Civilization Comes to Steam

Gamespot reports that yet another publisher has joined the ever-growing stable of Steam fans. 2K games is working to bring some of their games to the service, with Civilization III and IV coming to Steam this week, and other titles to follow. From the article: "Also included will be the high-seas adventure Sid Meier's Pirates! and the alternate-history real-time strategy game Shattered Union ... According to a statement released today by Valve, Steam currently has some 10 million customers for both its 'core' products--which include advanced shooters such as Half-Life 2--and casual games, such as PopCap Games' Bejeweled and Zuma. "

Comments

Fancy that...

[sirboxalot]

I've been meaning to buy Civ IV for a while now, and now I don't even need to leave the room.

High prices

[LotsOfPhil]

Civ 4 is $50 and Civ 3 is $30.
The latter seems quite high for a 5 year old game.

Re:High prices

[damiangerous]

Great, Civ 3 Complete is $18.98 on Amazon. The listed MSRP is $19.99, so it's not like you're even getting a discount from them. Steam is selling it for $10 more than that. What benefit are they offering you for your $10?

Re:High prices

[Odin_Tiger]

I realize that my case is so unusual as to be negligible and so it doesn't really justify it, but...I live 100 miles from Wal Mart (or any other place that would carry these games), so driving to get it, having it shipped next day air, or downloading it for $30 are my options for getting it quickly, and honestly the download would probably be the best balance of time and money. As it happens, I already own (and don't really like) Civ III, so I won't be getting either, though.

Re:High prices

[Anonymous Coward]

The benefit of not being able to play the game once they go out of business.

Steam & Shadowgrounds

[tcopeland]

If you've got Steam, give that Shadowgrounds game a whirl. It's old-fashioned 2D and is very nifty - lots of weapons, lots of stuff to kill, just fun to play all around. And only $20, so, hey.

Re:If you buy from Steam, Steam works

[Thansal]

I assume you are reffering to the problems that came about from the launch of HL2 (assuming as you do not elaborate at all).

So again, most of the problems that were there have been fixed. Yes, you can play your purely offline content offline with no problems. Yes, you still need to unlock the game from the start, however I personaly prefer that to other forms of copy protection. Yes, the launch of HL2 was rocky b/c of the steam servers getting hammered horribly.

If you wana bash something, bash it, don't just make random comments.

As for the Civ series showing up on Steam? Nifty, I am always glad to see the library grwoing, admitedly I have no interest in strategy games so this is not great boon to me.

Sadness..

[yamamushi]

Am I the only one who finds this disappointing?

Re:Sadness..

[pandrijeczko]

No, you're not (and let the Valve/Steam fanboys mod me down, I've karma to burn anyhow).

If some games players want an easy life and not to have to worry about applying updates manually then good luck to them and I hope Steam gives them what they want.

But Steam has also been shown to be as intrusive as spyware in what it "phones home" about in regard to what it finds on your PC - sure, those at "Steam Central" may not be able to do much with any information to any specific individuals but that information is still probably useful statistically and may even be used to justify even tighter restrictions on we consumers further down the line. No, I've nothing to hide whatsoever (apart from my own personal data on my machines) but I also work in operating system and server security - Steam is just another closed server/client application that has the potential to be misused or cracked and is therefore not running on any PC I own - it's that simple.

What's a real shame is that the original Half-Life (and its expansions) is my favourite game of all time and I would like to play Half-Life 2 and the new Episodes - yes, and like everything else I play, I'll happily go out and buy the full retail version. But I decide what I run on my PC and I simply will *NOT* allow any power-hungry company ride roughshod through my PC for the sake of a game.

It's even more annoying that I'm also a big fan of the Civilization series and have played them all up to Civ 3 - Civ 4 was going to be a game I was going to ask for a Christmas present from the missus. Hopefully, I'll still have the choice of buying the boxed version and downloading the updates to install manually, otherwise I'll be choosing something else for Santa Claus to bring me.

But to end on a positive note, at the other end of the scale I think Stardock deserve some real praise with the way they have handled Galactic Civilizations II. Not only is it a superb game (if you're a Master Of Orion fan like I am) but once you've installed it and registered your license key with their web site, you don't even need to put the game disc in the drive to play it - plus they even tell you how to export you registration to another machine so you can have it installed simultanously on a desktop and laptop or so that you don't need to go through the registration process again after a rebuild.

