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GDC 2002: Valve Introduces "Steam" Online Distribution System Gabe Newell from Valve delivered one of the most anticipated speeches at GDC this afternoon, when he addressed a packed room for his keynote address in the conference's "Business & Legal" track. In a lecture titled "Redefining the Business Of Game Development" he introduced Steam, Valve's new online gaming platform, which is currently in testing phase and will go live later this year.Steam is a paid distributed file system and application server that grants users access to a wide range of content, from games to business applications and hardware drivers. Once downloaded, the Steam system transparently downloads game content and delivers it to the end user. Steam also provides contact lists so members can track their friends and the games they are playing, as well as instant messenger/notification functionality. Steam's origins trace back to Valve's success in the online games market, with titles such as Counterstrike. These games have spawned a community of millions worldwide, many of them just playing in cyber-cafes or enjoying user-created content. In a recent survey conducted by Gamespy, Valve discovered 75 percent of those users are on broadband connections. Valve coupled that data with the knowledge that typical game has a working set (amount of content required to play a single level) of around 10 MB, and concluded that it would be much faster to download the content by streaming it on demand than to install the full retail CD. In the demo held at in GDC, Half-Life's popular intro sequence booted around two minutes after starting Steam, with an average time of 4-5 minutes according to Valve. With TEAM, Valve hopes to redefine the economics of the classic retail distribution model. Newell claimed a developer would get an average of $7 from a $40 title through the classic retail channel, whereas the same game would deliver around $30 to the developer under an online model such as Steam. Although these numbers are just a example, they clearly show the direction Valve is heading. The real test drive of the system will come later this year, when Half Life: Condition Zero is released simultaneously through retail and Steam. We'll see how the gaming community reacts. The download-on-demand feature also has some interesting side effects. The automatic distribution of patches/updates is possibly the simplest. It is also possible to customize the downloaded material according to different criteria, so if the user is, say, using a certain hardware, he would get content appropriate for that system. Steam also provides full billing and encryption support. Because the user's information resides on secure servers, it is easier to implement cheating prevention measures. Valve has a much tighter control over a Steam connection than if the player was playing online without a central game server monitoring the content of the player's local files. Cheating hacks are detected. After Newell's presentation, a number of guest speakers gave short talks on their experience test-driving Steam. Among others, Alex Garden of Relic showed a working version of their upcoming title Impossible Creatures, which will be published by Microsoft. Although the game will ship through the classic retail channels to meet the company's shipping deadline, Garden stated a clear interest of using Steam on future Relic games. Nvidia and ATI explained how they have been working with Steam to deliver driver updates and demos to users. Finally, Alexis Liu of Acer did an extensive profile of the gaming community in Taiwan (5,000 cybercafes generating around $500 million per year), and explained how a product like Steam could address the needs of gamers while providing a meaningful business model for the developer/publisher. Although everyone agreed that a platform like Steam was needed to deliver content directly to users, the open question is how long will it take to change the user's habits and embrace such a platform. Whether players will comfortable downloading games, as opposed to purchasing packaged software, remains to be seen. More information on Steam can be found at http://www.steampowered.com. |
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