Thursday, June 16, 2005
xStream
I haven’t commented much on xStream yet, as it’s competition with Steam is over before it reaches the end user. The showdown happens in the realm of developers, something I don’t have the experience to talk about with much authority – so I will be brief.
xStream isn’t as far ahead of Steam as it likes to think. DiStream are making the understandable mistake (or clever tactic, depending on your viewpoint) of looking at Half-Life 2 when they make their judgements and thanks to the overzealous in some areas and decidedly slack in others implementation HL2 saw Steam comes away in a bad light. This is both because of the Valve-VU contract and negligence on Valve’s part, particularly when it comes to the utterly wasted opportunity of content streaming in the game. Steam supports it fully, yet it’s use in HL2 is horribly inefficient and means you must have a ridiculous 59% of the game downloaded to play. Steam is better than this, only nobody knows it because the only major release they have to go on is the, in this context at least, failure of Half-Life 2.
Naturally such problems do not affect the unproven xStream. People look at Steam and see Half-Life 2, but when they look at xStream they can see the product itself. So even though xStream’s features are not all that much more than Steam’s (or failing that easily emulatable) it ends up smelling sweeter. This is not to say xStream is not an improvement on Steam, it is, but not nearly as much as the public believe.
There’s only one group of people who are responsible for the situation, and they are also the only ones who can fix it. When Valve re-release Half-Life 2 with their new publisher later this year I for one will be waiting with baited breath to see how much has changed.
The other point of interest is that xStream and Steam take a minimalist and maximalist approach to distribution respectively. Steam could feasibly do anything xStream can, but xStream is a nearly invisible layer while Steam is very much up there in the frontend. So in fact what I said at the beginning of this entry might be wrong: they aren’t competing at all. Single-player titles would be able to do everything they needed efficiently with xStream, but games with anything approaching a major multiplayer element would get more bang for their buck with Steam (especially if this sort of stuff went ahead).
This is of course the best possible arrangement. If (if) both systems play to their different strengths instead of fighting over the same targets the AAA online distribution scene will present a more varied face and do better against the real competitor, retail only releases.
xStream isn’t as far ahead of Steam as it likes to think. DiStream are making the understandable mistake (or clever tactic, depending on your viewpoint) of looking at Half-Life 2 when they make their judgements and thanks to the overzealous in some areas and decidedly slack in others implementation HL2 saw Steam comes away in a bad light. This is both because of the Valve-VU contract and negligence on Valve’s part, particularly when it comes to the utterly wasted opportunity of content streaming in the game. Steam supports it fully, yet it’s use in HL2 is horribly inefficient and means you must have a ridiculous 59% of the game downloaded to play. Steam is better than this, only nobody knows it because the only major release they have to go on is the, in this context at least, failure of Half-Life 2.
Naturally such problems do not affect the unproven xStream. People look at Steam and see Half-Life 2, but when they look at xStream they can see the product itself. So even though xStream’s features are not all that much more than Steam’s (or failing that easily emulatable) it ends up smelling sweeter. This is not to say xStream is not an improvement on Steam, it is, but not nearly as much as the public believe.
There’s only one group of people who are responsible for the situation, and they are also the only ones who can fix it. When Valve re-release Half-Life 2 with their new publisher later this year I for one will be waiting with baited breath to see how much has changed.
The other point of interest is that xStream and Steam take a minimalist and maximalist approach to distribution respectively. Steam could feasibly do anything xStream can, but xStream is a nearly invisible layer while Steam is very much up there in the frontend. So in fact what I said at the beginning of this entry might be wrong: they aren’t competing at all. Single-player titles would be able to do everything they needed efficiently with xStream, but games with anything approaching a major multiplayer element would get more bang for their buck with Steam (especially if this sort of stuff went ahead).
This is of course the best possible arrangement. If (if) both systems play to their different strengths instead of fighting over the same targets the AAA online distribution scene will present a more varied face and do better against the real competitor, retail only releases.
