The Steam Review

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.

Research firm Screen Digest have published a report on videogame digital distribution, titled with typical think-tank flair as Digital Distribution of Games. The 87 page report costs £995 and judging by the contents listing covers just about everything there is to know about the financial and business side of the practice, from CCP Games to splitting revenue. For those of us who don’t have that sort of money in our back pockets, an extremely brief overview of the paper’s conclusions is provided both on the splash page itself and in the press release: it predicts ‘strong and constant’ growth until 2010, at which point the market is expected to be worth over $400m.

A section of the press release also appears to be the report’s introduction, and it is reproduced below.

“Towards the end of the 1990s, when the world was gripped in Internet-based business fever, industry commentators were heralding the potential of digital distribution for games, and estimating that within a few years it would have a significant impact on the make up of the industry's supply chain. Fast forward to the mid-point of 2005 and although these predictions have yet to materialise, over the last 12 months the market has shown signs of getting into its stride, and has produced a number of noteworthy success stories in both the download and Games on Demand sectors.

The digital distribution market is made up of two key segments, digital download and streaming, also known as Games on Demand (GoD). Whereas digital download is the direct, retailer-to-consumer distribution of games via the Internet under an outright (or, occasionally, subscription) purchase model, GoD is a broadband-only service where games application data is downloaded to a user's PC on a continual basis as and when needed. Games are never downloaded in their entirety although – depending on the technology used – significant portions of the game tend to be cached (pre-loaded) on the user's PC to improve the efficiency of the application streaming process. GoD offerings are normally subscription-based.

There are a few major trends which characterise the market at the mid-point of 2005. Significantly, most available premium game content is PC-based and appeals to a narrower consumer segment than mainstream console platforms. Aside from Microsoft's premium content downloads via its Live! service - which accounted for a significant 11% of Western World core download sales in 2004 - console content downloads have yet to emerge. In addition Sony and Microsoft have already dismissed the idea of offering full premium game downloads via their next generation consoles, although add-on content on these platforms is predicted to make a considerable impact in 2006 and onwards.

Another key trend – the lack of publisher and developer support for the sales channel with regards to content availability – has started to dissipate during the last 12-18 months. Although there remains a general reticence to compete with the retail channel, more premium and up-to-date PC titles are available via download and GoD services than ever before.”

Quite why the report differentiates so much between systems that let you play before a download is finished and those that don’t (particularly when Steam can do both) is a mystery that I for one will have to live with.

Pirates of the Burning Sea is, barring any huge secrets, Steam’s first MMORPG. It is also curiously popular with EVE Online players, another factor which make their new beta signups so interesting. The beta is the general public’s first chance to see exactly how Steam handles (or doesn’t!) private betas: unlike the semi-public Counter-Strike: Source Beta, the private system uses secure content servers with SteamID and IP validation to keep things under control. At least one person had long-term problems with the stricter authentication during the private Rag Doll Kung Fu beta, which had ten or twenty participants compared to up to 25 000 for POTBS.

It will also be interesting to see how far ‘beating World of Warcraft’ goes when catalysed by an MMO to work and experiment with.

Lastly, in a familiar pattern Rag Doll Kung Fu it has today been dated for October 12th and priced at $12.95. Are these the predicted vestigial price points? I believe they are, unless Valve are forcing the prices and intend to continue doing so indefinitely.

Shacknews reports Half-Life 2: Aftermath’s price of $12.95, or £7.18. So perhaps existing HL2 prices are being held up for real reasons after all. It’s certainly great to see the platform start to deliver, price-wise, with Rag Doll Kung Fu, Day of Defeat: Source and SiN Episodes also set at sub-$20.

Several pieces of news to report following the weekend. The outlook isn’t good, but there are some positive points.

• Day of Defeat: Source was dated, September 26th, and more importantly to TSR priced, at $20. This means that we won’t be seeing Half-Life 2 Bronze reduced to this value as I theorised here in the foreseeable future. It also means Valve are not passing profit increases on to the customer. Make of that what you will. It is still possible that they are keeping package prices up for external reasons, such as not undercutting retailers, but my eyebrows remain firmly raised.

