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.

As anyone who used Triton will agree, the streaming technology was indeed powerful and efficient, and if anything like as easy to implement as has been claimed surely an incredibly valuable asset. I’ll try to keep track of what happens, but with DiStream in chaos news of license agreements may be hard to track down.

In terms of Steam, Triton’s smooth closure is a strong confidence booster. Valve have already produced code to disable authentication on clients, and while the chances of retail copies of independent games like Red Orchestra being delivered to each purchaser are slim, the lack of other major obstacles in Triton’s experience is reassuring.

There are some differences: online games that fully embrace Steam (i.e. are developed with it in mind) would lose their authentication systems, the old problems of patches would resurface, and someone somewhere would need to host the cache files for those who did not have all of their Steam games downloaded at the moment of disconnect. None of these can readily be avoided, but as Triton has demonstrated, all could probably be smoothed through support should the time come to ease in a new order.

Steam Retrospective

But of course, Steam isn’t going anywhere. “I think Steam was able to monopolize on having moved the previous games that were already popular to the platform for free first”, O’Brien muses on its success. It’s certainly true that Valve’s transitioning of their existing GoldSrc games and communities to Steam helped it establish itself, although as long-time users will fondly (or not-so-fondly) remember, not without alarming growing pains.

“Then up-sell the new game with a little ‘controversial press’”, O’Brien continues in reference to Valve’s highly-publicised dispute with former publishers Vivendi, “and you have yourself a market boom”.

That, I point out, is a little below the belt. “People knew about Steam, but many many more learned a lot more about it when things [the lawsuit] started to brew” he responds; “I can’t say that it was intentional, but if it were, it would be damn ingenious. There is no such thing as bad press”. A little like that other story, the 2003 source code leak? “I think that event just flat out sucked” O’Brien says, now sympathising. “People who steal code or leak intellectual property should be…well, I’m going to leave that to your imagination.”

Despite his words, there aren’t any hard feelings toward Valve from this quarter. “Steam and any others in the marketspace are helping get digital distribution into the real marketplace and into people’s minds”, he says, taking a wider and wiser view, “so as a result, any competitor to the market only strengthens that market”.

“I have spent so much time with developers, publishers, portals, and retail that I have the angles of where each are coming from, and there is a lot to work with for each of those markets. They can all make a play and do very well. Hands down.”

Victory pulled from the jaws of defeat, on the merits of those with true belief in digital distribution and gaming’s future. It doesn’t get much more poetic than that.

The practice has both its advantages and drawbacks, and I spoke to Garry to see where GMod falls among them.

The Deal

Straddling the line between genius and madness: ‘Asscrabs’.

“A new GMod with regular updates for $10″ is Garry’s summary of the deal for buyers. It’s the cheapest price point Valve maintain on Steam, and the same price as the voluntary donations that have bought keen players banners on scoreboards, enhanced forum features and beta access in the past – although, citing logistics and the gap between buying banners and games, Garry explains that those donators will have to pay again along with everyone else.

Garry also expects GMod to require an existing Source game in an account to be purchasable. It’s not an unreasonable condition considering what buyers would get for $10 otherwise, and interestingly it is his hope that the new version will be flexible enough to work with any Source game without developer input: “If you only have CSS”, he says, “it [would] recognise that…when Episode One is released GMod [would] realise that too and automatically mount the GCFs”. It’s only with the new technology in GMod 9.1 that this might be achieved, Source and Steam allowing: for instance, the new spawn menu has a configurable system of categories and filters from a base list of all of the resources available, and it will also automatically generate icons for anything spawnable, removing the need to produce icons for every object in the world, keep up with new releases, and worry about still not covering third party creations.

Community Concerns

Effects like motion blur are receiving a welcome update…if you pay.

Steam might be helpful in that scenario, but exposing GMod to a new pool of players and excluding those who can’t or won’t pay is going to put the community under significant strain, and what comes out when the dust settles will almost certainly be very different, even if that settling takes several months. Garry is optimistic on the matter. “PetitionOnline will probably explode,” he admits, “but eventually I think everyone will see that this is a great move”.

