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.

AWOMO was billed as the “iTunes of games” during its announcement; a ridiculously big claim, an act of hubris perhaps, but, it is now clear, more accurate a soundbite than we thought. Free Time and Rent-to-Own make for a disarming simple but deliciously disruptive model that will genuinely change the way we buy the games industry’s product. I would question the need to buy a game to replenish an account’s Free Time, but that niggle aside it’s hard to image a better way to be eased through the purchasing process.

Don’t be misled by my brevity: once Rent-to-Own and its part instalments hit the market, it’s going be some time before the dust settles.

Ephemeral streaming

Which is all very well for gamers, but how will GDI hold on to their advantage? “It’s only when you combine the Rent-to-Own model with AWOMO’s streaming technology that it becomes appealing,” Donald replies. “There’s nothing great about being able to try a brand new AAA game for an hour if it takes 9 hours to download it”.

AWOMO’s “AI-based” streaming technology follows in the footsteps of Exent and Triton. It processes in real-time, constantly downloading content based on a streaming profile generated by the distribution company. This compares very favourable to Steam, where streaming happens in level-by-level chunks if the developer has even bothered to create a profile in the first place.

It deviates from their established pattern in two very notable places. First is the Game Training Kit: downloaded by an army of volunteers who get free access to the AWOMO beta library for their troubles, it submits the streaming profiles it creates from each user’s experience to a central server for aggregation. It’s cheap, quick, decentralised and automated, which is to say an excellent idea all around. Valve should pay attention.

Second is the ephemeral model mentioned in AWOMO’s original announcement. “The consumer never has the whole game downloaded,” explains Donald; “only a stub that is stored on the hard disk. The rest of the info is streamed in when it’s needed and not stored”.

Steam was originally intended to work in this way. Valve abandoned the idea in favour of permanent local storage before its public release however, and not for no reason. What happens in non-linear games? What do mod developers do (or indeed mod players, as both Exent and Triton tear up the directory structure)? And in these days of cheap and abundant storage, does it really benefit the users anyway? Answers will have to wait until AWOMO is closer to release and the technology finalised, but one thing we do know is that it’s almost a requirement for Free Time – if content is on the computer, removing it from the system is only ever a matter of mathematics.

Not an MMO

The 3D world is “an exciting way to interact with friends” — not an MMO.

It’s odd to think that I intended AWOMO’s 3D World to be the biggest aspect of this story when I began planning it. Since I last talked about AWOMO it has been shown to the public and proven technologically in beta, and Sony’s PlayStation Home has helped to vindicate the idea’s sustainability by taking it out of isolation, but we are still none the wiser as to how it helps us any more than windows, images, menus and pointers.

“When we first started talking about AWOMO everything concentrated on this 3D world that we were building,” Donald says. “Immediately everyone started talking MMO and probably we have to admit that we weren’t clear on that. But let’s set the record straight. Our 3D world doesn’t aim to be a game, just a different experience for people, an exciting way to interact with friends in a more advanced form than your every day web based social networking sites. Each district in the world is themed, so it’s also a neat way to browse games, just wandering around and seeing what you’ll find.”

There is demand for this. PlayStation Home as has been mentioned, but Second Life and more recently Metaplace have also shown that a virtual world with the capability for personalisation can be popular in and of itself — though “AWOMO is primarily about offering people the best possible way to buy and play games”, Donald cautions. Not so popular with you or me perhaps, but for us simple folk a 2D version of the client with overlay functionality much like the Steam Community is being made available.

There’s still plenty to talk about, and I’ll be keeping up to date with AWOMO as best I can as it draws closer to release.

Non-Steam support is good for everybody. Without lifting a finger developers suddenly receive a robust and popular community system, which is likely to already be in use by the majority if not all of their players and is accessible to the rest for free. They can schedule tournaments and other promotional events almost as easily, and quite possibly without having to pay through the nose for the privilege. It’s good for players for the same reasons; particularly purveyors of older multiplayer games who currently rely on untethered and typically obscure fansites to schedule matches. If the game has an existing release on Steam, all the better for both groups!

