The Steam Review

The reacton to Get Serious varied across the forums I posted it on, but the most common response went along the lines of "what are you talking about, Steam is an auto-update utility for Valve games", which is doubly the attitude I wanted to try and break.
The piece wasn't about nagging the developers: it was to inform the public. It is therefore unfortunate that I used next to no persuasion. I described the state of play today then reeled off a list of facts that don't have much relavance to people not already involved with Steam, which might have informed but left the reader to make the attitude-changing links themselves.

If I were to write the article again I would undoubtedly add true arguements to it, describing the benefits of competition between Steam (representing PCs) and Xbox Live (representing consoles) for both platforms. I might also have explained the slow but sure shift towards digital ditribution to highlight the momentum Steam is building up and it's importance, and linked to the three mini-articles you can find below this post to help demonstrate my ideas, particuarly given the images in Friends, Clans, Matchmaking, Stats.


Update: There was also a factual innaccuracy: content streaming does in fact work in Source, just very poorly. A glance at some of the reslists would explain why...

Over the past few days I've been watching E3 and from the press conferences to actual event, it's becoming increasingly clear that gameservices such as Steam are going to become incredibly important in coming months and years. So much so in fact that Xbox Live is an entire third of Microsoft's strategy; Sony and Nintendo will both offer currently under wraps gameservices; UT2007 will have clans and matchmaking built into the game; even GameSpot is launching it's own gameservice. Gameservices are as much a part of the 'next generation' as hardware and software they will run on.

So where does that leave Steam? A very long way behind indeed.

Steam accepts credit cards and delivers content. That's it right now. Friends doesn't work, content streaming is barely functional, and the server browser isn't much to shout about in this context. The second largest collection of publicly-available service bandwidth on the planet and the largest group of connected gamers playing the most popular games ever made -- is wallowing at the bottom of the barrel, waiting for others to overtake it. We've got the unique advantage of providing the games. We've got the unique advantage of a far more massive established community than anything like us. We've got the PC itself. But the time is fast coming when that just won't be enough.

It's time for Steam to get serious. And it's time right now.

Click that link, read the ten points, say what you think, send it to your friends. Even if you don't agree with what has been written, it can't be denied that Steam has to start moving: in one direction, or the other. This isn't a wishlist, and it isn't about bugfixes. It isn't even about money. It's about ensuring we get the games we want, developers get the customers they need, and the industry gets to see the power of a whole new way of doing business before it is buried beneath it's competitors.

A large part of most modern online gaming services is matchmaking and it's associated technologies. As is so often the case, Steam has some unique opportunities to implement these ideas in a way that no other service can. This docuement outlines possible implementations of four key, interlinked concepts that could change the way people look at and use Steam.

friends_clans_matchmaking_stats.doc (90KB)

One interesting way to leverage the power of Steam is with resource packs: content hosted on the Steam servers but only downloaded on request, for instance when the user loads a map that needs it. This document outlines both the concept of resource packs, and the theoretical idea of sharing resources between games (thus allowing map makers to build Team Fortress 2 maps using Counter-Strike: Source props, for example).

resource_packs.doc (34KB)

One of Steam's major features is streaming content delivery - that is, not having to have to have the whole game downloaded in order to play it. However, the system isn't very well implemented in Half-Life 1 games and isn't present at all in Source! In this document I have outlined one method of safely, efficiently and conveniently streaming content through Steam in a way that can be used across all engines.

content_streaming.doc (40KB)