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Valve Announces "Steam" Content Delivery System

Posted by timothy on from the puff-puff dept.

Greg Brown writes: "Valve just officially announced Steam, its new content delivery system that works automatically over the internet. While this has been in the works for a while, including a semi-public testing period, it has slowly been refined to the point that it is faster and more convenient than other methods. Valve is also planning on licensing it to other developers to use to distribute their games online. Looks like the game-publishing heavyweights (EA and Sierra) may be outdated. More info from Gamespy and ShackNews."

4 of 185 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Ok, let's start with the... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    And it might actually be funny, if not for the fact that 60K+ people have already been testing Steam, and YOU CAN TOO:

    http://steampowered.com/html/betasignup.html

    Currently you can get Counter-Strike 1.4 beta, TFC, even the original Half-Life single player game, all via Steam and all free (no need to have purchased anything).

  2. Re:A little skewed, perhaps? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    The statistic's actually aren't necessarily Speakeasy's. The statistics come from a survey application that was included in the last patch for Half-Life and executed upon installation of the patch. Speakeasy just provided the bandwidth and the servers for collecting the data:

    http://valve.speakeasy.net/survey/

  3. Half-Life in 45 seconds by rufusdufus · · Score: 4, Informative

    I just installed their beta; took less than 10 seconds of download to get the steam code. I installed Half-Life and it took 45 seconds to install, and I was in the game.

    The process is beautifully seamless.

  4. Re:Ok, let's start with the... Yes BUT by q-soe · · Score: 3, Informative

    A further Update.

    I apologise - in a conversation with tech support on the forum i have discovered that their keygen had an issue and didnt work properly thats why it asked me for the CC number.

    It does that without the secret code as its a full working version of the client they will be using.

    I have now downloaded the software and played half life, i have a post in the same story about it an i can say that it appears to work as advertised.

    I was wrong.

    I apologise.

    --
    I refuse to argue with Anonymous Cowards - if you want a discussion get an account....