Valve gain on three fronts: non-Steam advertises the platform to developers, their potential clients, advertises it to unconverted players, their potential customers, and edges Microsoft one step further out of the picture with every conversion, especially if it’s a GFWL title being played. Who’s going to pay for voice in Halo 2 now a service almost exactly as useful is free after a few clicks?

The Achilles’ heel is that all of this depends on awareness. The entire non-Steam system is currently hidden behind a single low-key menu item, and will completely fail to amount to any of the things I’ve described if it stays there. Interface tweaks are short term answers, but they are only relevant to existing users: if Valve really want to see the Community succeed as it deserves to, I don’t think it will take anything less than a full non-Steam advertising campaign.

Issues and downsides

The Community has one major downside: it introduces the concept of logging into your Steam account through a browser. You’d only want to login to the site when you were away from a Steam installation, so at least people will detect something unusual when they’re asked to login manually, but it remains an undeniable step down in terms of phishing security that will inevitably be exploited by criminals across the world. With 256-bit page encryption, at least direct hacking isn’t an issue.

Continuing on the subject of web pages, Steam continues to use Internet Explorer, which perhaps because of its position within a VGUI window simply cannot cope with the complexity of the Community’s busier pages. Massive slowdown even on the desktop, scrolling bugs and agonisingly slow loading plague embedded pages. How long until we get a stripped-back Gecko renderer, Valve?

The beta also pushes Steam’s memory and CPU usage up considerably, to 10-11MB and a constant 5-10% of my (1.66GHz Core2) processor time when idling with all windows closed, which is up from around 3MB and no CPU at all. Hopefully this will be ironed out before the beta ends, but the extra load the Community adds to the client is something to keep a close eye on regardless.

Missing pieces

Steam Extras’ Vista gadget. Valve’s will hopefully fit on the sidebar…

Despite appearances, the Community’s infrastructure is barely present in this beta. Group and User pages exist in isolated islands with no system of navigation except bouncing from user to user to group — hardly helpful for newcomers without any contacts. The search function placeholder is visible, but central game pages and a navigable homepage, both utterly essential items, have yet to be hooked up at all.

Given the rampant forum anticipation for the beta’s release Valve’s decision to launch ASAP is understandable, but I can’t help but wonder what impact this state of isolation will have on the beta users and their understanding of the system if it goes on too long; early adopters are usually the opinion-formers, after all.

Game integrations (including achievements, matchmaking and in-game avatar/group display) have yet to appear in any form either, but fret not: they are coming, and large swathes of the API are likely to be open to modders when they do.

Of the features that aren’t known to be in development, wider Server Browser support is easily the most desirable. There is some movement on this front, as Red Orchestra‘s master server now reports to Friends the server a player is connected to (even if the Steam client doesn’t know how to ping it!), but the problem will need a different approach to be more widely applicable. If Valve publish a “Steam protocol”, the Community’s influence may be enough to prompt developers to add support to their master servers of their own accord. Or perhaps the client could simply be engineered to to ping the master and game servers itself, though this would probably increase overhead considerably. The best answer is most likely to be a mix of the two.

Finally, a Gamercard-equivalent for redistributing Community data isn’t provided. The (lowercase) community have stepped in however, with signature images and Vista, Mac OS X and Google gadgets, among other tools.

A Group is it’s Own Worst Enemy

Today’s issues with the Community are the sort of technical problems you can only expect from unfinished software, but tomorrow’s will be something else entirely; Clay Shirky’s 2003 social software keynote gives an excellent and timeless overview of the management issues surrounding large communities. Whether it applies to the Community will depend on how well the currently absent browsing and discovery infrastructure works, and whether or not the community sees fit to take their network beyond games, but if it does Valve will have a whole new challenge on their hands. We can only hope they will rise to meet it.

Valve recently announced that Steam has over 13 million active accounts, excluding those that haven’t been used for a month. Even if some users actively use more than one account, this is still a fearsome number of users and seems to confirm the position of Steam as the market leader for digital distribution, but there are other services vying for position in the market.

Gamespy/IGN are in the game with Direct2Drive, Turner with Gametap, EA with EA Link, GAME with a new on demand service powered by Metaboli, and probably a couple of others. Xfire is bringing gamers IM capabilities and server browsing, Gamespy have Comrade and Microsoft is trying to bring gaming under one umbrella with Games For Windows Live.

