Found via this Steam Forums thread. TSR’s massively-linked post from the time is here.

Steamcloud is the headline announcement of course, and very good news it is too. But our old friend John Cook also listed a few other upcoming developments: among them automatic driver updates (once again), “Calendar functions” of some sort, and improvements to the sales process that include displaying prices in the user’s local currency. And these:

Official communities

Any developer, anywhere, will be able to start an official Steam Community, er, community for their game. This is the missing keystone of the Community and something I called for as soon as I realised it wasn’t in.

The game pages will presumably surpass the functionality of today’s Groups, not least in the fact that they will have a group of paid-up developer employees behind them. But will they be used? Developers are notorious (on this site, anyway) for passing over Steam’s benefits. On the one hand creating and maintaining a Steam Community community doesn’t require changes to a game’s code and all of the QA red tape that involves, but on the other, as of yet even Valve haven’t done anything with their network besides create and maintain it.

There is an omen: the numerous developer groups already in existence show that other studios, including Bioware, ArenaNet, EA Mythic, Midway and Ubisoft are quite comfortable with showing their faces on the network.

One thing I know even today is that Steam is the exact tool a developer needs to revive an older multiplayer game, or simply keep the momentum going on an still-popular one. An actively-maintained Group is a wonderful thing, and indeed I’ve been trying to get some momentum going in the RPS group lately with regards TF2, though to no end so far.

System requirements checks

Knocking the seemingly-immortal bugbear of PC gaming to the ground is easily within reach of Steam, and as I’ve wondered out loud several times before now the only issue is why it’s taking Valve so long to do it. Steam already checks every system’s hardware for the hardware survey, it already knows the requirements of every game for their store pages, and a check already runs for Valve’s Lost Coast tech demo. What’s taking so long to link these pieces together?

Perhaps the answer is precision. Every time the hardware survey is reset we hear reports on the forums of mistaken detections (though on my system the only thing it reports incorrectly is the physical size of my 16:10 monitor) that would lead, albeit only in edge cases, to a game that demands to much processing to be greenlit for the system. Or, harmfully to sales, vice versa.

Firefox over Steam

GI.biz got the scoop: Valve have an interest in distributing Firefox at some point, with Steamcloud sharing bookmarks and other user settings across multiple computers. There aren’t any details on how this would work — hopefully it won’t involve Valve trying to wrap Steam around it in the same manner as the games.

Perhaps this would mean an end to suffering IE embedded in Steam — or perhaps not, as I heard recently that Gecko is an incredibly unhelpful piece of technology when it comes to embedding. Can anyone fill us in on that?

Steam is seeing 200% growth

Gamesindustry.biz have the quote again:

“We see sub ten per cent growth rates in our core, packaged retail business,” Newell said. “Right now we’re seeing close to 200 per cent growth in the alternative ways of connecting with customers.

“It will actually pass over in the next three months, how much of our business is coming from retail versus how much is coming from other channels.”

This is up from 150% earlier in the year. Bear in mind, of course, that this is for all of Steam and not just Valve’s games.

Prey: absolutely face-meltingly crazy, and very, very violent. £2.90 is a steal.

Before digital distribution this could only realistically have happened at a promotional event. Somewhere 2K could feel confident that copies weren’t being snapped up in bulk for later resale, but also where its impact would be limited to a promotional gimmick. Steam, on the other hand, has blown the doors wide open: it prevents bulk purchases with its already-established credit card fraud prevention, prevents resale at any large scale with its personal user accounts, and invites every gamer from the territories it has distribution rights for to join in.

It’s not just free advertising, but free advertising that people like myself will happily pay to experience — which makes the apparent lack of any attempt by Take2′s marketing team to capitalise further on the situation a mystery to me. There may still be a media onslaught awaiting us all on Monday, but (and call me jaded if you will) the consistent lack of serious effort in exploiting Steam’s potential by third party developers over the years tells me to expect otherwise.

I’m in no mood to end on a negative however. Even if 2K don’t take any further advantage of their sale, it is clearly a more effective use of back catalogue than simply bundling it with newer, full-price releases. Thanks to digital distribution it is a promising and commendable strategy; one that in my opinion should by all rights become a standard practice when releasing sequels.

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!

You may be forgiven for feeling a touch of déjà vu this week. A cutting-edge single-player game hailed as the greatest ever made has been released on an unprepared online authentication system that insists on downloading updates as well as authentication data before making the game available, and buyers confounded by technical issues and server failures are complaining furiously.

Adding to Bioshock’s woes is an unadvertised two-instance install limit (now up to five) which requires users to uninstall the game while connected to the internet to release each so-called “installation key”. Make the mistake of wiping or throwing away a drive before uninstalling Bioshock twice, and like Windows’ activation scheme you need to ask a human for additional licenses.

I’m not gloating about all this: 2K risked their incredibly important release with an unbaptised activation system for the same reasons they had to artificially price the game higher on Steam than in shops, and most of the authentication system is also present in Steam copies of the game. I’m instead asking why Steam is not being used, even without being present in retail copies, to ease the deactivation issue.

A Proposal

SecuROM‘s authentication technology should allow Steam buyers to activate or deactivate their computers not to play Bioshock, but to play it offline. The same technology that detects when the game is installed and uninstalled can surely detect when it is launched and closed, and combined with Steam’s persistent connection has the capability to limit the need to take an installation key to those who want to play without a connection.

Done right this introduces no lapses in security, and hopefully keeps retailers happy (not that they can do anything about it). It’s an ideal solution that requires only for SecuROM to integrate their activation technology into the Steam client, but will it happen? I think both Valve and 2K have every reason to build such a system at the first chance they had, leaving to my mind any scheme a question purely of SecuROM’s dedication to clients and customers.

• 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.