• Half-Life 2: Game of the Year purchasers found error messages followed by constant crashes after registering their products. Valve support staff Doug Valentine stepped into the breach early on Monday with the unprecedented move of phoning someone who had asked about it, then going on the Steam forums to explain. The whole thing has been a vast improvement over the vague second-hand account given by a likely embarrased and frustrated Tim Holt in the aftermath of Steam’s previous centralised issue, the semi-downtime in early February. A later post of Valentine’s confirmed that the problem had been fixed (by 10AM too), and those affected would find a complimentary copy of Condition Zero on their accounts when they next logged in.

• Related is the unfortunate but somewhat inevitable news that the new, EA manufactured retail boxes still include Steam authentication, even for single-player. The inclusion of authentication for these games makes Valve’s stance on Steam’s use clear. Expect something of more substance on this at some point this week.

• One last detail to note is that the new Half-Life anthology, despite costing $20, only contains Half-Life 1 (with Deathmatch), Opposing Force, Blue Shift, and Team Fortress Classic, whereas a copy of the original Half-Life for $10 or less retail or $20 on Steam will give you the whole back catalogue. This is understandable though, as Day of Defeat is still published by Activision and Deathmatch Classic and Ricochet are hardly worth advertising.

It’s taken Introversion a shockingly long time to get round to it, but nevertheless as of August 26th Darwinia has been downloadable worldwide from their official store. At 32MB and still without a publishing deal in America and probably many other major countries outside their native UK, I would have thought the guys would have jumped at the chance – not get around to it six months later! To make things even less logical, downloading is only available if you order a physical copy at extra expense to both you and Introversion.

I should add though that you ought not let any of these inconsistencies put you off. Darwinia is brilliant, and exactly what everyone is talking about when they complain about Generic Sports Title #23 being re-released and the need for something fresher. Your last excuse to miss out just disappeared.

Greg Costikyan’s two-part epic Death to the Games Industry: Long Live Games concludes in this week’s edition of the online magazine The Escapist. While part one dealt with the well-established notion of the industry’s creativity-hobbling state part two focuses on solutions, or rather the solution. It is, of course, digital distribution.

Although as you read the piece it becomes clear that what he describes is either already in existence or coming to fruition as Steam, and even though Rag Doll Kung Fu is one of his examples, mention of the service is not made. Neither is mention made of xStream or GameTap (see sidebar for links) nor any other large-scale distribution platform. Costikyan is solely interested in indie games. Indeed, the tongue-in-cheek slogan for a hypothetical indie focused Steam equivalent is “Corporate games suck”.

Which helps lead me to an important point that is perhaps outside the scope of Costikyan’s argument. If casual/indie games are so good at making money, why would anyone bother making AAA titles? For the love of doing so is the obvious answer, but let us not forget that an enormous chunk of games are packaged goods commissioned by EA in the name of profit. These corporate heavyweights may not hold as much of an advantage online as they do in the two-week retail sales window but that isn’t going to stop them leveraging their huge customer base. Bundling casual games and a link to their online portal with retail titles or even going so far as producing a dedicated SKU packed full of them would quickly swamp the market. Perhaps this will be EA’s ‘similar approach to Steam’.

It would be a strange irony indeed if indie games, seemingly perfectly suited to digital distribution, were monopolised because of it.

A post on the halflife2.net forums has revealed some more 3.0 news. It will feature true autoupdates, where the client doesn’t even have to be restarted to receive one (discounting updates to Steam itself, of course). Interestingly enough, this was originally a feature anyway, though I don’t personally recall how well it worked.

It is ‘one of many reasons’ for which 3.0 moves away from the ‘connectionless approach’ 1.0 and 2.0 had – i.e., the client doesn’t maintain a constant connection. You can see this yourself: load Steam, run netstat, then wait a short while and run netstat again. Maintaining a persistent session is presumably at least part of the architectural solution to Friends’ instability mentioned in last week’s interview.

Friday marked the final day of 1UP’s Valve week, with the feature’s climax being an interview with Gabe Newell. Frustratingly, the Steam segment is split between the two video files.

• Video 1 - Gabe Newell Takes on the Industry


• Video 2 - Gabe Newell on Next-Gen Frustrations

This article will consist of a transcript of the interview followed by an analysis of its implications.

