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on Steam you can buy Heretic for $5 and Hexen and its expansion for $5 each

Even better, it appears that according to http://steampowered.com/v/index.php?area=sub&SubId=440 , a bunch of id games ("id Super Pack") are on sale around this weekend (September 6 and 7th) for $35.

And http://steampowered.com/v/index.php?area=app&AppId=2360 shows that getting just the Hexen games ("Heretic + Hexen Collection") is $5.

on Steam you can buy Heretic for $5 and Hexen and its expansion for $5 each

Even better, it appears that according to http://steampowered.com/v/index.php?area=sub&SubId=440 , a bunch of id games ("id Super Pack") are on sale around this weekend (September 6 and 7th) for $35.

And http://steampowered.com/v/index.php?area=app&AppId=2360 shows that getting just the Hexen games ("Heretic + Hexen Collection") is $5.

1920x1200 is becoming a common resolution? Hardly, check out the Half Life 2 survey, a cool 2.29% of users are running it.

http://www.steampowered.com/status/survey.html

1024 x 768 and 1280 x 960 are still what most users are running by far. At those resolutions, a decent midrange card is more then any average user needs. Their games will run great.

Basicly SLI is great for those who are willing to pay through the nose to run the game at crazy resolutions, AA and AF maxxed to the tits. Because god knows that just improves the game experience so much that its worth shelling out more $$$.

Common among enthusiasts, who are the target market of high end video card, yes, most definitely. I saw a recent poll, I think on the hardocp forums, that showed 1920 and 1680 basically tied for the most popular resolutions for that enthusiast community. NV and ATI aren't selling multi-card systems for 1024x768, but the higher resolution market is quite large, growing very quickly, and is the market that has money to spend and people who can truly benefit from multi-card systems (assuming they don't care much about money, or computer gaming is ridiculously important to their lives)

Even at 1280x960 a rather new high end card is required to play a lot of games at 30+ fps at default settings. I was at 1280x1024 until recently (which is the 1280 LCD resolution - note that the steam survey shows that most people at 1280 are using CRTs still, given the 4:3 aspect ratio, which is interesting) and nothing short of an 8800 would run several games smoothly, and I never even tried Crysis.

1920x1200 is becoming a common resolution? Hardly, check out the Half Life 2 survey, a cool 2.29% of users are running it.

http://www.steampowered.com/status/survey.html

1024 x 768 and 1280 x 960 are still what most users are running by far. At those resolutions, a decent midrange card is more then any average user needs. Their games will run great.

Basicly SLI is great for those who are willing to pay through the nose to run the game at crazy resolutions, AA and AF maxxed to the tits. Because god knows that just improves the game experience so much that its worth shelling out more $$$.

Consider a machine with Intel integrated graphics and an add-in ATI card. While this machine is considered a "sale" towards both AMD and Intel graphics, chances are that the end-user is only actually using the AMD card while the Intel part is disabled.

So if you look at the overall marketplace, it stands to reason that Intel's market share is somewhat inflated. Sure they are selling lots of parts, but fewer people are actually using them.

If you're a developer, perhaps the Valve hardware survey is more valuable than Cnet or Gartner sales figures.

Read the Subscriber Agreement. You don't own Steam titles, you just pay a one time fee for a permanent subscription. The GP is 100% correct.

The rumor goes that Gabe Newell promised that in the event of bankruptcy he'd release the master keys for Steam (anyone actually got a link for that? I couldn't find it with 1m of Googling), but given that agreement I find that unlikely. Those keys are the valuable property of Valve so in the event of Steam going under they'd be kept under lock and key and sold to the highest bidder.

I still don't get how buying from steam is any different to buying from me, other than you may already have an account on steam.
For the record, I'd love to get my games on steam. I wish it was that easy.
[...]
I'm really hassling my payment provider to support amazons one-click method. For me, I think that's even more convenient than steam.

