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Valve Announces "Steam" Content Delivery System
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 Looks like the game-publishing heavyweights (EA and Sierra) may be outdated.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."
What does Sierra think of this, considering Sierra publishes Valve's stuff, last I checked? It seems like this is the kind of service that could be offered up easier by a larger company than a smaller one. Is Sierra going to be a part of Steam, or is Valve going to cut the middleman?
slashdot!=valid HTML
From the article:
With it, we can market and have direct communication with customers, sales and distribution
This doesn't sound like directly downloading games. This sounds like the company taking over your computer and forcing you to watch an advertisement for their product, then "allowing" you to purchase it with a single click of the mouse.
At present, the amount of advertising on the web is becoming increasingly intrusive, but we still have one advantage- we can choose (for the most part) when we want to be abused. I have pity for people whose employment requires them to surf the web as they have no choice when they are forced to endure such pop-up banner misery. With "Stream", the Internet may very well turn into what the modern day telephone has become, a boon for telemarketers and con artists alike. They can choose when they wish to interrupt us, whether it be from a family meal or our favorite TV shows, to allow them the high likelyhood that we can be reached, as the demographics have clearly been researched on such common behavioral patterns.
I, for one, will take this new technology with a grain of salt. It may just step over the fine line between spyware and trojans, and while on paper it may look like a great idea, I would caution those who think being early adopters would be a rewarding experience.
"In the latest survey by Speakeasy, over 75% of players use broadband..."
Aren't the majority of Speakeasy's business built primarily at targetting "power users", such as gamers who seek broadband? That makes their statistics not exactly a snapshot for who's actually the majority of their players.
One of the main reasons CounterStrike (and therefore Half Life) seem to be still selling well is the number of low end systems, such as those found in "internet cafes", that can comfortably run it, which doesn't point to the majority of the players being broadband enabled.
Regardless, isn't Valve pretty much only about CounterStrike and other Half Life (ie Half Life, but this time you play as one of the Black Mesa janitors) knockoffs these days? At least, Team Fortress II seems to have fallen off all our radars.
Sega use to do this way back when. They used to have the Sega Channel, an adapter that hooked up to a Genesis and would let you play games. I wonder what's so revolutionary about this time around. Doesn't sound to different based on the info provided on the links, well except that it installs in less time than a cd.
Can I get an eye poke?
Dog House Forum
Push Technology, 5 years too late? *grin*
This is, of course, the Holy Grail of the "content" industries: Never even pretend to sell anything again, just rent access to it. Steam looks like it's the first cohesive attempt to do exactly this.
First, the scenario they describe to make Steam seem appealing ("You need to re-install Windows from scratch, but you can't find your Half-Life CD key! What will you do!?") fails on two major points:
- The need to re-install Windows at all. This is due to perennially shoddy Microsoft engineering, and it's a damn shame Valve is spending precious R&D dollars trying to compensate for it.
- The illusory need for a CD key.
Cut out either of those issues, and Steam's appeal to users is diminished.Second, I challenge the claim that, with nothing stored on the local disk, Half-Life starts up quickly. Half-Life is fscking enormous. Single maps are at least 1M in size, with 3M being entirely common. Do the math yourself. Even at 1.5Mb/sec saturated, that's still 20 seconds just to download the map. Then you get to download the player models, sound effects, music tracks, etc. etc. Unless they've done some massive engineering to achieve "just-in-time" downloading (this is still a major area of ongoing research), I don't see how they could have made this an acceptable alternative over storing the files locally.
Third, if they're saturating the link to download the content, what's left for actually playing the game over the network? Many people get broadband for the lower ping and higher rate, resulting in smoother, more responsive game play. What happens to that experience when some other process is consuming the lion's share of the link?
Fourth, not having a complete copy of all the bits needed to run the software makes me extremely queasy. What happens when the master index server craps out? What happens when my Steam client gets toasted by the latest Outlook virus?
Having all the bits stored locally is also what's helped bootstrap and maintain the Mod community. There, on your disk, are numerous examples of maps/models/art/music that can be taken apart by users, studied, and used by creative people to come up with new maps and Mods. But what happens to all that when Steam enters the picture? The bits aren't on your disk. Will Steam hand you a copy of the bits, or will it refuse, claiming you're not a, "trusted application?"