Transcript
Sections unrelated to Steam removed

Video 1
Changing the Game: Episodic Content via Steam (7:18)

Newell: “There were two big, painful periods for Steam. One was when it went from being optional to be the way that everybody needed to get updates, that was pretty painful for people. And then the Half-Life 2 launch where we got swamped with not having enough capacity. Those are both painful memories for us. At least right now we’re not setting anybody on fire: we seem to be getting updates out on a really regular basis…that process [is] really smooth right now.

Right now we’re rearchitecturing Steam. People are actually running two versions of Steam right now – they might not realise that but they are running Steam 2 and Steam 3 alongside each other. The nice thing about having a system like this is there’s no reason not to have your old system and new system co-exist while you’re migrating functionality from one to the other.

One of the problems we had was architectural problems that made Friends unreliable, and so the new version’s approach to connections and how it manages connections should make Friends a lot more reliable. So just from a technical perspective it’s evolving, and from a not-annoying-the-hell-out-of-our-customers perspective I think we’re out of that hole. It’s certainly turned out to be a great way to sell products: we were worried that people might not want to purchase products that way and now that’s not really a concern of ours.”

Video 2

“I think what we have to do is continue to look for ways to make Steam more valuable to people, to solve problems for people. There are huge numbers of support problems that we can just make go away by proactively solving them, but [for example] we still aren’t getting display drivers out to people automatically which makes me crazy. One of the biggest problems out customers have is that they don’t have an automatic update facility for display drivers, and it’s been obvious for a couple of years that that needs to happen, yet we still don’t have that.”

Steam is the Future: The Next-Gen Headache

(2:03) “When I look at what I need to compete with, the most interesting game property right now is World of Warcraft. Huge retail sales and huge recurring revenue, and not only that but they have a great experience wrapped around them, whether it’s their forums or community art or whatever. They’re not only getting their customers to play the game, they’re getting their customers to make the experience more valuable for other people who play the game. So I’ll go off and download music and watch the movies that people have created and see fan art and all these other things: when I look at what a platform needs to help a software developer do right now, it’s figure out how to beat World of Warcraft. And when I look at the strategies that are being put forward by Microsoft on the systems side, the Xbox side, Sony, or Nintendo, they’re not making my life easier.

The Playstation 3 makes my life as a software developer much harder…[parallelism] was not a problem that we were lying awake late at night for, saying ‘oh, we would really like to take this on right now’. We were worried about little things like billing, and forums, and Wikis, things like that…Steam, essentially, was ‘here’s a set of tools that software developers need, focused on solving the problems we have with this next generation of games’. Billing, updates, product support, connecting our customers together, things like that. I would think that for a lot of developers things like Steam are going to be more interesting and will solve more problems for them than this next generation of hardware and operating system platforms.

The [Sega] Saturn came out and that was intended to take this previous generation of games and create this super-complicated chunk of hardware that would help you make the ultimate sprite-orientated game. Then Sony came along and said ‘no no no, it’s not a sprite problem any more, it’s a 3D graphics problem’. I think that a lot of developers are going to say [to the next generation] ‘that’s not the problem, that’s another Sega Saturn’. What we really need are [solutions to] ‘how do we connect to our customers, get updates to our customers, have closer relationships’. ‘How do we compete with the customer experience that you get out of being a WOW customer’ more than ‘how do we blast another set of pixels at what is essentially a 640 by 480 screen’.”

Steam vs. World of Warcraft
Gabe’s interview gives us the new or newly invigorated Steam strategy: to help developers make games, not game technology. It is a plan is in direct opposition to that of the upcoming consoles. Hardware independent, with little to no additional workload and the opportunity to oust the middlemen, Steam is to become even more the platform developers, not publishers, want in the next generation.

In the most general of terms Valve want to achieve this by ‘making Steam more valuable to people’, and Gabe identifies two key areas where this will be attempted. The first and largest is what he terms the ‘customer experience’ – the parts of the community a player experiences; everything about the game except the game. Steam can’t make your title interesting, but it can emulate the many of the MMORPG characteristics that help make World of Warcraft’s customer experience so compelling without you actually making one.

