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If Valve is smart, then they would have a special 'CyberCafe' edition

From the FAQ:

"There isn't really a different version of Steam for Cafés. But when an official Café product key is used in Steam, a couple of special things happen:
- Your Steam account gives you access to all of the games currently on Steam
- Steam requires a password to be entered when the user tries to logout or quit"

Also, you might want to read up on how a CyberCafe should setup Steam.

I could have sworn making something and selling it was a business model.

Making something and selling it != forcing people to purchase a hard copy or go through unnecessary legal terms just to install it.

Allow me to explain. We are quickly entering a world where "perfect" copies of the original can be made with little effort by a layman. A few years ago, this was not the case (number of floppies, immaturity of the internet, low bandwidth to end-users, etc).

Let's take for instance books. Books can be easily made into a digital form and distributed quickly, with very little cost (bandwidth is the main cost I see, offset by some sort of p2p). However, there is a market for the "dead tree" version. Somebody who wants to hold actual paper in their hands. Incidentally, most people do prefer to purchase a book rather than download (which is why I believe digital books haven't taken off yet). This might be due in part to the fact that books are portable and easy to read (in terms of eyes). Computers on the other hand are either not portable and easy to read, or portable and hard to read. Basically, books are more convenient for the consumer than digital books are.

In the case of music, generally people don't care to purchase a "hard copy". They just want to music. There is a market for the CD though, but it is slowly dwindling. People want to listen to music wherever they happen to be. Such as people who make copies of CDs to put in their car, work, and leave the original at home. Who wants to lug around CDs wherever you go? In this case, digital music is more convenient for the consumer. We have seen people embrace iTunes and other digital music offerings. People are willing to pay if the product is convenient to them.

Movie industry has seen DVD sales soar even with movie trading. Perhaps because people saw that the movies were good prior to purchasing a DVD that they might not be able to return. In addition, DVDs generally offer extras that are not available on file-sharing networks. This is added value to purchasing a "hard copy".

Now we come to software. CDs are going by the wayside. People don't want to have to go to a store to purchase a CD. In the case of games, one has to put in a play CD whenever you want to play. That is inconvenient. It's a helluva lot easier just to download a game and not even have to worry about CDs. Now, there is a market for a "hard copy". To me, nothing beats a thick, informative manual and/or a cloth map. If a game I want offers that, you bet they got my money. But back to the convenience factor. People look at the price of a CD-R. It's what, not even a dollar? Yet there's software out here that costs what, a helluva lot more. Of course there's the distribution costs, payment of employees, etc. But I don't think most people see why a CD has to be marked up 5,000% ($1 to $50). Something like $20 or $10 would be seen as more reasonable. And you also have to worry about crappy software. In almost every store now, once you open software, you CANNOT return it. So if you just bought some software that doesn't work because it was made in one month by some crappy developer or forced out by some crappy publisher, you can't do a thing about it. That is inconvenient. People will not pay for that.

If there is some system where people can pay like $5-$10 per download (utilizing p2p bandwidth, of course) for premium software (not bargain bin card games), I think it would take off (possibly Steam). Or perhaps a monthly fee to download software. I'm just offering some suggestions. Maybe the killer business model is something that I wouldn't think of in a million years. Either way though, the current one that requires a "hard copy" is slowly dwindling. It just isn't convenient for the consumer, and money talks.

I would like to touch on more aspect. In the case of online games (especially MMORPGs), there is generally a CD-Key

Two questions... First, how can a game be "PLAYED OUT" when more people play Valve based games than ANY other game like them? And not by a bit, but by a HUGE amount. And the numbers just keep going up, not down. Check the status page Second, you say your LAN gaming center failed. Because of licensing? I can't believe you failed just because of licensing issues. Sounds like a good excuse to cover a failed business.

IIRC, Steam is the graphics engine...

Well, you do not RC. Steam is Valve's proprietary DRM (OOH BAD WORDS) content delivery system, relying upon a great many other people to provide bandwidth and servers for things like game updates, updated modules for their anti-cheat (yes, think PunkBuster), and more recently, entire games. They even have Bram Cohen working on it.

If the protocols were to be blown too wide open--and source code theft will do that--it would arguably be (even more) trivial to fake the authentication process as you connected to a "secure" server, running as many cheats as you wanted.