No Warlords?

[DarthBibble]

I thought maybe they would include Civ 4: Warlords in a bundle.

Civilization comes to Steam?

[meringuoid]

... right, so after Steam get Railroad, then Industrialization. Then build factories, factories, factories, and start churning out the cavalry and artillery units 50% faster than your neighbours. The rest writes itself...

Old PC Games

[Jesterboy]

This is all well and good, but what I'd really like to see on Steam is the "ancient school" games that used to run on Win95/DOS running under Windows XP and available $5-$10 a pop. It seems like an ideal situation for Valve; small download sizes, minimal work, and I would think a high demand. As for the gamers, we could get games like the original System Shock running no hassle under WinXP, with possibly some minor graphical improvements (i.e., unlocking higher res video modes in this example).

I know games such as these are widely available on abandonware sites, but I would gladly pay for true support. Referring to System Shock again, I managed to get it to run fine on my old laptop with Windows XP, but my current system is unable to play it reliably, despite trying to use Dos Box, VDM Sound, etc. I would gladly pay for these games if I could easily run them, and would like to support the developers who made them. We could have Lucasarts Adventures, classic DOS games, and older FPSes at our fingertips without delving into a legal quagmire such as abandonware. Is this just a pipe dream?

Re:Old PC Games

[secolactico]

but what I'd really like to see on Steam is the "ancient school" games that used to run on Win95/DOS running under Windows XP and available $5-$10 a pop.

I'll say! I would gladly pay (again!) for a chance to play "Master or Orion", the Ultima series (incl. Worlds of Ultima) with no hassle on modern hardware/OS.

Still, this is a good idea. I never bought CIV III or IV, so I guess I'll give them a whirl.

Re:Old PC Games

[Bluesman]

There's no such thing as giving Civ III a "whirl."

You can start a game in the afternoon. You'll be "just finishing up this turn" when the sun comes up the next morning, and you haven't slept at all. You've been warned.

Re:Old PC Games

[damiangerous]

This is all well and good, but what I'd really like to see on Steam is the "ancient school" games that used to run on Win95/DOS running under Windows XP and available $5-$10 a pop.

What you want is Gametap. They don't have System Shock, but they have a lot of old DOS games (including LucasArts adventures).

When worlds collide

[Dr. Eggman]

I've already got Civ 4, but it would be very nice if I can use the CD code to run it off steam. For some unknown reason, my CD Drive trips a copy protection on Civ 4, causing a switch to low priority on my machine. I can reset it to normal, but it doesn't stay for long. It's incredibly frustrating. All tech support could say is "update your CD drive drivers" but apparently my drive's company doesn't support this drive anymore. This drives' not even supposed to work on XP!

It's really nice to see higher qualities coming to steam. It's even scheduled to have an Unreal Engine 3 based game. The Pop-caps games are just annoying to see advertised; maybe Civ 4 can class-up the place alittle.

Does anyone know

[overshoot]

how these play on Wine and variants?

I like the Civ games, but I'm not about to buy blind.

Re:Does anyone know

[Clever7Devil]

Civ 4 does not work in Wine, to my dismay.
Not as if grinding my Hunter to 60 leaves any time for Civ 4...

http://appdb.winehq.org/appview.php?iAppId=2514

Steam questions

[batmn42]

I like the idea of Steam, but I have an issue with it that has kept me from buying anything on it (I have tried the Darwinia demo, and liked it, but didn't end up buying the actual game).

My question is: what if Steam goes away someday?

I really want Episode One (and for sure will get Episode 2 when it comes out-- Portal is sweet). But if I buy them over Steam, and then my computer dies, and Steam dies someday, I've got nothing left. If I go to the store and buy a disc, then at least I'll be able to reinstall the game and play it even if I don't have a connection to Steam (or is that even possible?). But if I download the whole game on Steam, aren't I losing any chance to play it, should Steam ever disappear?

I have already bought Half Life and HL2 (in the boxes), and play them over Steam without any problems. But I've been staying away from actually buying things through Steam (even though I'd buy Episode I and Civ III in a second) because of these issues. Any answers?