Well, that's basically it for the digital distribution point - people don't like to fill out forms, they don't like to give away their data; not their email, not their name and especially not their address, so the common accounts most people already have, Steam and Paypal, should be used whenever possible.
Since your payment provider requires people to fill out that boring form every time someone purchases something, why don't you support Paypal directly? Just return a page with a download-link and/or serial key like other services do. One of your competitors when it comes to getting money from pirates, Rapidshare, does exactly that. If that's not possible on part of your payment provider then you should consider switching to a different one, perhaps one that doesn't support Paypal on it's own. Even if you drop it altogether and use Paypal as the only payment method, you might be better of.

For the record, I'd love to get my games on steam. I wish it was that easy.

Didn't they create Steamworks and recently released an SDK so that every developer can finally get their games on Steam? I didn't really look into it but where is the problem? Do they have some kind of requirements you can't meet?

We see unlockable demos in the shareware arena, but I don't think I've ever seen a big title go this route before, and I don't see why it hasn't happened yet.

You mean like Portal, or World of Warcraft, or Guild Wars, or Final Fantasy XI, or City of Heroes, or etc., etc.?

http://www.steampowered.com/v/index.php?area=about&cc=US This is the most effective solution I've ever dealt with for antipiracy. As someone who's pirated software for a very long time, I've spent quite a bit of money, happily, through steam on video games. The benefits of buying through steam however, meet the requirements of most everyone in here. No CD to put in the tray, no keys to enter (if you buy a game online [which i recommend]), constantly updated, and most importantly, the purchase is tied to the account itself, so you can download your game infinite times to infinite machines as long as it's tied to your account. I have Audiosurf on three different machines, legally :)

It's not "he," it's an optional steam system survey.

Valve picked up our latest, and people are vocally split into two camps -- "This is fun despite the simple graphics" vs. "This looks like crap, so I won't play it." It's still been good for us, but it's absolutely received less attention for not being both fun and pretty at the same time.

I haven't played it, but from both the screenshots and the description, it looks like a Katamari Damacy clone... is it?

Is it any cheaper if you order them from the States, maybe from amazon.com or some such, and have them shipped?

I buy my games off Steam, but even there they hype the prices up (still cheaper than UK stores though),

http://www.steampowered.com/v/index.php?area=app&AppId=7940&cc=GB

So I change the 'GB' in the URL to 'US':

http://www.steampowered.com/v/index.php?area=app&AppId=7940&cc=US

and buy it that way.

Is it any cheaper if you order them from the States, maybe from amazon.com or some such, and have them shipped?

I buy my games off Steam, but even there they hype the prices up (still cheaper than UK stores though),

http://www.steampowered.com/v/index.php?area=app&AppId=7940&cc=GB

So I change the 'GB' in the URL to 'US':

http://www.steampowered.com/v/index.php?area=app&AppId=7940&cc=US

and buy it that way.

And if an indie developer is worried about direction, make a simple one level demo and share it with the gaming forums,telling them ahead of time that the game isn't about graphics but bringing back the fun to FPS. I'm sure he'd find a ton of guys like me that would be happy to play test it and give him new ideas,because in the end all the eye candy doesn't mean squat if it isn't FUN.

Our (lucky) 13th title will try to fit the bill for a fun, indie-developed FPS. However, the feedback we've received over the years is that a) it's difficult for an indie developer to get the public's attention with same, and b) many (not all) gamers demand the eye candy. Valve picked up our latest, and people are vocally split into two camps -- "This is fun despite the simple graphics" vs. "This looks like crap, so I won't play it." It's still been good for us, but it's absolutely received less attention for not being both fun and pretty at the same time.

Steam makes it possible for independent developers to get wide exposure and delivery of their games. Audiosurf is an independently developed game on steam available for $9.99 that has consistently ranked in the top 10 for sales beating out even major Valve titles like Half Life. The game was developed over the period of a year by one guy in his basement and I wouldn't be surprised if he's made a substantial amount of money off sales possibly even making it possible for him to quit his day job.