Of course, ask most Half-Life players, and they'll say VAC (Valve Anti-Cheat) is worthless in its current state anyway. Let's hope they have something up their sleeve that'll coincide with or preempt the Half-Life 2 release, even if it's just extra effort doing updates to the modules. Somehow I think their attention has been elsewhere for a while.

IIRC, Steam is the graphics engine...

Well, you do not RC. Steam is Valve's proprietary DRM (OOH BAD WORDS) content delivery system, relying upon a great many other people to provide bandwidth and servers for things like game updates, updated modules for their anti-cheat (yes, think PunkBuster), and more recently, entire games. They even have Bram Cohen working on it.

If the protocols were to be blown too wide open--and source code theft will do that--it would arguably be (even more) trivial to fake the authentication process as you connected to a "secure" server, running as many cheats as you wanted.

Of course, ask most Half-Life players, and they'll say VAC (Valve Anti-Cheat) is worthless in its current state anyway. Let's hope they have something up their sleeve that'll coincide with or preempt the Half-Life 2 release, even if it's just extra effort doing updates to the modules. Somehow I think their attention has been elsewhere for a while.

Steam has nothing to do with the graphics engine, and everything to do with networking. It's Valve's content distribution and matchmaking framework. Click me.

also wants you to pay a monthly fee to play CounterStrike (they call it Steam, but if it looks like a porkbarrel and it quacks like a porkbarrel...)

Actually if you just use the key to register under Valve's content delivery system Steam, you'll get all the current games. Then when HL2 etc. comes out, you'll get those too. Steam will just automatically download them and give 'em to you.

early adopters and hardcore gamers who buy a new graphics card every 6 months. This is an important market segment as they buy far more graphics cards than everyone else

That segment might be the most profitable in terms of margins, but they are a relatively tiny part of the market. The low/mid range cards are where the volume is.

It's not perfect (primarily because of their games low hardware requirements), but Valves survey of hardware in use illustrates this.

ATI doesn't have enough of a lead over Nvidia to convince people to wait for their releases.

Who's doing the waiting? ATI shipped their first X800 cards this week (via Best Buy and their own online store). The first competitive cards from Nvidia (6800 GT) aren't due until mid-june.

I don't know who the first was but notably Valve is doing this with their software through Steam. Once you register your CD key with Steam you get access to that game and mods for that game. Patches, when released, are automatically pushed to your computer (unless you specify otherwise). There are no updates to download; for example, if you go to the Counter-Strike web site and click on "downloads" you'll be directed to the Steam website.

I've read there are no keygens for Steam accounts, though I guess you could share a key if you don't play online (and limit yourself to a LAN, e.g.)

If you haven't played Half-Life yet, it's a great way to try it out (especially since stores still seem to be selling it for $30).

If you are into the online games, that means you can also play Counter-Strike, Day of Defeat, Team Fortress Classic, or, my personal favorite, Natural Selection.

I haven't tried it, but you can also try installing steam under Linux, using WineX

Video Card Description:
NVidia GeForce4 MX Series -- 15.35 %
NVidia GeForce4 Series -- 12.47 %
NVidia GeForce2 MX Series -- 10.86 %
NVidia GeForce FX 5200 Series -- 7.02 %
ATI Radeon 9600 Series -- 6.11 %
ATI Radeon 9800 Series -- 4.93 %
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CPU Speed:
1.5 Ghz to 1.7 Ghz -- 14.00 %
1.7 Ghz to 2.0 Ghz -- 18.33 %
2.0 Ghz to 2.3 Ghz -- 13.82 %
2.3 Ghz to 2.7 Ghz -- 16.62 %
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The problem then is that you no longer have the point of sale presentation. A big part of the battle along the entire chain is getting the game on store shelves and in front of people. Anyone who has ever had to redo any part of their game to qualify for a Teen rating and, qed, the shelves of Walmart knows what I'm talking about. The wholesalers and retailers provide a service: they take something that comes in a few large shipments, sort it, manages it, finds buyers for it, ships it by region, and present it at thousands of locations for millions of people to peruse, buy, steal, return, and generally abuse.

