The Steam Review

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Mythic Entertainment's first digital distribution foray, the release of Darkness Rising, an expansion pack to their Dark Age of Camelot MMO, has come a cropper.

From File Rush News:

"Mythic Entertainment, like any other newcomer to the digital distribution scene, could do nothing but look on in awe as both their BitTorrent and direct download hosts were flooded with users after upping their fourth retail expansion to "Live" status on Tuesday...Fileburst (their direct download host) ran extremely low on bandwidth and users received corrupt installation files after trying to download the game via BitTorrent."

If anything, this teaches us the valuable lesson that established and proven systems (Steam or otherwise) are not to be sniffed at when converting a popular title to DD, particuarly a MMO where players are so active.

A short post today. This week's news update has revealed that Zombie Movie, a short (10min) comedy film produced by two Valve employees, one current and one former, will be released over Steam following its premier at Screamfest LA. While this is an interesting experiment from a socioeconomic viewpoint, at 10 minutes and for only one film it seems unlikely that we'll see any technology beyond a seld-contained Bink .exe used, similar to how Half-Life 2's E3 2003 videos were handled. No mention was made of whether the short would be free or for a small price.

TSR's analysis of Steam's new UI won't be posted until the site has moved to Wordpress.

Long story short, I'm moving TSR to Wordpress and hopefully a domain of its own. If anyone is interested in helping out with hosting the blog (images optional, minor advertising acceptable), e-mail me at steamreview@btinternet.com.

Traffic stats are available.

Some late news today: it seems that Steam’s new UI is being extended to packages, too. Late last month Doug Valentine quietly revealed that the current Half-Life 2 packages are to be changed shortly – though what too, not even he knows.

“The package offers offered on Steam are Scheduled to change shortly. There will *NOT* be upgrades to / from specific previously owned packages. There will be a way to fill out the games you don't currently own by buying them individually. The pricing has not been announced yet…[and] I do not have any details at this point (that means don't PM me to beg for info ;-)).”

Being able to purchase games individually (without each one requiring its own package, we can assume) is undoubtedly related to the new Browse Games structure and ties in neatly with the goal of getting Steam ready to handle a larger library.

Gamecloud have posted an early interview with Greg Costikyan and Johnny Wilson on Manifesto Games.

“Gamecloud - There are already a number of ways independents can release games: Valve is beginning to do so with its Steam system, GarageGames has its system and Stardock has its system among many others. What will set Manifesto Games apart from these ventures?

Greg Costikyan - Sure... and actually, we hope to work with GarageGames and Stardock. Building a viable independent games industry requires more than one company.”

While Gamecloud should be congratulated for covering digital distribution as much as it has, be aware that the interview, while informative, isn’t exactly earth-shattering.

Steam 3.0’s gradual approach continues, with news of a large visual update covering the Browse Games interface and more at some point before October the 12th. Erik Johnson had this to say on the hlcoders mailing list:

“We're getting ready to release a fairly significant overhaul of the look and feel of Steam, ahead of the release of Rag Doll Kung Fu. Part of this release is going to give individual games more space for people to see screenshots and information about individual games, including MODs.

Currently if you go to the Third Party Games area of the Steam store you'll see a listing of the most popular MODs currently being played, along with a text description and a couple of screenshots. You can also get to this web page directly by going here:

http://storefront.steampowered.com/3rdparty.php

What would be really helpful would be for any MOD that is currently listed on this page to put together some of this material and send it on to me. What we need is:

1. A short 50 words or less description of the game.
2. 5 screenshots in .jpg format to include. The width of the screenshots can be no greater that 1024px, but the aspect ratio is up to you.

Once you have these together, .zip up all of the materials and e-mail them to me and we'll make sure this gets into the update coming up.”

The update is ‘mostly a visual overhaul’ to ‘accommodate the release of more products’ and won’t contain many major code upgrades such as the new version of Friends. It’s not hard to come up with ways of improving the current system, though Valve requesting five images would suggest that each game now has its own unique page.

Don’t think the update is entirely a sideline to 3.0: it ‘falls under the umbrella of some of the next set of things [Valve] are working on for Steam’. Erik continues:

“Along those lines, we're pretty actively thinking about/working on a distribution system that will work for free content. It's not far enough along to give out too many details, but it's something that should be pretty useful for MOD developers.”

This is of slightly more substance. Previously I would have guessed at a new heading in Play Games, ‘Community Games’ or similar, to hold mods distributed using the existing framework. This comment suggests things are going slightly further however, perhaps somewhere near Resource Packs. Alternatively it could be something as mundane as a P2P connection manager to download free content without bothering the main content servers – let’s hope not.

It’s also worth pointing out another feature suggestion that has caught Valve’s eye in the past. Even though there’s been no suggestion of its inclusion beyond ‘we’ll keep it in mind’, Lunchtimemama’s updated Play Games interface may well be introduced in part or in whole with the update.

More news as it arrives. Infodumps are available on the Steam Forums, or through the hlcoders mailing list.

Greg Costikyan today revealed his new digital distribution venture: Manifesto Games. After spending several years ‘ranting’ through various mediums, Costikyan has quit his comfortable job at Nokia to start up Manifesto with Dr. Johnny L. Wilson, a games journalist, novelist, and believe it or not ordained minister.

Manifesto is already aimed squarely at the indie market. While Steam and to a lesser extent xStream both focus on modern titles instead of back catalogues neither of them are particularly suitable for indie games, which are typically small (little point in using xStream) and single-player (little point in using Steam)*.

Given this I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect a web-based portal, perhaps also embedded in a client application like WMP10 music stores or the Browse Games portion of Steam. It is far too early to speculate any further however – we must wait and see how Manifesto pans out.

Which brings us neatly on to the fact that Greg is blogging it all for public consumption. This openness looks set to extend further and define Manifesto’s business ideology, one that will fit very well into both the indie market, not to mention the company’s ensuing anti-corporate stance. Whether this means we will see Manifesto’s portal DRM-less is questionable: not only would such a move arguably prove the company’s ruin should it take off, but also, during his otherwise hard-hitting (perhaps overly hard) GDC speech, DRM was described as ‘solvable’ rather than needing to be ‘blown up’. We’ll see.

Whatever happens to Manifesto over the course of the year, there is no doubt that it is worth keeping an eye on, and a welcome third player into the progressive DD circle.

*RDKF, although indie, defies both conditions.