Yeah, because wanting to use your payed-for product however you want is "being cheap." Plus DRM doesn't even work, it's easy to bypass and really just makes things difficult for the actual paying customer (100% recycled argument, I know).

However, getting people to pay for an indie game is probably really freaking hard. Not only is it going to be virtually impossible to advertise due to the lack of funds, but most of the time it's actually easier to pirate the game than buy it. About 2 years ago I pirated Gumboy: Crazy Adventures (I have since bought it on Steam) because I liked it so much, but didn't have a credit card to buy it.

Annnd speaking of Steam, it really is an amazing platform to distribute indie games, though I don't know what kind of cut you get from selling it there though. Also, Penny-Arcade's Greenhouse site might become a good venue as well.

MLCT, go to http://steampowered.com/v/index.php?area=about

Get Steam.

You should be able to register your CD Key, this will register your game.

Then you can ditch your CDs as you can use their client to redownload the game as needed. No CDs necessary.

If for some reason you can not locate your HL2 CD Key.

Buy the "Orange Box"
http://steampowered.com/v/index.php?area=sub&SubId=469&cc=US
Gets You
HL2
HL2 Ep1 & Ep2
HL2 Lost Coast
Portal
Team Fortress 2
for $39.99

I recommend buying the Orange Box anyway just for Portal and TF2 alone.

Plus once you get Steam you don't need the CDs :-D

Note: You should still be able to use Steam behind a firewall. You probably can't host games, but playing them should be no problem.

MLCT, go to http://steampowered.com/v/index.php?area=about

Get Steam.

You should be able to register your CD Key, this will register your game.

Then you can ditch your CDs as you can use their client to redownload the game as needed. No CDs necessary.

If for some reason you can not locate your HL2 CD Key.

Buy the "Orange Box"
http://steampowered.com/v/index.php?area=sub&SubId=469&cc=US
Gets You
HL2
HL2 Ep1 & Ep2
HL2 Lost Coast
Portal
Team Fortress 2
for $39.99

I recommend buying the Orange Box anyway just for Portal and TF2 alone.

Plus once you get Steam you don't need the CDs :-D

Note: You should still be able to use Steam behind a firewall. You probably can't host games, but playing them should be no problem.

Also speaking from experience, albeit the experience of someone who was surveyed, it seems to have worked for Valve. Perhaps you just aren't providing the correct presentation/incentive for your survey if you aren't getting enough opt-in to recover useful data.

*cough* really? *cough*

I think short-signed reasoning like this is why businesses today abound with so much bad (stupid) behavior in the first place.

I'm not suggesting Steam is perfect (it is a DRM wrapper after all) but Valve, through Steam have implemented a rather simple and straight forward way to collect information by (and get this): asking for it. Revolutionary!

Just because it might be a little easier to automate (or hide) your data collecting policy doesn't mean it's the only (or right) way to do it. After all, *you're* asking for something of value. Don't you think the least you can do is pay *me* the respect of asking for it?

Tell it to valve. They regularly run a hardware survey.
http://www.steampowered.com/status/survey.html

More than one million datapoints. That isn't enough to be useful for you?

Speaking from experience I can tell you that an "opt-in" program would never collect enough data to be useful.

Depends. Opt-in to be fed ads? Most likely you are correct. Opt-in as in the Steam hardware survey? Less clear.

I'm quite happy clicking "yes" on a question of whether I am willing to submit anonymous information about my hardware configuration. So are almost two million Steam users, apparently.

What I don't get is this article. Why is the submitter even making a connection between surveys/data collection, and DRM? They are utterly not related. You don't need to collect personal information to enforce crappy activation based DRM, and you don't need DRM to collect other types of information. These issues should be discussed separately.

Speaking from experience I can tell you that an "opt-in" program would never collect enough data to be useful.

Is data from over a million and a half samples not useful?