Fifth, I don't see the "daily update to thwart cheaters" as a feature at all, much less a realistic goal. The two primary things standing in the way of this are:
Finally, I'm concerned about all the stuff they're not telling you. There are obvious privacy/security concerns here:
Personally, I'm all for developing new facilities that help cut out the middleman and get more dollars directly to the creators of digital works. Perhaps it's my aging, cynical brain but, as a software consumer, I just don't see any advantage Steam provides for me.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
Its free but it asks for credit card details and there is no indication on the site or information about why they want it.
Plus they ask for special offer code which you dont have of course.
Why do they need my credit card? why wont they tell me why they need it ? I dont give my card number out to anyone for any verification process, its bullshit and a company the size of valve should not need it.
I wanted to try this out but i wont be doing so as i wont give them my credit card - this is a BETA test. At this point it reminds me of the famous Lindows pay $99 to beta test our software but you cant tell anyone about it or show it to anyone.
Something smells fishy here.
I refuse to argue with Anonymous Cowards - if you want a discussion get an account....
(Hm. I suppose since they made a public announcement NDAs don't apply...)
I thought the Steam delivery system was just for the beta testers. I hate the bloody thing. Runs in the background, downloads maps as you need them, requires you to log on to play, etc. I figured it was a necessary evil as a beta tester; I'm not going to put up with it as a gamer. Is there some way to boycott this? First PowerPlay and now this shit. Valve isn't a game company - game companies make games.
like a knight in shining armor/from a long time ago
ok please explain this to me,
my cdrom is 40x150KB/s= 6000KB/s (granted it does not actualy achieve those speeds but hdpram -t gives me 2867 KBS/s )
my cable modem gets 4Mbs max thats 512KB/s ( fast mirror would get me about 300KB/s)
so even if you take in acount the 4:1 compresion that would only effectively get me 2048KB/s
(thats using the maximum modem speed vs effective CDROM speed)
So what are they only installing a minimal version of the game and downloading stuff as needed ?
42
I've been a beta tester for Steam since mid-January, and I've been immensely pleased with the software and the gameplay. In order to play any game, you have to go through an initial download of compressed files, and it all takes up about half a gigabyte on your hard drive. This can take a while, but it's a one-shot deal, so I'd pick up a book or make myself dinner for twenty minutes. After this first delay, all updates are handled automatically at login, and they're transparent- unless you bother to check, you're never going to notice that some small patch has been installed to the software.
Login is a simple name(e-mail address, really) and password. This may certainly change, but that's how it stands now. There are no ads beyond a mention of Speakeasy.net, the company hosting the Steam servers, I gather.
The interface for game selection is excellent, as is the "Tracker" software, a combination IM/Gamespy Arcade applet that helps you find servers. The software does seem to improve on a near-daily basis, with fixes to minor bugs, improving ping times, etc. The staff has been great about communication on both the forums and through e-mail.
And one of the best things about Steam was watching all those people who have based their entire game of Counterstrike around bunny-hopping fall flat on their faces. CS 1.4 was first demoed over Steam, and it removed bunny hopping. Bloody crack rabbits getting capped left and right, swearing about how horrible the game is now. Brings tears of laughter to my eyes...
So you play online games, right? You play Counter-Strike? Team Fortress Classic?
No, not really, just Starcraft.
You hate cheaters? How about downloading patches?
Starcraft downloads patches automatically.
It uses a high-performance distributed file system for fast, scalable content delivery.
I think the bottleneck is probably still the Internet.
This is only a small glimpse of what Steam will be able to do.
So, as usual, you haven't written any code yet.
Here is a familiar scenario: You reinstall Windows on your PC. You then start to reinstall your favorite games, only to discover you can't find your Half-Life CD-Key! Doh! What are you going to do?
I'll put my CD key in a textfile called cd-keys.txt (and maybe I'll even print it out!)
With Steam, all of your authentication information is stored server side.
"With Hitler's Third Reich, all your racial/ethnic information is stored in Berlin!"
After launching Half-Life from Steam, it downloaded the necessary files (which took hardly any time at all - actually it was faster than using a CD)
broadband = T5 in this scenario?
92% wire utilization
Wow, you saturated my connection. Doesn't *every* packet-switched application do this?
GameSpy will have more updates about Steam as it becomes available.
Go, code monkeys, go! Work that emacs buffer!!
I was a beta tester for 2 months on the steam project and let me say one thing. Sucks to be 56k. I tried the system on my old modem and it just did not work. The initial connect to a steam server downloads all the data. Sometimes more than 5 megs of content. Thats a lot for a sad little modem user.