Direct downloading would be a step in the right direction (and downloading through Bittorrent would be even better), but that economic model is well known... It's called shareware, and despite some high quality releases it tends to produce riches far below what would be attainable through traditional retail channels. If a player can't hold the box, can't feel it in his or her hands, it is much more difficult to convince them to pull out their credit card.

The manufacturer could also sell boxes to the public. However, you would still need to do basically all of the above... Ship to regional distribution centers around the US, manage the product, run a call center to interact with buyers, take returns... Aforementioned lower total sales aside, you still have the entire warehousing cost and much of the customer relations to deal with. You might manage to cut your total retail (equivalent) expenditure in half by storing your product in less expensive real estate, but you have to tack on an additional $5 for shipping. So, in essence, you have done nothing but bought the inventory control and customer relations side at the expense of the ability to aggregate the cost of selling the game with other games in a large pipeline.

Personally I want to see more direct downloads being used as a sales model, but I just don't see that happening any time soon. Having a physical thing in your hand is too tempting for the player, and broadband penetration is still too shallow. Plus, the model won't work for consoles unless a publisher were to design the console specifically around it. For more examples of the future as envisioned here, see Steam, and The Phantom.

I would imagine that this is a somewhat correct assumption. I once had a copy of a Steam PowerPoint presentation (Dead link, send me a message if you happen to have a copy of it.) that pretty much stated that Valve was going to use Steam, and it's DRM related design, to force markets like Asia to pay up for their copies. Knowing that, everything else with Steams design is merely a consequence of its nature.

Think about it. If you strip away all the things that many pro-Steam users cite as advantages of Steam that is also unique to Steam, you're not left with a whole hell of a lot to work with.

For example;
Automatic updates: So what? That was what Sierra Utilities was originally meant for. Of course, it was terrible since the FTP server in question was always full or down. But that didn't mean there couldn't be another non-DRM attempt.

Content (Game) delivery: Am I the only one that remembers the RealPlayer network offering of downloadable TFC?

New GUI: Like this couldn't be done with the old version?

Includes VAC: I swear everytime this lame argument pops up, they pretend the WON version never had VAC... ever.

I could go on and on about all these, "features," of Steam and how they've could have been done in other ways. But once you boil it all down, it's really another noose that's prettied up with cute little pink flowers that someone is trying to tie around our collective necks.

Who owns your hard drive? If you've installed Steam, read this, then answer the question again.

Yeah, let's all give game developers on-demand access to our storage. Cheat detection notwithstanding, this is bad news; is it worth the cost? I like to think intelligent people agree: it isn't.

Valve has been conducting and publishing system specification surveys. It's interesting to see that the majority of their respondents are using GeForce 4 MX cards; I would have thought higher specs.

The most annoying thing about detail controls in games is that it's unclear what you (the end-user) are changing when you tweak the knobs. As a developer of 3d applications, (who's guilty of same), I think I'll approach this in the future by giving users immediate feedback: "Here's what your scene will look like with low shadow detail. Here's how smoothly it'll run, on average."

From the news page, "Yesterday's Update & Today's DDOS Attack" I thought they were possibly referring to a slashdotting. However, the times don't quite match up.

Infinium beleive their USP is their Phantom.net VPGN (Virtual Private Gaming Network) - surely Valve are working on something similar with Steam?

I've got two real, legitimate, completely authentic Half-Life CD keys, one from my first copy of Half-Life bought in early 1999, another from a copy bought in mid 2001 after I mislaid the first CD.

I've played online a fair amount, and I've never had a single problem with either of them. If I had discovered a problem, I'd have got in touch with Sierra's technical support, or failing that, Valve directly.

Sometimes, I wonder how many of the complaints about copy-protection, cheat-prevention and suchlike are real. For instance, imagine the Valve Anti-Cheat system identified someone as using a cheat program, and banned them as a result. If that person was one of these fabled false-positives, are they more likely to kick up a fuss and claim that Valve is the Worst Company Ever, or would they politely explain to Valve what really happened through their VAC contact form?

If you do have a legitimate CD key and are being prevented from playing, tell Valve. They can't do anything if they don't know. Steam's got a page full of support stuff if you need it.

