Steamworks
I know this is a little late, but since I’ve been on vacation and all, well, yeah. It gave me plenty of time to think about this.
Valve, the company behind Half-Life and the Orange Box, released a suite of tools for developers called Steamworks. This is potentially big. Let’s take a look at what it entails from their press release…
• Real-time stats on sales, gameplay, and product activation: Know exactly how well your title is selling before the charts are released. Find out how much of your game is being played. Login into your Steamworks account pages and view up to the hour information regarding worldwide product activations and player data.
• State of the art encryption system: Stop paying to have your game pirated before it’s released. Steamworks takes anti-piracy to a new level with strong encryption that keeps your game locked until the moment it is released.
• Territory/version control: The key-based authentication provided in Steamworks also provides territory/version controls to help curb gray market importing and deliver territory-specific content to any given country or region.
• Auto updating: Ensures all customers are playing the latest and greatest version of your games.
• Voice chat: Available for use both in and out of game.
• Multiplayer matchmaking: Steamworks offers you all the multiplayer backend and matchmaking services that have been created to support Counter-Strike and Team Fortress 2, the most played action games in the world.
• Social networking services: With support for achievements, leaderboards, and avatars, Steamworks allows you to give your gamers as many rewards as you would like, plus support for tracking the world’s best professional and amateur players of your game.
• Development tools: Steamworks allows you to administer private betas which can be updated multiple times each day. Also includes data collection tools for QA, play testing, and usability studies.
That’s a lot of stuff. Let’s take a bit of a closer look at some of these things.
Real time stats. This is important stuff. NPD’s numbers as of right now don’t include downloadable content in their statistics, and that’s where most news sources get their information. When you hear that a fantastic (though horribly written) game such as Crysis only sold 87,000 copies, that’s NPD telling the world that. Electronic Arts just released their global numbers at over a million copies sold, many over their EALink service. That’s a big difference.
Encryption. I hate DRM as much as the next technophile, but that’s because it’s usually ass. It sneaks it’s way into your system and makes it so you can’t use what you’ve paid for the way you want to do it. Steam isn’t quite like that. Yes, it’s managed through them, but I can go down to Arizona and show someone Portal that I bought at home in Seattle on a computer that has Steam running, type in my login and my password, and load it up. It’s based on where I am, not where my computer is. If I’m able to do this with any game that I’ve purchased through Steam, it makes gaming on the go a lot easier, and the DRM becomes more transparent, and not nearly as overbearing.
Territory and Region control. Ok, this is annoying, but we’ve done it for years with everything else, we’ll still be able to put up with it now.
Auto updating is fantastic. I hate forgetting to run updates and having things crashed all around me.
Voice chat, matchmaking, and social networking. The integrated voice chat in Team Fortress 2 is one of the cleanest I’ve ever dealt with, same with the matchmaking. The functionality here rivals that of Xbox Live.
Development tools. For most players, this doesn’t mean anything much, we all do betas anyway, but this simply makes it easier, and gives faster feedback for both players and developers.
Oh, one thing that isn’t mentioned above: It’s free. there
Overall, this is what Games for Windows was trying to do. Valve is both innovative, and exceptionally smart about how they go about things. Much props to them. It’s a clean and uniform way to integrate your games on that forgotten gaming box that is slipping the way of the typewriter.
What this also means is that we’ll actually get some variety in our PC games. When one goes in to a brick and mortar store to look at a computer game, you’re fighting the lack of shelf space afforded to the consoles, so the owners of those stores must buy what has historically sold the most. This is why we get the same games over and over, just repackaged. While Steamworks probably won’t save the computer as a gaming device, it should help it tremendously and give a kick start to the system again.