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.