All these services fit into slightly overlapping areas, and it’s only a matter of time before an almighty competition breaks out between them, and so I would say that we’re at, or close to, a turning point in the history of gaming on the PC platform and I think now is probably a good time to examine the origins and long-forgotten promise of Steam.

Long Distant Origins

Steam was originally intended to be a shared set of technology components that could be used by any software publisher. Reading the 2002 Steam press release, you can see that many of the ambitions listed have gone unfulfilled.

Dave Rolston, Vice President of Engineering, ATI Technologies Inc:

We will use the tools Steam gives us to create an automatic driver update and configuration management facility to deliver the most current and complete graphics drivers directly to the user, and ultimately add to an immersive and outstanding gaming experience.

5 years on, and we’re seeing the same thing promised.We’re told that:

Steam is designed to support a wide variety of models for hosting, billing, and support. Allowing for any number of partnerships and implementation, Steam was built as a modular platform.

This too, has gone unfulfilled. There is one implementation: Valve’s. There’s only one method of billing currently being used, a bog-standard one-time purchase. Hosting is all on the Valve content servers and there are barely any partnerships to speak of. Even the innovative content streaming features of Steam mostly lie unused, even by Valve games. It’s depressing that the best example right now is the original Half-Life! Even Source games don’t properly take advantage of content streaming.

The menu 3D backgrounds for instance, are a pretty good idea. They look great, show off the game immediately, and ensure a fairly relevant set of assets are already cached into memory before you even start the game. However, combined with Steam content streaming, they’re a disaster. Try it, if you like. Delete the local content for HL2 (or move the .gcfs out of SteamApps), then re-install it and try and run the game straight away. You’ll notice it allows you to start the game with it not fully downloaded, but then will appear to hang before it even gets to the menu. The engine has realised that the map file for the background isn’t downloaded, and instructs Steam to download it. Meanwhile, it continues to display a (static) loading screen. For the duration of the download, it simply looks like the game has hung.

There are two simple solutions: require 100% of the game to download before you allow the game to start, or require Source to put up a progress bar with approximate time remaining and a working cancel button. The second is by far the better design decision; the user is kept informed, knows the game hasn’t hung, and can cancel the process and continue the download on the desktop if they decide they don’t want to wait. It’s a well-known fact in user experience design that users are a lot more patient to wait for a long running-process to complete if they’re kept informed about what’s going on. The streaming features of Steam are also then properly leveraged to get the player into the game as soon as possible.

It gets worse – the third party games currently packing out the Steam platform don’t implement this streaming at all! The Steam client basically becomes a glorified download manager for loose files. Nobody uses the content streaming because it requires deeper Steam integration. If not even Valve are implementing the full features of their own platform, there isn’t much hope a third party will. Triton attempted to achieve content streaming essentially “for free” without requiring integration by using a virtual filesystem driver, however a similar attempt by Steam has been discarded as providing terrible performance.

The Secret of Success

So if Steam is being used only in the most basic fashion, what is its competitive advantage over every other service? The other digital distribution services are building up catalogues of games almost as impressive and in some cases possibly even superior. The functionality is more or less equivalent, minus Friends and Server browsing features. The answer has already been mentioned: Steam’s fantastically large user base.

By hitching Steam to the CS/HL2 wagon, giving Steam the killer app which all the other platforms lack, Valve ensured maximum exposure for Steam as well as ensuring it became fixed in the minds of the industry as a whole. Valve are pioneers not for trying something especially new – and as we’ve seen, what is new is not being used – but for trying it BIG, dragging digital distribution kicking and screaming into the mainstream. Before it was something on the fringe, now publishers like Eidos are putting their new games up on digital distribution services as a matter of course.

Steam has become fixed in the gamer consciousness; PC Gamer UK for instance is quite happy in reviews listing the publisher as “Steam”, putting the price in dollars, and leaving it at that. There’s no need to qualify it by giving the Steam URL somewhere in the text. Everyone knows what Steam is.