The litmus test of whether or not they do that will be the relative sizes and productivity of the paid and free communities. The two versions will not be compatible, 9.1 being the rewrite it is, and as time goes on the gap between each will grow. Will more people pay than drop out? Will the older credit card-holding audience be as drawn to GMod’s brilliantly silly, ad hoc gameplay? Will the new community without younger players be a better one? Garry certainly thinks so, but what will actually happen is anyone’s guess. The potential gentrification of an online game should be interesting to watch.

Development Changes

Selling the mod has had one particularly interesting and unusual effect: despite having no license, Garry will receive the uncompiled Source Engine code, blurring the line between a mod and full game as well as overcoming the limitations of the free SDK. While Valve’s increased take of the profits from each sale will eventually overtake the cost of a license, we are nevertheless seeing a new entry path for indie developers form, one where they can use Valve’s top-of-the-line game and communication technology without footing the usual bills, at least in any traditional sense.

What is it with people and enormous, fully-functional robots? Meet Tyrannis.

That’s a different story though. Garry’s Mod has a legacy of casual development which will have to change when Garry becomes accountable to his customers. GMod has evolved significantly in the past, something that can’t go on. “One of my original worries was that people would complain that they paid for it at version X…I’ll be restricted as to how much I can change”, Garry explains.

Another issue is related to Valve’s “hard line” on third-party content in official games. Every contributor to one is required to sign an agreement, putting the kibosh on any integration with garrysmod.org and seriously reducing the scope for bundling community-built content (as opposed to what is created by Garry’s small team), both today and in the foreseeable future. All the same, Garry is keen to share his wealth with those producing quality work. If he likes something someone has made enough he can offer them money to include it for everyone else – “something I’ve always wanted to do”, he says, and an intriguing prospect for those with imaginations and enough spare time. Steam’s upcoming Peer-to-Peer distribution system may or may not break the barrier down – more likely not, given its prominent ‘install’ button. We aren’t going to see any competition to Second Life just yet…

The Future

There is one final surprise. “I was pretty much done with GMod”, Garry says. “There was no reason for me to fix all the bugs (which required a whole lot of work). I planned to release a few bug/security fixes and leave it at that. This deal bought GMod back. There was a reason for me to work on it…the community wins that way”.

Garry’s Mod has been saved, but, quite literally, at a price. Or so it would seem. The actions and reactions of new and existing GMod players will define the success of these ‘pay-mods’ for some time to come, and I for one don’t think anyone can predict what will happen.

The beta is now out. Add -beta steam3friends -clientbeta steam3friends to your Steam shortcut to access it.

The beta is is feature-light, focusing on stabilising the backend. Expect that to change with the release of the SDK.

Let’s start with the overview. Has Friends 3.0 gained any new features or lost any old ones?

This release concentrates on getting the core features stable – adding friends, sending chat messages, and seeing when your friends are playing a game. The underlying architecture of the new Friends on Steam 3 will allow us to add many new features in the not-too-distant future.

Do you have any plans to implement Friends into a wider community bracket than single, one-off conversations?

Yes, having an IRC-like Chat room system is on the short list of new Steam features to build. Another avenue we’re looking at is tightening the integration between Friends and the games, letting you see how your friend does in Counter-Strike, or letting users customize how they are seen in the game via Friends.

Some interesting ideas there, can you expand on any of them?

Sorry, no details yet.

Would Friends work with any game on Steam, or does it require Source and/or VGUI?

A Friends SDK will be added to the Source SDK and be available to Steam licensees after the beta is over, which will allow any developer to hook into the system. It doesn’t require Source to access friends inside a game, but if they’re using the Source engine it’s a lot easier because they can reuse the existing code.

So the community will be able to add new parlour games and other features to Friends?

That’s part of the long term plan.

Has anything been done to prevent people ghosting?

We are looking at ways of temporarily disabling chat between certain users for a certain time period. In Counter-Strike, spectating players would be told that their messages will be delayed until the end of the round. That’s not in the beta yet; we still need to do some experiments with the interface to make it clear what’s going on.

Does Friends show when someone is playing a single-player game now?