I've got two real, legitimate, completely authentic Half-Life CD keys, one from my first copy of Half-Life bought in early 1999, another from a copy bought in mid 2001 after I mislaid the first CD.

I've played online a fair amount, and I've never had a single problem with either of them. If I had discovered a problem, I'd have got in touch with Sierra's technical support, or failing that, Valve directly.

Sometimes, I wonder how many of the complaints about copy-protection, cheat-prevention and suchlike are real. For instance, imagine the Valve Anti-Cheat system identified someone as using a cheat program, and banned them as a result. If that person was one of these fabled false-positives, are they more likely to kick up a fuss and claim that Valve is the Worst Company Ever, or would they politely explain to Valve what really happened through their VAC contact form?

If you do have a legitimate CD key and are being prevented from playing, tell Valve. They can't do anything if they don't know. Steam's got a page full of support stuff if you need it.

This is about how Valve's Steam system works with VAC (Valve Anti Cheat).

VAC doesn't get updated REALLY fast, and it doesn't catch every cheat. Those who use the latest "cutting edge" cheats can still cheat. HOWEVER, here's the big difference: if it catches you, you're screwed - banned for 5 years from ALL Valve game servers running cheat detection. Currently this is about 85% of all servers running Counter-Strike, Day of Defeat, etc.

So the basic model for VAC is to have not the best cheat detection, but by BY FAR the strongest penalty for being caught.

So if you're a cheater, Valve's being like old Dirty Harry. "Was it 5 bullets, or 6? Feeling lucky, punk?"

I have to put in a shameless plug for the Natural Selection Half-Life mod. They've done a beautiful job with it.

Marines vs. Aliens, playable from each side. Combat mode, where kills and experience earn you equipment/ability purchase points and ranking, or Classic mode, with buildable upgrade structures, where one player becomes an RTS commander to guide the Marines against the more chaotic Aliens.

It's a gorgeous cross between the movie Aliens, StarCraft, and the old game Marathon.

It's on Steam now as a third party game, getting anti-cheat all up in it. Current version is 3.0 Beta, available for anyone to play.

It is a timeless classic, and its modability has kept its multiplayer alive with CS and Firearms. WAS alive until Steam .... quite possibly the worst idea and program ever created, and also ruined the ease of running HL or CS in gnu/linux.

those are two good examples. deus ex was a complex game and the devs took out that complexity (in mostly superficial ways, but still significant) for the sequel. the fans were enraged but ion storm at least responded. so they're walking a fine line (actually more like dancing back and forth on it). being a fan myself i want them to patch the pc version but if those changes were included in the initial release it might have cost them sales in the console market and ultimately displeased eidos, their publisher. it's a hard choice.

but at least they're dancing on that line. valve and steam are not, as a previous post pointed out. but that can be a problem. a while back valve released an update that inadvertently prevented people from playing half-life games in direct3d. the result was a firestorm of fan complaints that only got worse as valve released patch after patch (once a week actually) that added features like shadows under players or tweaks to weapons' strength in cs without even admitting the d3d problem much less fixing it or even announcing that they were fixing it or removing the broken feature that caused the mess in the first place. their priorities in updating the game are obviously insensitive to the needs of the users, and that kind of attitude is dangerous - even for a company as big as valve.

dance the line - the game that dances the best wins the prize.

those are two good examples. deus ex was a complex game and the devs took out that complexity (in mostly superficial ways, but still significant) for the sequel. the fans were enraged but ion storm at least responded. so they're walking a fine line (actually more like dancing back and forth on it). being a fan myself i want them to patch the pc version but if those changes were included in the initial release it might have cost them sales in the console market and ultimately displeased eidos, their publisher. it's a hard choice.

but at least they're dancing on that line. valve and steam are not, as a previous post pointed out. but that can be a problem. a while back valve released an update that inadvertently prevented people from playing half-life games in direct3d. the result was a firestorm of fan complaints that only got worse as valve released patch after patch (once a week actually) that added features like shadows under players or tweaks to weapons' strength in cs without even admitting the d3d problem much less fixing it or even announcing that they were fixing it or removing the broken feature that caused the mess in the first place. their priorities in updating the game are obviously insensitive to the needs of the users, and that kind of attitude is dangerous - even for a company as big as valve.

dance the line - the game that dances the best wins the prize.