Seriously though, Steam's hardware survey is the first thing that came to mind when I saw this story. It's non-intrusive, it clearly asks you before sharing any information, and it keeps the summary information available for all to see. I probably wouldn't mind sharing technical information if it worked similarly to this.

Speaking from experience I can tell you that an "opt-in" program would never collect enough data to be useful.

Valve would disagree.

http://www.steampowered.com/status/survey.html
http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/52707

1,728,662 Steam users have voluntarily agreed to participate in their semi-annual hardware survey by having detailed specification of their PC hardware cataloged.

I was just about to comment on that. Not only do they collect it but they have a page for it albeit a simplified one. I wouldn't expect Valve to collect personal data, implement in-game advertisement or the like, especially with private servers, but it's always a concern in the era of online games. Though it's not fair to single out data mining in games when it's a common practice when dealing with internet. All you can do is keep your tinfoil hat handy whenever you start to secrete personal information.

I think that it is good, from a developer's and user's point of view. Look at Valve and Steam. They use data collected from their games to improve the multiplayer experience.

• Feedreader (collapsed) - these two feeds came with Feedreader, and I just didn't delete them.
• • Feedreader Developer Blog
  • Feedreader news and announcements
• Games
• • Deus Ex Projects - two projects for my favorite game of all time that both move one inch toward completion every 6 months.
  • • Deus Ex HTDP - high-definition texture pack. Text feed, news and announcements.
    • Project 2027 - new levels and story for Deus Ex. Text feed, news and announcements.
  • The Escapist: Zero Punctuation - if you're not watching these game reviews, you should be. Feed is links to the weekly ZP posts.
  • Valve Steam news and updates - Steam is Valve's content delivery system. This feed includes game updates and general news. Text only.
• News/aggregator
• • CNN top stories - this feed can be annoying because it sometimes contains a story summary in the item, but more often it just contains a link to the story. I wish it had summaries more often.
  • Fark - Fark is a news aggregator site that, like /., combines user submission with a little editorial control (as opposed to the Digg method). This feed is of the mainpage stories and contains only the headlines and a link. Sophomoric and dark humor are mainstays.
  • MSNBC - this is the top stories feed, editorially selected. They also have a "most viewed" feed if you're into celeb news and dogs in funny poses.
  • MSNBC - Coundown - feed of Countdown with Keith Olbermann video clips, updated nightly, with the first two stories usually posted before the show is over. Feed is links to the clips.
  • Slashdot - log in, your feed is personalized to your mainpage prefs. /.'s own feed contains headlines and story summaries.
• Politics
• • Crooks and Liars - This is a blog that supports more liberal ideals than the party line. Feed is of front page stories and contains attachments of any items referenced in the stories (usually QT files, sometimes PDFs)
  • Daily Kos - The largest liberal log/community on the net, this one is much more toward party line. Text only.
  • Electoral-vote.com - election news and coverage with a map that updates the electoral college count by poll average. Contains the site's daily upd

You forgot one other aspect of Steam. At any point they can render your purchases unusable by you.

Check your EULA. What does it say about guaranteeing access to the product you "purchased"?

Well first off they are very clear that you are not purchasing anything.
"Steam is an online service."
"You become a subscriber to Steam by installing the Steam client software. . ."
"...as a Subscriber you may obtain access to certain services, software and content ("Subscriptions") available to Subscribers."
"Your license confers no title or ownership in the Steam Software."

Then my favorite:

"VALVE DOES NOT GUARANTEE CONTINUOUS, ERROR-FREE, VIRUS-FREE OR SECURE OPERATION AND ACCESS TO STEAM, THE STEAM SOFTWARE, YOUR ACCOUNT AND/OR YOUR SUBSCRIPTIONS(S)."

"Either you or Valve has the right to terminate or cancel your Account or a particular Subscription at any time."

