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.

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.

Gabe Newell gave a presentation at the Showdown LAN event the other day (thanks Greg), which seems to have focused on the Steam Community. Fortunately for us someone had a camera, but don’t get too excited: there’s nothing particularly remarkable yet. There are surprises, like global voice support handled by Steam itself and support for external games, but otherwise it’s what you might expect from a post-Xbox Live community system.

Gabe’s release estimate is this summer July, before the launch of Team Fortress 2 and the Orange Box.

Gabe’s slides

The “Steam Identity”

Create Profile and Home page

Preferences

Affiliation

Statistics

Control Panel

Public versus private

Schedule

Real-time status

Revamped all the communications function to make it easier to play with your friends

Find a friend

See who’s online or playing

Invite Friends to chat or play

Join a friend’s game

“Communications”

Instant Messaging, integrated voice (finally), and chat rooms

Works with non-Steam games

“Affiliation”

Join or create new groups

Scheduling/Organizing tournaments and matches

Back in 1996, two Microsoft executives quit their spectacularly high-paid jobs, formed a games company and made the best game ever. Twice.

They didn’t like the way retailers were throttling the industry’s creativity, so they cut them out. They did like what a lot of mod teams were doing, so they hired them. They published any game they liked through their digital distribution network, however commercially risky, and saved several independent developers in the process. Their revolution was so successful that today, major publishers like Eidos and Atari come to them to sell their games online. Now they’re gearing up to do it again, by turning Steam into a giant gaming community.

The teaser’s headlines:

• Free.
• “One-click matchmaking, both for new games and existing ones such as Counter-Strike. You’ll be able to jump straight into a game with players of your skill level, with no history of griefing, by pressing a single button.”
• A Halo 2-inspired party/clan system. “[Group] members can see when others are playing a game, join them, or schedule a match for a specific date and time. They’ll also have a dedicated chat channel to talk to each other on regardless of what game they’re playing, even between rounds.”
• “A personal gamer page that’s accessible via the web, with embarrassingly detailed stats about what you play, how much you play it, and what kind of player you are.”

Details are due at some point this week in PC Gamer UK, though whether they will be in the print or online edition first, or both at once, isn’t clear.

Turns out that the Steam interview won’t be published in print until 7 June — hopefully it’ll appear online before then!

It didn’t make the June 7th issue either. I will definitely have the details next month though, regardless of PCG!

Left 4 Dead will punish disruptive players.

Left 4 Dead 411‘s excellent preview dedicates an entire page to the new system, explaining how it works to provide both real-time feedback and scoreboard summaries. As can be expected, the game’s badges encourage co-operation between Survivor players:

There are three kinds of awards: Achievements, which include difficult goals like surviving a map without dying; Awards, which are good things you do, such as reviving a teammate, giving away a health kit to someone in need, and saving someone from a zombie about to attack them from behind; and Demerits/Faults, which are bad things which include blowing up a Boomer near teammates, friendly fire, angering the Witch, and jumping in front of someone else’s bullets (reckless). There are a ton of these achievements, ranging from being an Expert Headhunter to completing an entire campaign without using the flashlight at all.

From what we hear in IGN’s Team Fortress 2 interview however, its badges are more personal. This may be because we haven’t heard about the teamplay ones, or perhaps because it’s harder for a computer to accurately detect its particular brand of teamwork. Either way, personal bests will pay a prominent part:

We do a huge amount of stat gathering, like the thing [IGN] saw with the persistent stats stuff, where the game is identifying how well you’re doing and rewarding you for it saying “hey check it out! On that run where you thought you did well, guess what? You did well, you broke this record!” So we gather all that data and use it for game tuning. Steam does that for us for free.

The Achievement game

Badges clearly owe much to Xbox Live’s Achievements, Games For Windows Live will be a competitor to Steam’s online gaming service mechanisms, and (if you read the previews in full) Valve are making a concerted push to build more accessible online games. These are not unrelated facts.

Microsoft’s web services are very well established and easy to use.

Live is a success for many reasons, and Achievements are a large one. It’s fun to play games on the Xbox 360, but each purchase, at retail or from Live Arcade, is a macro-transaction (to mangle a phrase) in the social, gotta-earn-them-all Achievement meta-game. It’s Microsoft brand social glue, working in a similar way to MySpace and other such sites: you do something, then talk about it among your friends, by way if you so desire of your summarised Gamercard. The easter egg nature of many Achievements makes finding your trophies all the more fun, and the expansion of gold farmers into Gamerscore padding should give some indication of how much store people place in their record.

I’ve had a hunch that Valve would be gearing Steam up to better compete with GFWL for some time now. Badges aren’t conclusive evidence that Steam is being repositioned, but it’s fair to say that it would be a waste for them to be used strictly for ranking players and votekicking. The biggest challenge is redistributing the data widely and in a way understandable to the average user; and to compound things, Microsoft have set the bar very high.

No matter how much talent is thrown at them however (Valve have been and are still hiring web application developers and user experience designers), badges are facing the fact that the potential for their social use is limited by Steam’s paucity of the core games that would be needed to keep them fresh and relevant.

It’s come, it’s gone, it’s come back again. Eurogamer have now confirmed that a “bespoke matchmaking system” is in development for Turtle Rock’s Summer 2007 Left 4 Dead.

As a four-player co-operative game, L4D clearly needs to regulate the people playing with each other in the public server space. With the increased intimacy from your team-mates being close by at all times there is very little room for poor players — in both senses of the word.

Although perhaps at first only Left 4 Dead and RACE (which we can say with reasonable confidence was planned to ship with a version) will make use of the system, other games are sure to benefit; Arkane’s enigmatic The Crossing is bound to have an unusual use for it in particular.