Re:Steam questions

[Goose42]

Once the game has been downloaded to your machine, it is possible to force Steam into an "offline" mode which won't hit up servers for anything (updates, verification, etc). So, if the Steam service disappears, you will still be able to play your games. As well, you can back up the Steam installer and the game data to CDs/DVDs, so if the service disappears you can load the games back from your own personal backups.

Re:Steam questions

[Dr. Eggman]

Well, The Steam Review has a blog/report on the closing of Triton; an online games distribution system that once hosted Prey.

The closing of Triton is a lesson on how not to shut down DD systems. While I fully support Steam and buy all my valve products through it, it is always important to know what could happen. We can only hope Valve takes up Triton's lesson and prepares fail safes. As of now, Valve has tested and says they are prepared to allow bypassing the authentication servers should their service be offline for an extended time. This is a good first step in preparations, but it is still a small step.

You are fully allowed to backup all steam games to disk; it even provides you with a function to do so with minimal work.

In my personal opinion, Digital purchasing of Steam games is just as safe as physical purchases, easier, and (in some cases) cheaper. The real arguement is what if Steam's gone for good and that'll affect all the Steam games equally.

Re:No its rather recent

[vertinox]

I assume you are reffering to the problems that came about from the launch of HL2 (assuming as you do not elaborate at all).

Recently, I saw Red Orchestra at Target and bought it as an impulse buy because I really liked the Mod. However, to my dismay, I could never get it to run because it could not connect to Steam.

Even tried connecting directly to the internet without a router and turning off firewall and hacking the WinXP TCP/IP, but to no avail that game would not work.

I would have reformatted the machine, but it was my room mates. *coughs* My main computer is a PPC mac *coughs* and they were disproving of me playing games on it anyways.

Still... I thought it as money towards supporting an indie game dev, and eventually I'll have a Intel Mac so it will hopefully work.

But doesn't mean I will shy away from games that use Steam.

So what

[alnjmshntr]

I can't understand why releasing a game on Steam is news. These games have been available for online purchase and download from other sites for ages. Direct2Drive.com for example (my favourite) has many top games for sale and their prices go down pretty quickly after release. And you get to download an actual setup file which you can backup to a dvd.

Re:So what

[Zed2K]

Which you can't update with official patches until Direct2Drive puts out their own version of the patch. Steam is directly connected to the publisher which just pushes the patches out to the system to update automatically.

The problem is

[Sycraft-fu]

That it is generally a non-trivial amount of work to update the game to run on modern systems. I mean the way you dealt with things in the DOS was was just totally different from now. For graphics most games would do something along the lines of directly write information to the VGA card's registers then call an interrupt to switch it to a non-directly supported mode (320x240 with multiple buffers was popular, called Mode X often). You'd then directly write to the off-screen video RAM and flip the page when you were ready to display.

Ok so there's just no such thing now in Windows. You don't directly access anything in hardware. You instead call upon an API for it (usually DirectX). This means that to make it directly Windows compatible you have to totally re-write large parts of the code. You aren't just hacking one little thing to be different, it's a different way of dealing with a computer.

The only other option is emulation. You leave the program as is and have something that translates those direct hardware access instructions in to calls to APIs Windows can deal with. That's precisely what DOSBox or the NTVDM do already.

I just don't think you'd find the market to be large enough to justify the development cost of a Windows port.

However, as to the Lucas Arts games, you are in luck. Turns out that all those adventure games they made were designed with the same basic software. It was called the Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion, or SCUMM. Basically they developed a tool to put together Maniac Mansion. Well when they made another game like it, they started with the same tool and updated it. The upshot is that emulating that engine has become an easy way to make lots of those old games run, and that has been done. See http://www.scummvm.org/ for the project.

Re:How do I sell a game?

[toejam316]

Actually, You can sell your games. Simple as hell for the seller, but it can be a nightmare for the buyer. You simply sell the DVD/CD, CD Key and thats it. The whole damn thing, done. And for them to play it? They have to send in the CD Key and $10 to Valve and say "Hey! This game is registered to another steam account! Mine is ****@***.***, Register it to this please!". Then, they get the game. Simplish. ish.