If a game were 25$ and I could walk and pick it up in 15 mins at the game store near by.. Or spend 1-2 days downloading it...

Not that I particularily like Steam from Valve Software yet, but it may be a decent beginning for something useful.
Anyway, when they rolled Steam out, their servers were immediately DOSed by CounterStrike players who were trying to upgrade. After having read the description on the Steam homepage I had assumed that Steam would be using a P2P scheme for content delivery. I geuss they didn't think of that. :(
In my opinion, their "content servers" should have provided an original copy and checksums, and the Steam client should have used the same mechanism it uses to find other players (essentially finds other Steam clients) to find Steam clients who have the required file already, and have not maxed out their outgoing bandwidth. The client should then add different sources until the download bandwidth maxes out or until there are no more sources. The original content servers should be the last resort to ensure minimal load.
Maybe Valve could look at eDonkey/eMule for an example implementation.
Just an instance where I believe P2P should have been used. (Hey, maybe if they are smart they will add this in a furure update...)

There are also a few threads on steam, PlanetHalfLife, and arstechnica.

Actually, that's an incorrect understanding. You'll need to get a Steam account, but you shouldn't have to pay for it. They're planning to offer a monthly plan if you want access to all their games, but I doubt they'll charge for playing the HL2 you get through ATI. Check out the FAQ for more info.

Btw, does anyone have a source of information saying that the ATI version will be single-player only? ATI's announcements don't seem to mention it.

Acually steam does run on linux. Its not very prominent on steampowered but there is an emerge for it with gentoo. It really just installs the halflife server for linux.

I can say that they are certainly screwing over the HL1 mod market. I current run one of the premiere Natural Selection servers known as Texas [HK] Palace.

We have a nice rig on an incredible network. However, Natural Selection is an incredible CPU hog. This is confounded by the newest version of hlds (3.1.1.1d+ on Linux, 4.1.1.1d+ on win32 I think) which uses 50-100% more CPU than hlds 3.1.1.0. Now, in the past we've had the choice on which version to use. With DoD, we need 3.1.1.1, same goes for CS1.6. On Natural Selection, the coolest HL mod IMO, we have to run 3.1.1.0. hlds 3.1.1.1 uses TWICE as much CPU has hlds 3.1.1.0.

HL2 is removing our choice to run 3.1.1.0 or 3.1.1.1. They're removing WON authentication and replacing it with a new Steam powered system to make way for HL2. It will lower the total number of slots available for Natural Selection because few servers will have the dedicated CPU time to run a stable server of more than 18 players.

We will probably be forced to drop 4 to 6 slots from our NS server to accomidate an HL2 server. Or be forced to splurge on a dual-opteron to run the amd64 build of hlds.

Considering the current plan with Steam is that once you download a patch or play online, you have to be connected to the net even to play single-player. I've already lodged my complaint, though most likely Valve won't care.

Greaaat. The official Steam website give you a huge two locations to download the client, and *both* require signing up to these 3rd party services before you can download the software.

How long is it going to be before Valve get it through their skulls that this pisses people off massively? Fine, you want my personal details before I download your client, and you want a serial of a Valve game I purchased. No problem. But I'll be f*cked if I have to sign up to a 3rd party content distro site just to be able to download a different content distro system!

Sort it out Valve. Either suck it up and provide the download directly from your site, or if you don't want the bandwidth bill then provide a torrent (which, while a content distro system in itself, requires no registration). Grrr!

Actually, it says the new version will let you use skins. It also says something about a conversion wizard about using existing content, but I don't know what that means.

At least half of the CS players I know play with a "borrowed" key. Many of those players will not go out and buy a access.

Ya, Valve should worry about accomodating the people who are pirating their software. That makes a helluva lot of sense.

Your suggestion about bundling them both though is a pretty decent one. You should check out the Steam Forums and post it their.

LAN Parties and single player STEAM games require connection.

HTH.

LAN Parties and single player STEAM games require connection.

HTH.

Guess what happens when their "STEAM" content delivery system suddenly has HalfLife 2 available.

CRUNCH. No more Steam Content servers.

