But in the Eurozone prices have rocketed thanks to Valve’s conversion of $1 to €1, despite the dollar’s actual worth of €0.72. A dystopian future at best, this 28% increase is offset slightly by the inclusion of VAT in listed prices, though even the unusually large levies of 25% in Denmark and Sweden don’t account for the entire hike.

Valve haven’t given any particular reason for the move, but there are several potential triggers. Foremost is the likelihood that Steam’s sales have simply reached a volume at which it becomes economic to flex some financial muscles: Newell predicted in May this year that Steam would start to account for the majority of Valve’s sales over the summer.

Good Old Games also deserve mention for introducing a $6 price point for over half their catalogue, which has significant overlap with Steam (Valve’s equivalent price is £3/€5). Valve may feel that gamers ought to be shielded from the world’s increasingly unstable exchange rates, or perhaps it’s as simple as that the new code was checked in for testing?

The numbers

Speculation isn’t going to achieve much, so let’s take a look at the actual figures. Highlights can be seen to the right: most games have been automatically converted, but Valve also gave clients the opportunity to set their own prices and quite a few have taken the offer up.

Some of the resulting reductions are incredible, particularly those given to FlatOut, Bioshock and Civilization III — FlatOut in particular, which is now far, far cheaper on Steam than it is at most retail outlets, even though it was released to solid review scores in August.

But note Empire: Total War and World of Goo, which both went up in price all over Europe. 2D Boy’s defence of Goo’s prices is unsurprising: “our agreement with our European retail publisher obligates us not to undercut retail prices,” Ron Carmel told me. “No publisher would sign a retail deal without ensuring that.” Sega’s excuse is almost certainly the same.

The situation in Europe

There’s a pretty obvious trend here. France and continental Europe as a whole has suffered, while the UK stands alone in benefiting. Posters on the Steam forums believe that this places “Valv€” in breach of EU anti-competition law (specifically Article 82), and they may well be right, though precisely where the buck would stop in that situation is a murky matter I don’t much care to tackle.

It’s not hard to imagine how localised, tax-inclusive pricing became a bad thing for most. Artificial inflation of Steam prices is the last manifestation of that legacy bottleneck known as retail, and I’m actually quite surprised that any one region has been able to escape it at all.

Indeed the UK may prove to be an experiment (Valve are working on “fixing” prices elsewhere in Europe), one made expedient by our continuing use of a separate currency. It’s certainly hard to imagine Amazon UK agreeing to Steam undercutting them on most games; they’ve discounted many since Valve’s new prices came in, but none very far. Postage and packaging typically undo their efforts unless the customer buys in bulk.

Whether this supposed experiment will spread clearly depends on its reception in the UK, from both buyers and retailers. Alas we are unlikely to ever hear retailer’s reactions, save for sugar-coated assurances from their PR departments, and Steam’s top seller list is international. But with classics like Arx Fatalis and Civ3 selling for £3 it’s well worth spending less than the cost of a takeaway making a statement in favour. Not to mention picking up some great games!

(But beware: as I’ve discovered, Steam’s version of Civ3 is incompatible with Vista.)

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.

The Valve Hardware survey was reset for the seventh time yesterday. This time archives of all the previous surveys have also been made available, going right the way back to March 2004!

I’ll leave any comparisons to statisticians. What drew my eye more was the “Installed Packages” result that is now tagged onto the end of Survey seven’s results. It reports that Firefox is installed on my system — why I don’t know but, having recently started browsing the Steam Community with Firefox instead of solely with Steam’s embedded IE control, can take a hopeful guess at. Pretty please…

Has anyone seen any other packages appear in their results?

It seems like this gets at least one mention every month. It’s a bit of relief to see that it still exists! The Steam Community’s voice chat is carried over Steam’s new BitTorrent-based P2P network, and the separation of the binaries that work that little bit of magic (into bin/p2pcore.dll and bin/p2pvoice.dll) strongly suggests that we’ll be seeing more applications of the technology at a later date.

Some further findings from Steam’s new files:

• Use the VGUI Editor (Ctrl+Alt+B) on the Downloads page in Settings and you’ll CSubPanelOptionsP2P. Use the ‘Select Control’ combo box to select and make visible the P2P controls it contains.
• A #Steam_P2P_SharingColumnLabel_hidden label for the current Media tab is to be found in config/dialogconfig.vdf. For sharing mod trailers, right?
• The public/P2PDetailPage.res dialogue includes a tracker field. Could refer either to community trackers for mod content, or official regional trackers that can be switched between.
• “VST” appears in public\P2PMetaDataPage.res‘s CP2PVstKeyValuesListPanel. Sitting alongside VMT, VDF, VCD and other keyvalue-based Valve file formats, it somehow seems unlikely that this three-letter acronym starting with V has anything to do with Virtual Studio Technology. “Valve Sharing Tracker” perhaps? (Better suggestion from the comments: Valve Steam Torrent.)

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!

Support for Steam on Windows 98 and Windows ME operating systems will end on June 30th 2007. This means you will no longer be able to run Steam.

In order to continue running Steam on this computer, you must upgrade to a newer version of Microsoft Windows.

An automatic update increasing the requirements of a game (let alone the platform itself!) was one of the first fears to develop when Steam was released to the public. While it’s true that according to the Valve Hardware Survey only 1 631 or 0.14% of all Steam users still have Windows 98 (Windows ME isn’t listed), those one thousand and six hundred people, a few of whom are complaining on the forums, will shortly have their currently perfectly functional software rendered useless unless and until they upgrade their systems.

Single-player gamers with pre-Steam boxes will be able to continue running their Half-Life 1-era titles, albeit with very outdated builds, or try to remember never to start Steam while online. Online players and everyone who bought the game in stores after its Steam re-launch, or on Steam itself, will have no realistic choice but to buy a new operating system.

While a more significant 11 876 or 1.03% users don’t have SSE, it isn’t unreasonable to assume that most of them will be playing Half-Life 1-based games on very old systems — SSE being a standard feature in all even vaguely modern processors.

Of wider interest is what could be happening on 30 June to actively exclude older operating systems. Vista support comes to mind: Microsoft’s recent code libraries have many features unsupported by pre-NT versions of Windows. A new authentication system is another possibility, although relying on OS components would almost certainly break Steam’s long-maintained — and in this age of rootkits and hardware layers thoroughly commendable — OS-independence.