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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."
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...
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)
If (assuming that it's true) they make people connect to the internet then it would be serious misstep at an otherwise brilliant company.
Valve has got lots of great people and is one of the few companies that can seriously challenge id in the FPS market. Making people connect to the internet to play, though? Weak.
What if your LAN party's using some type of weird proxying system? What about other configurations? What if the inet trunk goes down and people have to say "Oh shit. No inet. Let's just play Doom3 instead"
It just doesn't make much sense to require a "ping" to the server to play on a lan or single player. Sure, activating the product I can understand (And just like everybody else with some shred of moral fiber in them I plan on plunking down some hard-earned cash for HL2 the first day it's out) but anything farther than piracy prevention is toeing that line between cautious and just plain douche-baggery.
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