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Valve Releases, Tries To License Steam
Thanks to Blue's News for pointing out that the non-Beta version of Valve's Steam has been released, and a valid Half-Life-related CD key is required to install the online content delivery system and play Half-Life engine games online. Since launch this morning, Planet Half-Life are noting: "we said, 'the transition over to Steam is bound to be a little bumpy,' and hoo boy, did that turn out to be an understatement", as many are experiencing installation problems and slowness at the Steam servers. Elsewhere, a Wired News article discusses Valve's plans to make the Steam software base available to others: "Valve is also actively licensing the commerce software that manages the game's download and purchase process to other developers, publishers and Internet service providers in exchange for 5 percent of their gross sales."
It really gets me steam-ed when it takes half-my-life to download the latest patches
adopting the Microsoft business model is going to work out for them.
For every annoying gentoo user, are three even more annoying anti-gentoo crybabies. Take Yosh from #Gimp for example.
support nightmare. I don't think it's worth it, atleast not right now. You may only have to pay 5% of what you grossed(that's how much money you recieved not how much profit, which makes it less reasonable to use), but to pay the support people may make it not worth it when it comes down to the total cost.
What's the world coming to when you can license hot air!
I'm a little teapot, short and stout
This is my handle, this is my spout
When I get all steamed up, then I shout
Just tip me over and pour me out!
now supporting:
cmdrTaco for president '04
michael for oval office intern summer '05
Vaguely on-topic. This is the first petition I've ever signed...
Protest of Half-Life 2's requirement of an internet connection for Single Player and Lan Party games.
I'm waaay out of the loop with the Half-Life scene nowadays so I hope I'm not spreading FUD by posting this link. But if Valve do seriously intend to require an Internet connection for single-player and LAN games (apparently NOT just one-time product activation) then I think it would be a very bad thing.
Thanks to Blue's News for the link.
I downloaded Steam by itself about a month ago without having HL before. I got HL, CS, OP4 and the like for free. Is it any different now?
One of the things that kept Counterstrike fun was replacing the skin models with higher resolution skins. Real nice deagle, and CT/T skins. With valve enforcing the butt ugly generic, 7 year old skins, i really will just start playing HL2 mods, or even work on a CS clone for HL2. (CS2 is using an 4 year old engine, ick...)
I wonder whats going to happen to sites with valve killing special addons, and replacement skins. Favorite places like CSNation, CSCentral, Games Fusion, Skinshack...
I've had to burn all add'ons/modifications to cds, as sites go up and down. Now theres no reason to keep them up with Valve killing over half of the modification market. Wondering what the people over at Fusion are going to do, as they make money off selling complete conversion kits, rather nice ones too.
The steam interface is better, just evil about the way they kill off so many sites that supported valve/sierra. Use to be one of the most mod friendly bunch around...
I'm not sure if this is more than rumor or not (but surprised others haven't noted this yet... was hoping for more info on /.)
check out this hex edit of the gcache
and this guy might need a tin foil hat but has some points... *Shrug*
interesting at least... eh?
E.
Build Your Own PVR/HTPC news, reviews, &
This sure ain't the beta...I put in my CD key from this shit Blue-Shift I have and it tells me I'm entitled to a 1 month subscription...to a game I PAID FOR (Opposing Force comes with BS) just to use their meta-server! I doubt anybody will pay to play a 5 year old game online...at least, I hope not.
Can someone post a torrent for the newly posted traditional installer for 1.6? (approx 400MB, currently available from fileplanet)
what i find amusing is that theres all these petitions about wanting to drop steam and go back to the 1.5 cs and below install style, do they seriously think valve will drop a product after beta testing it since jan
As Halflife 1's engine was originally quake1, it's a bit older than 4 years.
I'm amazed with its staying power, how many other games using Quake1's engine are still being played today?
Yes I know that Valve changed 90% of Quake1's engine, but it's still based on it...
HL uses a heavily modified Q1/Q2 engine.