The situation is analogous to the placing of a retail store. Excuse the London-specific example, but if you can you’re going to set up your shop somewhere like Oxford Street where the foot traffic is the highest. Passers-by will remember that your store is there if they want something you sell, even if they don’t walk in and buy something immediately.

Steam is also analogous to a department store, selling the wares of multiple different companies. Again, I apologise for the London bias, but I’d like to use a real-life analogy. Aquascutum make clothes, and they have a store location on Regent Street, just off Piccadilly Circus. A reasonably short walk away is the Selfridges department store on Oxford Street, which has an Aquascutum section, amongst others. The benefit to this arrangement is that in Selfridges they pick up the passing trade of people looking for a broad class of related items, in this case, menswear, even though they’re presumably doing some damage to sales from their own store down the road.

Introversion sell DEFCON both from their website and from Steam; presumably they make a larger margin on sales from their own site, but the advantage of Steam to them is that they pick up the passing “foot-traffic” which had previously helped propel Darwinia to new heights.

The Defcon Dilemma

So Introversion presumably were planning on distributing on Steam for a good portion of the development time of Defcon, needing the added exposure of Steam distribution to ensure good sales, and the finished game obviously has integrated Steam authentication, because the “key” you’re provided with in-game is prefixed with “STEAM”.

However, on launch day, people were able to buy, download, install and launch Defcon, only to be presented with an authentication failure when they attempted to play. Had the Steam auth servers, capable of handling the authentication of hundreds of thousands of Counter-Strike players every day, collapsed under the weight of the Defcon release?

No. Introversion had implemented their own “metaserver” system, which promptly collapsed under the load and forced the angry buyers to play the demo version until they fixed the problem. Why was this necessary? Why could Introversion not simply license the Steam authentication service for Defcon, from wherever it was purchased (Steam, their site, or retail) and for all platforms? What happened to the dream of a modular platform available for flexible implementation and partnership with anyone?

Somewhere along the line, Valve lost sight of the original plan, and this may come around to cost them.

A Call To Action

More and more publishers, retailers and others are encroaching on the territory that Steam first staked out. None of them quite do all of what Steam does, but I fear it’s simply a matter of time. I doubt it will be long before Xfire or Microsoft starts up a digital distribution service, or licenses one from one of the major players on the scene. The feature lists of Xfire or GFW Live already sound a lot like Steam’s feature list (especially if you include the upcoming Steam Community).

Microsoft generally have one modus operandi: keep going until no significant opposition is left standing. They’ve made mistakes, like tying Live to Vista, but they have deep pockets and a lot of patience. It’s only a matter of time until Vista overtakes XP in terms of install base, as unlikely as that seems today. If they succeed, we could see Steam slowly squeezed from the marketplace, reduced once again to a hard-core of the Half-Life games. Microsoft is a platform-builder; as a company it’s pretty much what they do, and in time they are going to build something very compelling to developers. The only advantage Steam has currently is momentum. If they lose that momentum to Live, or anyone else, then they’re back practically to square one.

This then is a call to action to Valve.

Valve has a chance, right now, to take the initiative. If they make the right moves, we could see the rise of Steam as the de facto platform for online gaming.

Otherwise, the alternatives are almost certainly either ignominious fragmentation or total Microsoft domination. A benevolent dictatorship by Valve seems to be the better alternative to either having tens of digital distribution schemes, friends lists, and server browsers, none quite able to outdo any of the others, or the reprehensible Microsoft tendency to suck ever more money from people.

The Road Ahead

The first step is, in my opinion, to decouple all the Steam functionality from the Steam client, and from each other as much as possible.

Developers have very few options for using Steam right now. In practice, the only options are one-time billing/download manager/limited auth functionality, a full Source + Steam license or nothing at all. There’s practically no middle ground; there are the occasional exceptions like Red Orchestra which uses VAC and was considering integrating Friends, but they have one difference over most third party games on Steam: they distribute with Steam at retail.

This is the source of the Defcon dilemma – if you want to distribute your game without the Steam client, you can only use the most basic sub-set of Steam functionality, i.e simple downloading, very limited CD-Key style auth, and one-time billing. Most Steam features are therefore useless to most developers and publishers because they can’t use them, even if they wanted to. They don’t want to bundle the Steam client with their games at retail, for a bunch of fairly obvious reasons.