Chief amongst these is communication, both player to player and thanks to the direct and constant link to them player to developer. Friends, when it works, is the clearest example of Steam’s inter-player communication – anyone anywhere anytime, including from single-player games and the desktop – while Valve’s weekly Update News items are examples of player-developer contact and the HL2:CTF matches between Valve and the mod’s developers the first sign of attempts to merge the two. Also attempting to bridge the gap are Ritual, who look set to take a slightly different approach with their community-based outcomes for SiN Episodes, where the in-game decisions a player makes count as a vote towards what will happen in future releases.

The second area is one where Steam has a distinct advantage given it’s status as a background app as opposed to a self-contained game like WOW. The idea of driver autoupdates hark back to Steam’s inception when it was claimed that both ATi and nVidia were ready to use Steam to deliver their software. The deals fell though (probably due to the atrocious state of the network back then) but now it seems they are back on the agenda. The reasoning behind such a feature is reducing the support burden of people with outdated video card drivers, something Valve do in their own territory with a brief version check before a Source game runs. This proactive approach to troubleshooting is to be expanded to cover Steam itself, with a future feature to diagnose as many identifiable problems as possible, and beyond.

The two big assumptions with this take on the industry are that developers think like Gabe does, and that customers think like Gabe does. The latter isn’t as big an issue as you might expect, with Steam changing market perceptions and introducing a try-before-you-buy model that is available and immediate to every customer. Nobody will browse to the Steam store and pick a game based on its screenshot and blurb like they would at a retailer – they will download the demo first, assuming it exists, and get a taste of the actual game.

Developers, too, are a surprisingly small problem. Those who are or become interested in Steam have already abandoned the system where pretty screenshots alone sell games, and surely in many cases will have abandoned the system where the resources to make those pretty screenshots are available to them. All that’s left to do is make the games.

So we’ve talked about what Valve are doing in the future, but have yet to touch on how. I’ve already made it clear what I think should happen, and if you will excuse my self-indulgence now is the time to look at the evidence and try to predict what will happen. There are many possible moves that are in the spirit of Gabe’s words, but I will keep the list solely to what I can pin on something that has already happened or been announced. Confirmed features will also been omitted.

3rd-Party Plug-ins
“I think what we have to do is continue to look for ways to make Steam…solve problems for people.”

Valve can’t solve the problems they don’t know about, but the chances are the people who are having them can. Besides problem solving, allowing plugins increases Steam’s value to plug-in users and generates a whole new community around their development. It is also a natural use for VGUI – if nothing else plug-in support would allow future mods to extend to the desktop, useful for persistent worlds. While plug-ins may create a security risk, it is worth noting that mods are essentially engine plug-ins but pose no such threat to Source. Nevertheless plug-ins would be a large step, one that is unlikely to be taken in one stride.

More mod adoptions and map additions
“They’re not only getting their customers to play the game, they’re getting their customers to make the experience more valuable for other people who play the game.”

Where Blizzard has fan fiction and homemade videos of a character’s epic quest, Valve has mods and maps. Both already fill the brief of increasing value, but only to those who go out and find them. Steam is made for bringing Valve’s content to a gamer’s desktop and according to this new outlook, the community’s content is just as important. The HL2DM map contest shows that Valve are not opposed to the idea of taking on others’ maps, and the Natural Selection and Sven Co-op mod teams are already known to have been approached with offers of adoption.

Official ‘Add-Ons’

Add-On is a new term coined at the release of the Half-Life High Definition pack: optional content that can be enabled and disabled on a whim. The feature is decidedly basic in its current state, and it is more than likely to see improvement in 3.0. Driver autoupdates may well use a version of this feature.

Match broadcasts

The most interesting feature of SourceTV to me is its ability to relay the broadcast to other servers, distributing the load across an unlimited number of machines for a potentially unlimited number of spectators. Add this to a communication tool as powerful as Steam and what else could happen? The first major broadcast has already been announced: the HL2:CTF match linked to earlier. It isn’t a great leap of imagination to see a new page in Browse Games or whatever replaces it covering scheduled matches across the network from week to week.

****

I hope I’ve provided a fairly accurate and comprehensive dissection of what we can expect from Steam as the industry enters the next generation. Valve clearly see it as much a next-gen platform as the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, but focused on solving the problems of those making the games rather than those promoting them. Whether or not they succeed depends on their understanding of what a community wants and needs – something that Steam does not have a good reputation for. Here’s to that changing.