When I first learned about Steam a month ago, I was impressed by what Valve had done. Free Counter-Strike, Half-Life and a few other mods. Wow. What a smart move! nobody's buying those old games anymore. Making them free not only is a nice thing to do for fans but also bolstered people's sympathy towards Valve and increased the number of people who are going to buy their new products (namely Half-Life 2). But that was just the tip of the iceberg as I saw it.
Steam had the potential to be the next revolution in pc game distribution. Here was my recipe for success:
Attract people with free games and increase Steam userbase. Make anyone who uses Steam agree to occasionally contribute some upload bandwidth as a compensation. Say you have to contribute 1Gb/month worth of upload, with the choice of when to enable it and full throttle abilities. A user in control is a happy user.
This will of course, be used by steam (which would a p2p system a la bittorrent for content distribution.)
Now comes the really cool part:
Say Half-Life 2 is ready. Valve can offer the game through Steam. Since all the costs involved in distributing a physical item have beel cut, they can afford to sell it for maybe $20 a piece. No monthtly subscriptions or anything like that. It's not like you are paying for servers! Other people are hosting them. One time fees. Always. (How much money does valve get off the sale of one HL2 box? I'm assuming it's $20 or less)Use a 100Mbit line to get things rolling (and maybe get some videogame sites (the same ones that host demos, servers and such) to share some of the "seeding" burden with you in exchange for some advertising.
Soon enough, People will be contributing most of the bandwidth needed by their fellow leechers). And these are freaking happy people. These are people who got the game for 40% of it's retail price.
Now that users have got the game (and the corresponding cd-keys that have been emailed to them). Keep being nice to them. Those who want to play online will have to pay for the cd-key. Those who want offline game and are not willing to pay can leech a pirate version anyways. So make the game protection free for your beloved customers. Hell, include a button for them that convert the game to format so they can burn it if they wish to (not like isoz of the cracked game aren't going to surface a week before it's released in stores anyways...).
A little later, you and others are going to start releasing mods. Team Fortress 2, DoD 2 and eventually, the much expected counter-strike 2.
Sell those mods! Charge very little for them. Say $5 to $10 bucks depending on the mod. If the mod is not yours, charge $5 or $10 on each mod sale. You'll have millions of people willing to spend $10 for CS2 right? many of the people who pirated HL2 buy it and spend $10 for CS2 because they want to play online. The number of quality mods will increase exponentially because of the money incentive. You get money, happy customers AND more users as time goes by. THe more users, the more appealing it is for other modders to jump on the bandwagon. and the cycle continues.
The constantly increasing userbase will start to full fledged game developpers (small and big alike) who will start releasing their games on Steam. And you're getting a small slice of the pie for every single copy sold! More profit for you at very little expense. Remember the bandwidth is provided by the users (who will be more than happy to do so in exchange for those low prices I mentionned).
So there we have it, Everybody is happy. Valve is making tons of money, gamers are getting awesome price/value, modders and small time game developpers have an easy entry to the industry.
Am I crazy? Is all this stuff I mentionned so hard to implement? Isn't this a valid business plan?
But nope. Steam is not going to do this.
1-After the beta ended, free HL and counter-strike was over. Say bye to to 50-75% of steam users.
2-Valve is going the monthly subs
licensing the commerce software that manages the game's download and purchase process to other developers, publishers and Internet service providers in exchange for 5 percent of their gross sales
HAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Good luck selling a glorified web shopping cart and FTP client for 5% of gross; especially one that has been demonstrated to not be able to stand up under load.
NO CARRIER
You'd probably be surprised how many lamers set their skins to neon colors for better visibility, or used a custom AWP/Scout skin to get a crosshair back. People exploiting skin functionality to get a cheap advantage is what brought this about, not jerkishness on Valve's part.
Oh, and newer, higher resolution skins and models will be available from Valve officially, the rollout starting with CS v1.6 .
Steam includes an MP3 playback program, and indexing your MP3 files to make them available is probably one of its functions. The rest of the data can probably be explained by the file initialization issue mentioned in that forum thread.
