sit up and take notice of NeoEdge is the screenshot from Bioshock prominent on its front page (original URL).

I inquired about the image’s use and have yet to receive a reply, so take the association with a pinch of salt for now. But if Networks really is the digital distribution partner for Irrational Games’ upcoming sure-fire hit, we’re certain to be hearing a whole lot more about their service as the game nears its projected 2007 release.

In the meantime, we’ll delve a little deeper into exactly what NeoEdge Networks are trying to achieve with their service–and in fact what they are full stop.

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Seeing as the most popular feed reader for TSR’s subscribers (now bumping gently against 150!) is Firefox’s Live Bookmarks, which can’t display the contents of posts, I’ve reverted the basic site feed to its original, smaller, excerpt-only form.

If you want to receive the full text of each post in your feed and don’t mind the larger download, your new URL is http://feeds.feedburner.com/steamreview-fulltext.