If you’re a publisher, you don’t want people at retail to install something full of ads for your competitors’ games, you don’t want to force your users to create a fairly unnecessary Steam account, and you don’t want to limit the ability of people to play their games without an Internet connection; all annoyances and niggles inherent in the Steam client. For people unaware of Steam, being forced to install and create an account with what at first sight seems to be extraneous and annoying software is not a great user experience.

It’s a shame, because there are some fairly obvious uses of the Steam functionality that would work well even with retail games. Take the Steam filesystem and content streaming, for instance. If implemented properly, it works well for streaming games to you from a remote content server. What if it was streaming files from the game’s DVD? You could put the DVD in the drive, the auto-run would pop-up and ask where you want to install, then mere moments after that you’re in-game, because there’s a Steam filesystem in the background streaming files from the DVD into a .gcf cache file on your hard disc. Halo 2 for Vista uses a system somewhat like this to give a console-like experience; put the DVD in and you’re away.

What if developers could license the master server / server browsing platform? They could host the servers themselves or rent them from Valve, either way, they’re using a robust system known to work for the world’s most popular online action game. I’d say that was worth licensing! What if they could license Friends? In-game and out-of-game chat with not only people who’d bought that game, but anyone who had any Steam Friends enabled game. I have no doubt that a Valve-provided server browsing back-end would be infinitely better than the technology being sold by the likes of Gamespy.

Steam Auth could be extended to create a new type of Steam account. Why only have the username/password combination to access a Steam account? Couldn’t any known unique token be used? For example, the CD-Key of a game? It’s a weaker protection as CD-Keys can be stolen, but plenty of games still use such a system. Valve could license out the auth server software for third parties to run themselves, federating with the main Steam auth servers, or just rent the service from Valve.

Resolution of the Dilemma

There are an innumerable number of ways Steam services could be used by third parties, and the Defcon dilemma would be rather swiftly exorcised.

Instead of building the metaserver system, Introversion could have bought a license to use the same Steam auth system for their retail copies as for their Steam ones. They’d save the time of building and debugging their own system, and the cost of hosting their own servers. Then it would make sense for them to also use Steam server browsing, another component they don’t have to build, with the added benefit that Defcon would automatically work with any third-party server browser that supported the Steam server protocols.

Valve could offer price breaks to developers who use more than one Steam service, and they could even offer say, the Steam filesystem for free or very cheaply as it’s an offline feature that costs Valve nothing for a developer to use in their game. This would make it easier and economic for a developer to implement content streaming as it would enable streaming from a retail CD as well, benefiting all their customers. For a game like Defcon it wouldn’t be useful, but for a modern AAA title it would certainly be beneficial.

I’ve only really scratched the surface of what could be done with decoupled Steam services. There’s no reason purchases couldn’t be initiated in-game, for example, inside a demo like with Xbox Live Arcade games. Games could also manage their own auto-patching/distribution through their own in-game interface. A combination of those two would be especially impressive. Imagine playing a particularly good demo that let you purchase and play the full game without even quitting it!

You can see the advantages all round. The developer/publisher saves money and time by outsourcing, the consumer gets the benefits of the larger ecosystem, and Valve gets paid. None of this is obviously Steam-driven to the consumer too, no clunky Steam client to install, so the disadvantages of the client have effectively gone away. The services are transparent; the experience is just better. The use of these kinds of services can then see greater and greater uptake, and as we’ve seen by the explosion of third-party games on Steam, the growth rate is exponential.

The more people a service attracts, the more attractive the service becomes. You join MSN Messenger or Xfire or Facebook or MySpace because all your friends have, not necessarily because of the inherent quality of the service. The more friends are on one service, the more valuable that service becomes to you. It’s also about the developer mindshare; if you’re using Steam features, or developers you know at other companies are, you’re going to be more likely to use other features in future if using them is obviously beneficial.

The Role of the Client

So what role will the Steam client have in this new order? The answer is that it can integrate with the Steam services now built directly into the games. The Steam-enabled (but not necessarily Steam-delivered or auto-updating) games on your system will appear in the games window. You could use the Steam client’s desktop Friends and Server browser for your separately-installed Steam-enabled games. It’s currently a nonsense that all Steam games have to clustered under SteamApps, in the future maybe they could install like regular games, but seamlessly integrating with the auto-updating features of the client if they’re using the Steam filesystem.