If you don't like it then you can fuck off according to them:

"YOU ACKNOWLEDGE AND AGREE THAT YOUR SOLE AND EXCLUSIVE REMEDY FOR ANY DISPUTE WITH VALVE WITH REGARD TO STEAM OR THE STEAM SOFTWARE IS TO DISCONTINUE USE OF STEAM AND CANCEL YOUR ACCOUNT."

These are not nice people.

At least with disc in drive DRM I'm the only person who controls if I have access to my purchase. Either through backups, or not damaging the disk, or nocd crack.

Did you check the parent link? Here is a direct link to the actual chart

Gold Rush and Dustbowl are the 2 maps where blue attacks and red defends, clearly red has a major advantage. I'd like to see how much closer the sides would be if Valve only included maps using the default spawn times.

Gravelpit is an exception, since that map is unbalanced, it's far easier to attack than defend on that map (of the non-medic achievements the perfect defence of Gravel Pit is the 2nd rarest, and the only one I lack)

As for engineers and teleporters, your point doesn't even make sense "Thus, quick respawn + teleport = back in the action much faster than red." The best you could say is that it gets them back in the action at the same speed as red, and even that is inaccurate.

Each teleporter has to recharge between each use, if you've got a fast respawn rate you'll need at least 2, probably 3 teleporters to keep the momentum up. In a game with 12 players on each team if you're using 2 or 3 player as engineers you better hope that the rest of the team can carry the extra weight. Engineers excel at defence, at attack they are pretty weak.

Let's not also forget all it takes is 1 spy to cloak, run past the attackers and sap all the teleporter entrances, which gets easier the more teleporters there are (since less attackers will actually be walking to the action, therefore less chance of noticing the spy).

Did you check the parent link? Here is a direct link to the actual chart

Gold Rush and Dustbowl are the 2 maps where blue attacks and red defends, clearly red has a major advantage. I'd like to see how much closer the sides would be if Valve only included maps using the default spawn times.

Gravelpit is an exception, since that map is unbalanced, it's far easier to attack than defend on that map (of the non-medic achievements the perfect defence of Gravel Pit is the 2nd rarest, and the only one I lack)

As for engineers and teleporters, your point doesn't even make sense "Thus, quick respawn + teleport = back in the action much faster than red." The best you could say is that it gets them back in the action at the same speed as red, and even that is inaccurate.

Each teleporter has to recharge between each use, if you've got a fast respawn rate you'll need at least 2, probably 3 teleporters to keep the momentum up. In a game with 12 players on each team if you're using 2 or 3 player as engineers you better hope that the rest of the team can carry the extra weight. Engineers excel at defence, at attack they are pretty weak.

Let's not also forget all it takes is 1 spy to cloak, run past the attackers and sap all the teleporter entrances, which gets easier the more teleporters there are (since less attackers will actually be walking to the action, therefore less chance of noticing the spy).

Valve's TeamFortress 2 stats show the same effect after over many more trials -- 21,000 in the case of 2fort.

Especially if you're playing on Goldrush (last graph is wins per team per map

In case you're not aware of this: http://steampowered.com/status/ep2/ep2_stats.php Especially the third graph.

They're already basically do that. Here are some stats from HL2:Ep 2, maybe not exactly what you're looking for, but I'm sure they have that info too.

http://www.steampowered.com/status/ep2/ep2_stats.php

Not having a physical copy and requiring activation are certainly high on my list. What really gets me is that you don't get a fancy box, manual, or disc and the game still costs the same.

Quote from http://www.steampowered.com/status/survey.html. This will give you a rough idea about what OSs gamers prefer. Not all gamers run Steam, or submitted to the Steam Hardware Survey (I couldn't ever get it to properly upload my results) but Steam is becoming more popular as its library expands so this is at least indicative of the "hardcore" gaming group (given Valve's core library and the type of gamers who would play it).

