Speedball 2 Tournament will be available via Steam at the end of November 2007 and in stores this fall. The retail disc will use the same authentication technology used for Valve’s The Orange Box. Valve’s authentication technology enables Frogster [Interactive, Speedball 2's publishers] to use a single master for multiple languages, to time retail activation worldwide by region, and to control grey marketing and unauthorized activations.

The release is also the first time Valve have explicitly promoted Steam to publishers. This wasn’t done for the big fish like Activision or Take2, so it’s reasonable to conclude that they’re looking to attract smaller outfits now. It would certainly be a sensible move: exclusivity deals like this one are good business that larger companies would never agree to.

The press release also talks about the tournaments, leagues, clans, global leaderboards and matchmaking that are major features for Speedball 2. Hopefully these will be compatible with the Steam Community, but the release doesn’t go out of its way to suggest they will and with less than a month to go until release things don’t look too hopeful. Still, we may be surprised.

Steam is to begin selling music “in the coming weeks”, starting with the OST from Valve’s Orange Box.

So far the success of “Still Alive” can be measured only in indirect ways like word of mouth or the 149 comments on Coulton’s blog post about the song. Valve marketing director Doug Lombardi told me that the song will be released early this week on Valve’s Steam download service as well as through the iTunes alternative TuneCore. It will also be included on “The Orange Box” soundtrack which Lombardi said will be sold on Steam “in the coming weeks.”

I don’t think it’s likely that Steam is going to become a full fledged music store any time soon, and the songs on offer are unlikely to ever extend beyond soundtracks. But even within a targeted remit like that, how much commercial demand can there be? If you own a game you already have access to all of its songs (even if they take a bit of getting at), and, with the possible exception of Still Alive, there isn’t much music from games that would interest anyone who’s never played the title it came from.

It could be that enabling purchases was so easy that Valve decided to go ahead and do it anyway — or it could be that they intend to charge people again to download music that they already own. After the non-arrival of the Black Box package on Steam, I’m not as inclined to dismiss the latter as I once was…

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.

Valve are trying to convert existing retail customers to Steam.

This is clearly a move designed to let Valve undercut retailers by organising the availability of a clutch of highly-anticipated games online and offline, as happened at Half-Life 2′s launch when Steam’s Silver package gave far better value for money than retail options.

In this case, Valve are circumventing retailer’s hold over minimum prices: stores can easily refuse to stock a product if it’s being sold for less online, but refusing to stock a different pack because a theoretically less valuable one is being sold cheaper elsewhere might not go down so well with shareholders.

The reverse effect of retailers undercutting Steam is also undoubtedly on Valve’s mind, as they lost a great deal of face when Episode One was sold on the high street and at e-tailers for less than its Steam price on day one. Will shops be willing or even able to cut prices enough to compete with a now unencumbered Steam? I doubt it. Unless you want HL2 or Episode One too, Episode Two’s package, I predict, is going to be cheap.

This will also be a marketing experiment for Valve: what proportion of their cornered market of Half-Life 2 and Episode One owners will they be able to convert into Episode Two buyers? It will be a measure of their confidence whether or not we see any advertising for the Steam package outside Update News items.

I’m pretty excited about finally getting some display drivers – the ATI announcement included that – where rather than having the situation they have right now where they literally tens, close to hundreds of display drivers out there on people’s machines, that everybody will have the most current, the most up-to-date driver, automatic bug-reporting and things like that. That’s a nice step forward.

As far as I’m aware the current Catalyst drivers don’t have a bug reporting system, meaning that the version that will be distributed over Steam has been integrated (or at least customised) to some extent. The download’s management, what with drivers being system tools that can’t realistically reside in SteamApps, may also break some new ground.

Looking at the hardware survey, there are tens of thousands of people playing with drivers over three years out of date! Many will have older hardware not supported by newer driver releases, but there are sure to be a fair chunk of gamers with old drivers holding back their performance and stability who will benefit from ATI’s decision.

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.