The same games perform better when digitally distributed via the Client because the developer did the work to enable content streaming because it was beneficial to retail too. Valve can up-sell both users and developers to the digital vision.

It’s about flexibility and a great user experience. Steam, to be even more successful, has to offer opportunities, not limitations. It has to behave more sensibly, more pragmatically, and less rigidly. A prime example of pointless rigidity is in the auto-updating system. It has immense value, but also tremendous downsides. Once the update is started, you can’t use the game. If your Internet connection failed right then, you’d be unable to use that game in offline mode, because the update broke it. You’re limited to Steam to get updates, there’s no possibility of cover-CD distributed ones for people with dial-up and the like.

The solution is simple and obvious. Download patches into a temporary cache file. Once the download is complete, Steam auto-applies the patch. The game is always functional. This opens up options like: the patch being delivered a day or two before it’s activated, ensuring that the number of people wanting to play but unable to while the patch is downloading is kept to a minimum, offline game patching by allowing people to distribute (something like) the temporary cache outside of Steam, or pre-update betas being the norm rather than the exception.

A feature like this was originally intended to be a part of Steam, and was known as “trickle updating”. In the (probably paraphrased) words of Valve, “new content will just be there, when Valve says it will”. In reality, I can’t remember the feature ever being used, and it has apparently been dropped for operational reasons. It is more immediately practical for Valve just to push updates out monolithically, as most clients will download most updates quickly on their broadband connections.

The client will still exist for the reasons Valve initially conceived it. Having a permanently available application is valuable because residency has opportunities that transiency doesn’t; like trickle updating or community features, a single unified place to get at everything that matters to you in the gaming space.

I’m tempted to play the Devil’s Advocate and even suggest that the Steam Client should support in some fashion games which aren’t Steam enabled at all, for example providing XFire-like support for Friends and Server browsing and a listing in the Steam games list. This may look pointless, but it will make Steam more useful to end-users, which drives foot-traffic to Steam boosting sales, and gives Steam more mindshare. The community could be leveraged to develop code to enable server browsing for other engines. It would be worth it at least to get server browsing for Red Orchestra integrated into the Steam server browser!

It’s All About the Platform, Stupid

The initial vision of Steam could have been typical Valve over-ambition, cut short by technical challenges. I think there’s still a lot of value in that vision, though, especially if extended in subtle ways. The original vision was making Steam a platform that anyone could use, but it has since become somewhat more of a walled garden. There are advantages to the walled garden approach, and it’s certainly worked for companies like Apple who have successfully carved themselves out a niche with the iTunes + iPod system.

The company which has really been successful though is Microsoft, the platform builders. Rather than trying to sell their own software using their own operating system that runs only on their own hardware, you can run any application from any developer on Windows on standardised hardware you can buy from any hardware supplier. Microsoft has built a platform which bridges the gap, and they do very well out of being the middleman which supplies the glue.

By opening Steam up as a flexible platform, providing the “glue” between developers and gamers, they could be extremely successful. They could do a lot to change a lot of people’s minds. It’s all about getting critical mass, about getting mindshare.

Being a platform builder is hard. You have to ensure that your platform works 100% of the time for 100% of the people you’re aiming it at. Valve hasn’t done brilliantly at this so far. Part of the point is ensuring a good experience for everyone, and a good experience is all about the details, the niggling edge-cases which are a pain to handle correctly but are all-important. When Steam becomes acceptable to include in all games to everyone, not something a sizeable segment of gamers still see as something that has to be endured to play Valve games, then we could see a revolution.

The continued flakiness of Steam’s offline mode is one good example of this. The vast majority of the time it works, in a roundabout manner, but there are those edge cases it fails in immensely frustrating ways, like the “interrupted update” problem I mentioned earlier. In some ways this is a consequence of offline mode being an afterthought; the first release of Steam had no offline mode at all; Steam left beta in September 2003, but the release which added Offline Mode didn’t arrive until March 2004! Steam always has been designed exclusively for broadband connections and is painful in a lot of very un-obvious ways when you’re connected to a very good Internet connection in America. Woe betide you if only have dial-up and you want to install HL2 – Steam will force you to sit through a large update despite how the game works fine as it was published on CD. Woe betide you again if you live in Australia and have restrictive download limits and Byzantine networking arrangements.