So we got 15% Vista here.

wierd, they had 2 different ram requirements, one at 64 mb and on another page 256 mb... sigh

64 MB
http://www.steampowered.com/v/index.php?area=about

256MB
http://www.steampowered.com/steamtour/6.php

wierd, they had 2 different ram requirements, one at 64 mb and on another page 256 mb... sigh

64 MB
http://www.steampowered.com/v/index.php?area=about

256MB
http://www.steampowered.com/steamtour/6.php

PCI-E was the standard on *new systems*, and barely at that. Go look at the statistics that Valve has gathered through the years, an awful lot of gamers run completely obsolete gear (I am talking GeForce MX's being the most popular card for most of this decade).

http://www.steampowered.com/status/survey.html

In the most recent one about half the cards in the top 10 were released before or around the time of Doom 3. Also it looks like about roughly 20% of people who participated in that survey have current generation cards. And note that isn't all computers, that is from gaming systems (the only ones that would have Steam installed).

Game companies need to stop optimising games for the bleeding edge nut jobs. Valve get that, iD don't judging by DooM3 and Quake4.

Yes, you can. You have to connect to Steam to setup offline mode, but after that you're set. https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=3160-AGCB-2555

ATI doesn't have the same number of Direct X 10 cards as nVidia. As per the Valve Hardware Survey, ATI has about 13 000 Radeon 2600 HD cards installed. nVidia, on the other hand, has 137 000 8800's installed alone. Thats not counting any other 8000 series cards. In other words, of course nVidia is looking worse, there's more opportunity for something to go wrong. I don't blame anyone for the graphics card crashes really; the changes from Direct X 9 to Direct X 10 are quite drastic. I just wish Vista's release hadn't been rushed so that everyone could get their shit together.

I don't think so. I found these numbers from 2006, where ATI's market share was almost 10 percent points larger than NVidia's. However, on Steam's Hardware Survery NVidia is in the lead, with 62% against ATI's 33%, and Intel's 2.5%. I think these latter stats are seriously scewed, though, since I've often heard that Intel has the largest share.

What you say is exactly true. Valve Software realised this years ago and have figured out a pretty good system (note: not perfect) for their content distribution. They have an extensive content server network which allows for easy distribution of their bits; ISPs can set up their own Steam content server caches to save heaps of bandwidth.

http://www.steampowered.com/status/survey.html Steam hardware survey (which I think is a fair representation of gamers - the people who use this stuff most) gives nVidia over 50% market share. 8 series is a little over 11% of all graphics cards used. There's already a fairly sizable market - and one that is only going to get bigger.

I assume the controls would present *some* challenge. A controller pad has a more limited controls than a PC; not to say it can't do it, just that it requires more than just a quick function mapping. A large portion of Spore is supposed to be about sharing just about everything, and I'm sure Live presents some challenges and requires a lot of interaction with Microsoft, atleast that's what other developers have said. Furthermore, DS and cellphone versions were said to be limited to a or a few certain "levels" (eg. space/microbial.)

On a side note, as a PC gamer, I still don't feel consoles are quite as good. I do own a Wii, as I feel it best compliments my PC. As for PC gaming being a money pit, I don't know if I can argue against it; consoles are just going to be cheaper because of the model they follow. Still, I prefer building my own PC. If the comment was in reference to the never ceasing harkening of the "death of PC gaming," I would submit that perhaps PC gaming is merely going in a different direction than the stats are looking for. For instance, Steam reached 13 million accounts (not users) in May, only to recently ascend to 15 million accounts. Increasingly popular games are becoming available via Steam as well; just recently the MMO Eve Online accounced it was coming to Steam. Despite a large and growing library of games, services like Steam, or Direct 2 Drive, or Gametap, tend to fall off the rader of PC stats accounting.

It's on steam. No CD fuss, no muss.

"This is a real problem, though it should be noted that this doesn't happen after a game is signed to play offline."

I'm sorry this got modded informative because it is not true, i have played pretty much all of my games in offline mode, but none of that is relevant if steam won't even start because it is asking you to authenticate.

this just happened to me last week.

http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=644996 I am SomeLlama there too.