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 Looks like the game-publishing heavyweights (EA and Sierra) may be outdated.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."

Comments

Not used for what you think

[CmdrTaco (editor)]

This "Steam" content delivery system raises my eyebrows, and it should raise yours as well. We live in a world driven by advertising, especially through media such as the web and TV. I wouldn't hesitate to think that some bright executive would get the idea in his head to use this for marketing purposes.

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.

More Important is What They're Not Telling You

[ewhac]

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:

• Proxies on separate machines can still be written, nullifying local attempts to thwart hacks;
• Release testing for Windoze takes at least a month. Regression tests against Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows ME Harder, Windows NT4, Windows NT5 (2K), Windows XP, and all the various forms of hell that is DirectX practically guarantees that the notion of quick-tweak-and-post-to-server just ain't gonna happen.

Finally, I'm concerned about all the stuff they're not telling you. There are obvious privacy/security concerns here:

• How is billing performed? Can I pay in advance by cash or check? Who will have access to my credit card number?
• How does Steam know it's "me"? Are login sessions encrypted so no one can obtain my password without my permission?
• Once I'm logged in, how much data is Steam gathering about me in the background? Are they sniffing around in my machine? Are they tracking which games I'm playing, when, and for how long? What will Steam do with that information once they obtain it? (Any why do they imagine this would be any of their damn business?)

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