Somewhere Valve forgot about the flexibility of their original vision, of a Steam that could be used fully by anyone, that would have made the experience universally better for everyone, even those on dial-up. It’s a crying shame that that flexibility and potential is long since lost, to do the easy thing and serve the majority, rather than the plurality.

Hopefully Valve will take this kind of thing seriously once they hire their new senior user experience director.

Basically, my message to Valve is this: Make it flexible. Make it open and inclusive. Think about all the people, both developers and end users, who could be using your technology for their benefit and yours who aren’t because of arbitrary limitations and restrictions. The removal of these limitations and the cutting of ties of the Steam services to the Steam client would have the end result of driving people to the client, not driving them away. There are technical hurdles, but they’re not insurmountable, and they’ll lead to a better experience not just for Valve and their customers but for everyone.

Which a bit of an issue, because the kind of independent games that are distributed through Steam are by and large no good to advertisers. Poker Superstars II and Zen of Sudoku are the only titles in that list that have audiences definable beyond the “gamers” group that Steam covers by itself; everything else has such a niche market that targeted advertising would be all but impossible.

Valve acting as a proxy, accepting Steam-wide advertiser contracts and distributing them evenly among their participating clients, may be a solution, but when we consider the lower rates, fewer impressions and greater player aggravation non-targeted adverts would lead to it suddenly becomes much less appealing. Perhaps some cashflow could be set up in that environment but certainly not enough to justify a game of any quality being flat-out free. Gabe’s implied solution of providing free advert-supported and paid advert-free versions doesn’t do much to counter this situation; its obvious variation, advertising in your demo, makes financial sense but stacked alongside demo restrictions stands a strong chance of discouraging potential buyers.

Valve clearly think they have a workable system however, and they are the ones sitting on the important data. Perhaps their strategy will be hosting games aimed at the lowest common denominator, the market that the mass media (and Kuma Games) have found profitable, but it’s far more likely that we’ll be surprised with a holistic solution that goes some way toward pleasing everyone. That, or the entire thing will be a waste of time!

We should definitely expect user-created content, judging by the wealth of content that sprang from the free release of Portal’s progenitor, Narbacular Drop. “We have any easy-to-use way of getting maps into Portal and loading them up,” says Swift. “We’re definitely looking forward to seeing what people create. We’re going to be releasing our FGD and an SDK update so people can use what we’re using.” That should happen soon after Episode Two, Team Fortress 2 and Portal launch together [in October].

This doesn’t confirm that there will be a built-in library of third-party downloads, but given The Steam Community’s recent announcement and Valve’s ever-lurking peer-to-peer network, the odds are reasonable.

To read more about the distribution of community content, see Building communities through residency.

Needless to say, modding is quite distinct from retail. Gamers are far more forgiving of delays when there isn’t a set and promised date to anticipate, and even more so when they know that they won’t be expected to pay anything but respects when a release finally comes. It’s no surprise that even when episodic mods like MINERVA and NightFall see delays of the same proportion as Valve’s, frustration may be evident among the fans but outright criticism is rare. Perhaps the generally more industry-aware nature of the mod playing audience is behind the difference in attitude too, but it’s a distinction well worth noting all the same.

The bridge between these retail and mod worlds, blurring the line between the two, is Steam. Garry’s Mod, The Ship, Alien Swarm, Natural Selection, Dystopia and Red Orchestra are all at different stages along the process of moving between the two, and of course there’s the original triplet of Counter-Strike, Day of Defeat and Team Fortress. The list will only grow as more independent developers realise the power of this emerging route to market.

Even if Valve’s efforts toward creating episodic games don’t work out, with Steam and their encouragement of iterative mod development they’ve more than laid the foundation for others to carry on their work. Those modders and independent developers will inevitably create a stable market for the episodically-developed AAA titles that aren’t quite possible today…by which time they will perhaps come out when they ought!