Determinance screenshot

Steam

steam

We talk about Steam a fair bit on this week’s Village.  Let me precis my current feelings about Steam:

- I like Steam because I can play my games on any computer and not have to worry about losing discs, and because it keeps selling me games at the right prices.

- I worry about Steam becoming too powerful, especially with Steamworks.  Steamworks’ features, cloud save-games and community especially, could make it a runaway leader pretty soon.  Monopolys for this kind of thing aren’t good – indies like us are already feeling the pinch from “having” to be on Steam to succeed.

- While I am not one of them, I understand that quite a few people are put off by the somewhat bloated Steam client.

- I am convinced that “I have to be online to play my games” will be a complaint no-one cares about in three years’ time.

EC and I have been discussing what it would take to create a viable competitor to Steam.  He thinks that a massive exclusive (think Half Life 2 for Steam) could do it.

I think what people really want is all the functionaliy of the Steam client, but as a web app.

What do you guys think?

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 28th, 2009 at 12:57 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

3 Responses to “Steam”

  1. Herr_Alien:

    § November 28th, 2009 at 8:46 pm

    Very, very hard to displace the de-facto leader.

    There’s just one (and maybe the only) true competitor: BitTorrent.

    Try the following recipe:
    - use an already existing transfer protocol: check!
    - do not allow people to run the game without being properly authenticated. For example, have the game servers not accept ‘rogue’ clients (ie. clients that send fake authentication tokens that do not match with your customer database). Have the master server not accept rogue servers (ie. servers that do not comunicate the client IDs to the master server for checking).
    With enough levels of checks, you’ll deter most of pirates away. You will not elliminate the problem, but you will reduce it.
    The key here is authentication of the player.
    - price stuff right
    - if possible, make your ‘store SDK’ as unintrusive as possible. An external DLL and one header file would do.
    - do not aim just for big exclusives. Have anything and everything. You’ll be competing to gain market share, so expand at all costs.
    - ask for a small cut. Just enough to cover expenses and 2%-5% profit. Don’t get greedy, remember, the key word is to expand, to aquire as many games as possible
    - use a ‘light’ client. Maybe just the authentication dialogue, embedded in the game? Maybe an external app that games will connect to to retrieve the authentication tokens? (I am thinking here sign in once, play as many games you want without having to sign in each time you fire up a game).
    - make it easy for people to uninstall/remove/get-the-f**k-out. People love an easy way out if they belive it’s not worth it.

  2. Ben Sizer:

    § November 30th, 2009 at 12:05 pm

    My main gripe with Steam is the client. It serves no useful purpose for me and I don’t see why it requires so many patches, mostly for games I don’t even own.

  3. Ian:

    § November 30th, 2009 at 12:06 pm

    Yeah, the constant updates are pretty annoying.

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