No, we don’t currently track [that]. This feature has been added since the interview took place.

Do not adjust your sets.

Steam 3.0 is based on the TCP connection model, a change that came about at least partly due to Friends’ instability. Does the re-release of Friends mean that Steam itself will switch to the new connection setup too?

Steam 3.0 is actually based on a combination of UDP and TCP connections. UDP is a great lightweight protocol, which we currently use to maintain a constant connection between clients and the Steam servers for things like authentication, VAC, and the server browser. TCP is used mostly for the heavier high-throughput actions, like downloading content.

Friends runs over the UDP channel, to make the bandwidth usage essentially negligible for clients. We may at some point use TCP as a fallback for it if the client is having trouble making its way through a firewall or router.

One for privacy worriers: is chat data passed peer-to-peer or though a Valve server?

Chat messages go through the Steam servers. The proliferation of NATs and firewalls has made it very difficult to reliably make direct connections between users. We have the work mostly done to encrypt the data stream, although that may not make it into the beta.

How many people have been involved in the redevelopment?

Everyone on the Steam team is involved to some extent, typically around 10 people. Not everyone is working directly on Friends, but much of the work is shared between us.

Any final thoughts?

We all really believe in the importance of a system like Friends as a way to strengthen the community around Steam and our games, so we’re looking forward to this release. Hope to see you (and your readers) on the beta, and please feel free to let us know via the VDC page about any issues you run into.

Thanks to John for giving the interview, and of course for putting so much time into Friends 3.0 itself. Stay tuned for the beta’s release later today!

There have been three new Steam releases announced in the past few days, beginning with Darwinia last Tuesday. Introversion Software’s seminal genre-buster saw almost universal praise from critics but sold poorly, not least because it lacked any form of distribution in America. After near-bankruptcy and an underwhelming response to offering downloads for those purchasing through their site, Introversion are getting ready to begin a Steam distribution deal. I spoke to Tom Arundel, Introversion’s accountant and the man responsible for Darwinia’s upcoming localisations and the existing Mac and Linux ports.

Hello, and thanks for taking part in this interview. I’ll start off with the biggest question for your existing community right now: will those of us who have already bought Darwinia be able to register our boxed copies to our Steam accounts?

No. That would be a logistical nightmare – think about it!

Secondly, does your new agreement cover Darwinia only? Or will past and future Introversion titles be distributed on Steam as well?

Currently it’s only Darwinia, but I wouldn’t rule out other Introversion games coming out on Steam. Let’s see how Darwinia does amongst Steam customers first…

Will your new relationship with Valve lead to any new content, features or improvements to any of your games?

Certainly, the multiplayer features of the Steam system take the pain away from matching up players to multiplayer servers, so that’s something we’d like to make more use of in the future. Also, since we now have the distribution, localised versions will also be developed, starting with German for release, and French in the new year…

So we are going to be seeing multi-player games from Introversion?

Yes. We have design docs for a multiplayer version of Darwinia – we’re currently scheduling the work / release. We also have a new multiplayer game coming out in Spring that we’ll be talking more about in the new year.

Can you explain the month-long wait before Darwinia is made available?

Green diamonds represent the souls of deceased Darwinians.

Few people outside of the UK know about Darwinia. Despite our best efforts, US gaming magazines etc really haven’t picked it up. Therefore we need to build up some PR awareness first. Naturally this takes time! We’re also working on a German version of Darwinia (ready day 1) which also takes time to complete.

Darwinia will of course be promoted though Steam. But will we see external advertising campaigns as well?

Lots of PR. Money spent on PR is always better spent when you can capture attention. We’re a bit off the wall and represent a bit more than just a machine that spits out games every 2 months. We also have some silly stunts planned for the new year

Finally, do you expect to see more sales from existing Steam users, or from those who sign up especially to buy the game?

Well, you’d like to think that at least some of those 6 million existing customers would be interested in the game! We also expect some new customers to sign up to steam in order to buy Darwinia. As for who buys more – can’t really say – guess it depends on the cross-over of existing FPS customers.

Thanks again to Introversion for taking part in the interview!