Reader Reviews

Steam (Valve's content delivery service)

by Virgil Scott

Having read an inspiring interview with Gabe Newell (of Valve Software) in Develop Magazine, I had high hopes for Steam. I could see a streamlined content delivery system that would reduce the purchasing cost of games and allow easier access to additional content and patches. Although the concept of add-on content is a somewhat touchy one, I felt Half-Life had made such an exemplary case of how well it could work (the most popular online FPS being a free modification for Half-Life) that Valve stood in a good position to improve the this area - they know how to foster a community.

I find it really frustrating when it takes an hour just to find a server that will grant you enough bandwidth to download the latest compulsory patch. Or when the download sites ask you to 'register' then tell you to wait in line for three hours for a patch that would otherwise take 10 minutes to get hold of. With Steam this is no longer an issue, that's why Steam is so great. Or rather, why Steam should be so great.

My impetus to write about Steam came from my recent experiences with it whilst playing Counter-Strike (CS) and Opposing Force. Just before the introduction of Steam a friend of mine had shown me the WarCraft 3 Mod for CS. It was a really nifty Mod that added RPG elements (cumulative experience points and character classes) to the game. I found myself playing it all the time - it was superb. Then Steam was released, and was obligatory if you wanted to play any Half-Life related games online.

The first time I tried to install Steam it stopped responding and ruined my entire Half-Life installation. The second time I installed it everything went fine except that I found out afterwards that Steam was not compatible with the WarCraft 3 Mod. More recently I started playing the Opposing force single-player campaign. This downloaded surprisingly quickly, but whenever the cinematic voiceover played in game my computer would freeze for a few seconds - this made it a little difficult to get through lengthy conversations.

Later on, the game started crashing every time it tried to auto-load when I died, each time it crashed on an auto-load it corrupted the save file that it was trying to load. By the time I noticed this pattern it had pushed me back by about half an hour's worth of play - all my most recent saves no longer functioned. Even more frustrating was the time when, having just done a lengthy auto-update, Steam stopped working entirely - crashing when I tried to log in.

I had always thought that people who dismissed Steam as Digital Rights Management (DRM) for computer games were wrong. To me, it sounded like Steam was primarily designed to improve the way games were distributed - cutting costs in distribution would make it cheaper to buy games. But it seems as though Steam has (mostly) unintentionally become the embodiment of what many fear in DRM. So far DRM has brought us increasingly poor interoperability - for example, music downloaded on Napster can't be played on your iPod, a clear likeness to Steam can be drawn through its apparent incompatibility with many Half-Life Mods. DRM has restricted the use of content that has been purchased legitimately - for example Ubisoft's ridiculous copy protection scheme whereby their games won't run if your PC has any virtual drives installed, a comparison can be drawn in Valve's software in that you can no longer play single-player Half Life (or any of the single-player add-ons that you may have obtained through Steam) unless you are connected to the internet. This also means that you cannot hold 'offline' LAN parties - Steam simply doesn't work offline.

I'm of the opinion that broadband content delivery is inevitably going to become more and more prevalent, this should be something to be excited about. It has the potential to genuinely enhance PC gaming, but I find the initial offerings of such a system very discouraging (I'm interested to hear about other people's experiences though!). Perhaps other Developers and Publishers will learn from the blunders of Steam and come up with something more satisfactory.