They say they have 1.8Gbps bandwidth, but a mere 3345 people used 1.3Gbps when the RedHat ISOs were released on BitTorrent. Centralised content distribution like Steam is simply not going to be able to handle the load for the size of files they're going to be throwing around.

Without some decentralised P2P file downloading action it's about as bright an idea as their "Powerplay" initiative (and look how that turned out).

So if I'm not mistaken then that's a sort of Steam application, but not only for VALVe/Sierra games. That's quite good. If you guys manage to get a thing like that going, I'm sure it's going to be popular. It's like, All Seeing Eye with intergrated chat,resource downloads and everything. Nice idea, care to share the URL?

No, but it would be the perfect display for playing Myst...

Not to mention running Steam...

The final showdown was held on de_dust2, naturally.

One thing I like about CAL/CPL are the new maps they have, having to play the same maps for over 7 years is starting to get quite old.

How many years can you keep playing DUST.

BTW, if you want to experience how good CPL players are, download Steam CS 1.6 (Free), and play 20 bots on Expert Settings. If they see you, you are dead. Just like CPL.

Maybe Duke Nukem Forever will be distributed through Steam then.

has a record of creating late (and morover vaporware) products, everything from PressPlay, to Steam to Team Fortress 2 (whos last news update was January of 2001). I pray they don't delay this game too, seeing as how im getting a new computer mostly for HL2 :-\

Valve (creators of Half Life et al) is doing something similar. Theyre currently testing something called Steam.

Steam lets you download a game you have access to(meaning, subscribed to from steam once the test ends. currently its all free) and play it on the fly. You only download the sounds/maps/textures that are about to be used, so the download time isnt too bad. It caches also, so after the first time you dont notice it as much. This is helping them betatest the new version of Counterstrike much easier, as they can push updates whenever they want and fix minor things without having to wait a few months to release another patch.

While the Steam system works great, Its scarey to think it will enable pay as you play style billing. Who really wants to pay $.50/min to play counterstrike? (example figure, again its currently all free, and in the future they'll start it with comparable prices as a one time fee, but you have no garuntee thats all they'll use it for).

The upside is of course Valve no longer needs a distributer so being bought out would be up to them. This is nice in the face of all the vivendi buyout rumours you see every few months.

http://www.steampowered.com

This is Valve's technology to perform this kind of function. Not only can it perform a licensing function beyond being a point of purchase, it has the advantages of being an automatic updating/patching system. Because it manages licensing it could be used for "trial" play of a game. Pay $1 to play for a week. Decide if you like it. Pay the difference to buy it forever else your license expires. A risky proposition - but only for those that make crappy games.

It seems like Steam is nothing but a DRM scheme full of hot air.

See my post here...

I think Valve was waiting to release his Steam platform before stopping cheaters. We will see how this "windowey updatey styley" platform will help Valve in squashing punks. And IF.

BF1942 has either more clever network protocol designers in the team, or simply a less known protocol and a less hacked executable... (Counter Strike's protocol is how much old? Six years ? Eight? Considering that the original Half Life engine was based on Quake 1 modified by Valve).

This doesn't invalidate what I said :), with a GPLd game you ought to hope that your friends are playing honestly :)
Better would be a lanparty for friends ;).

While Half-Life was great on it's own, regardless of being a "platform," Valve's STEAM is starting to look quite a lot like a full platform itself, and the screenshots they posted of the V-GUI running in/with Half-Life were quite amazing.

Hey, TF2 also appeared at E3... in 1999. It's still not out. Valve has not had an official comment since 2001. So, why is anyone getting excited about this announcement?

Don't get me wrong. Half-life was a good game. Still is. It's so good, in fact, that it has spawned a grass-roots development community that has been incredibly prolific.

Still though, I've lost patience. In five years, Valve has made one game. ONE GAME. That's only one more game than I've made and I'm not even trying.

Oh, they've also become quite good at taking the mod's and add-ons developed by other people and putting them in cardboard boxes. Kudos, Valve. Oh, and there's Steam: their nifty content delivery mechanism for downloading that one game they've made.

In short, I'll believe it when I see it.

valve has been working on steam, a system that allows game developers to deliver content directly to customers online. there's no publisher involved and players are guaranteed to always have the latest version of everything they need.