Here is an animation that describe of what I think of the Steam service so far...
What's so bad about being lazy? What if there was a war and nobody showed up?
I will not give Valve a dime as long as they are pushing this crap along with the game. Hopefully lots of other people feel the same way and ol' Gabe gets the message... If not, there's always Doom 3!
I've asked Valve itself about this, but didn't get a reply. However I asked Planethalflife and got a response.
It's the first one down. Or anyone have proof it has Q2 bits in it?
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!
Link: 379.43 MB
Interested in open source engine management for your Subaru?
If you're waiting in line, I'll let you cut me.
Steam:
What is probably the biggest thing in the half-Life community since the announcement of Half-Life2 is Valves new toy, Steam. htp://www.steampowered.com
There is a lot of misconceptions about Steam, alot of rumors, allegations, but mostly confusion.
Steam 1.0 has just come out of beta and with it is very little information in the way of the Who, what, when, where, and why. Hopefully i can shed some light and help you understand what Steam is, and also help you see the benefits of this service.
Guide headers are:
WHAT IS STEAM?
WHY STEAM?
DOWNLOADING GAMES THRU STEAM.
WHAT DOES THIS MEAN TO US PLAYERS?
How DO i USE STEAM??
INSTALL STEAM!
USER FOLDER IN STEAMAPPS FOLDER.
INSTALLING MODS:
INSTALLING ON 56k (or you cba to download)
BITTORRENT or ROUTER PROBS
WHAT IS STEAM?
The best way to some up Steam is to say it is like Sony's Launch Pad. If you dont know what Sony's Launch Pad is, well then ill explain what Steam is for you.
Steam is a Broadband platform (i think one of th folks at valve called it) it is essentially a program which uses the power of Broadband connections to bring everything in the Half-Life world together. Why i single it as Broadband only will be explained below.
Combining different tools already available in many guises in the HL world, plus a streaming system, Security protocols, system scanning, online shopping, News, Anti-cheat, Instant Messanging and alot more, Steam will give us the players of Half-Life more control, interactivity and ease of mind.
WHY STEAM?
Well there are many reasons and i don't think its fair to suggest any as the sole reason for Steam. From Valve Softwares point of view. Valve has the largest online gaming community in the world ever in the histroy of games. Valve have sold over 10 million retail copies of Half-Life. Valve are also commited to provide the Community with support for their releases. They have a commitment to ensure that we the customer, get a good game with hardly any bugs,no hassle, cheat free etc and to do this Valve need to bring them under their control.
Whilst implementing a system that can update any file on our client at any time we're connected to Steam as soon as the files are released means we dont have to sit around and face the same old Patch wars, that is assuming Valve can compensate for the amount of server load. By streaming files, the client can update whilst we play, even install new downloaded mods using an install when you need policy, which means it only installs a bit of the mod, when you need it. So if you want to play Counter-Strike it wont download all the maps, just the map you are playing first and then it will install the other maps when you meet them, it does mean at first it will go slow, but its a once off process, once its installed you dont have to re-install them, unless theres updates, this is why it is recommended to have a Broadband connection.
Security in Half-Life is the biggest threat to the community. With hacked copies of Half-Life circulating and an old security system not owned by the makers, means theres little they can do to fix the problems besides nagging WON. So introducing Steam_IDs, to replace WON_IDS and incorporating their new anti-cheat software means that Valve can theoretically stop any illegal or malicious cheats/hacks.
DOWNLOADING GAMES THRU STEAM.
Though mods wont be free, as far as I can tell. Steam is FREE to use if you so wish, with continued support to mods and include many of the services you get at the moment with Steam, including on the fly updates, instant messanger and STEAM_ID security etc.
As i write this, im under the impression that Steam will act two fold for Mods under Steam. Firstly, Mods submitted to be Steamified will have to be bought by the Players to play them. Secondly Mods under Steam will be released through Steam first, but still remain downloadable to us non-payers a while later.
I see this like The Counter-Stri