Steam Proposal First Rejected by Industry Giants

[Junaid Alam]

Steam Proposal First Rejected by Industry Giants

A top Valve official said that the company approached - and were rejected by - giants Microsoft and Yahoo to build Steam before forging ahead by themselves.

Doug Lombardi, Valve's vice president of marketing, said other companies kept rejecting the idea of building the platform. "You know, we went around to Yahoo, Microsoft ... and anybody who seemed like a likely candidate to build something like Steam," he explained.

"We basically had our feature list that we wanted. We wanted auto-updating, we wanted better anti-piracy, better anti-cheat, and selling the games over the wire was something we came up with later. We went around to everybody and asked 'Are you guys doing anything like this?' And everyone was like 'That's a million miles in the future...We can't help you.'"

Today, Steam stands as a major distribution platform and community network as more and more publishers release titles both old and new on it. The follow-up to the hit 2007 PC title S.T.A.L.K.E.R. will in fact debut on Steam.

It caters to more than 14 million accounts and sells more than 300 titles.

Source: Gamesindustry.biz [http://www.gamesindustry.biz/]

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[thebobmaster_v1legacy]

This is going on my list of "quotes that came back to bite the person in the ass." Also on that list is a person telling Elvis Presley "You better stick to being a truck driver, because you'll never make it as a singer", another person telling the Beatles "Guitar music is on its way out", M&M/Mars company telling the makers of E.T. "No" when approached about putting M&Ms in E.T., and a dude in the U.S. Patent office in 1845 saying "Everything that can be invented has been invented at this time."

 

[Cousin_IT]

maybe its for the best that Valve got to be pioneers with steam. Least that way they can helpshape the rules of digital game distribution as well as the software. Leaving new ideas in the hands of the old order rarely leads to innovation.

 

[adamandkate]

i really dont like steam. expencive games without manuals/cd? get em cheaper from amazon. online match making, get gamespy thingy, please someone explain to me whats good about it

 

[Meshakhad_v1legacy]

My one complaint about Steam (well, that Valve could fix without much effort) is that they don't include manuals. They could simply attach a PDF file.

But I like steam in general. True, downloading takes ages, but it solves the problem of wanting to install the same game on multiple PCs. And I don't have to keep track of CDs.

 

[fix-the-spade]

i really dont like steam. expencive games without manuals/cd? get em cheaper from amazon. online match making, get gamespy thingy, please someone explain to me whats good about it

The main draw of Steam is that the games are massively cheaper than buying from stores.

for the uk Steam pricing is a straight conversion from US$ to £Sterling. So the games cost less than half what the shops want you to pay. Best example being the Orange box, £55 in store or £20 from Steam? Tough choice...

The tech support pages are also much better than any other system I've used so far (especially EA). Which is good for people like me, who have all the technical knowledge of a house brick.
The games install themselves, update themselves and tend to work first time. Also the speed at which Valve fix bugs is second to none.

Also, their dlc is free. I can't think of any other companies that release games and keep adding maps and equipment packs for free. Usually they caim its an expansion and try to get another £20 out of you.

 

[616Nickel]

CDs? What are those?

Oh, right: those are the delicate little disks that you're forced to find, insert, and wait before your game will even consider running. Then when you've finished playing or want to put something else in the drive, you have to remove them and store them somewhere where they won't get scratched. If you do scratch them, your game might very well be borked.

Oh, to be sure, you can fiddle with no-CD hacks that sometimes work and sometimes don't, or virtual CD drives or whatever, and a bunch of other DIY hacks, butthey all fall into the PITA category.

So I love Steam. Buy a game online, wait for it to download (usually shorter than it would take to head to the nearest EB Games to pick up a CD/DVD version), then never worry about CDs or authentication again. Plus, I can log in to my Steam account from any computer and play my games, once they're downloaded.

All I care about is the game; I couldn't care less what medium it's on. Though I'm glad Valve was the pioneer here; I don't think anyone else could have pulled it off (EA LInk, anyone?)

 

[Steven Rokiski]

1. Steam encourages purchases. You can't tell your friends that you bought a game, when in fact you downloaded and cracked it. Though you can pirate Steam games, the multiplayer component doesn't work properly.

2. VAC seems to be a non-intrusive (I'm looking at you, punkbuster) anti-cheat mechanism. If you stick to VAC-secured servers, you seem to be ensured of a fair game.

3. VAC also ensures the server checks for valid game keys; this, in combination with (1),tends to keep the most annoying online folks in check (children, wankers who don't pay for the game who don't want to be a good neighbor in the community, etc).

4. Valve and other companies often make their full games available during a particular weekend; while the tide of newbies can annoy regular players of these games during these periods, this is an awesome trial mechanism (and needs to be used more often!).

5. Due to (4), more of the people playing the game tried it first and are dedicated to the game.

6. Due to (5), and a bit of (1), no keys get handed down to younger siblings or semi-interested parties who don't care about not being a jerk. Major exception: Half Life 2 keys (since almost everyone who bought the Orange Box already had it, and thus ended up with a "gift key" for it. Thank God they didn't include CS:S keys or DoD:S keys with it...).

7. Valve's usage of voice communications in their games (not universal to all Steam games) is a positive thing. There are mike-spammers out there (google HLSS), but the immaturity-prevention systems seem to stop 99% of it (unless you join a server with "4chan" in the title... even then its mostly just funny and less pure annoying).

 

[Melaisis]

This is going on my list of "quotes that came back to bite the person in the ass." Also on that list is a person telling Elvis Presley "You better stick to being a truck driver, because you'll never make it as a singer", another person telling the Beatles "Guitar music is on its way out", M&M/Mars company telling the makers of E.T. "No" when approached about putting M&Ms in E.T., and a dude in the U.S. Patent office in 1845 saying "Everything that can be invented has been invented at this time."

Hah! That's quite a considerable collection.

On topic: I am forever surprised at how much undeserved hate Steam gets, even from the likes of this forum community. "OH I DON'T LIKE IT BECAUSE I DON'T!" Yeah, that's called ignorance, kids. Or even better: "Well I don't like it because five years ago it wouldn't let me update Half Life 2 when I was updating my 50gig porn collection at the same time!" Well I've had Steam since early last year and bought over 25 games over the system. You know how many problems I've had with connectivity, or purchasing stuff, or downloading it?

None.

Zilch.

Zero.

Nil.

I loathe how like of The Escapist community has fallen into a trend about how people release their games untested and begging for patches. Guess what? Steam updates automatically, so you don't even have to worry about scrolling through pages of downloads to find which one you need to play. Then, you'd normally have to load it onto a reliable download manager and wait for a few hours for the patch to finish off downloading; if you restart during the process, you're buggered. Steam is the ultimate being in up-to-date in not only game downloads, but patching and managing said streams too.

"Get GameSpy!?"

And people complain about Steam being buggy. I remember having to reinstall GameSpy and re-register every time I had a new game. Plus, who of your friends in real life uses GameSpy nowadays?

"They don't do manuals!?" Hah! Really? What was the last game you played that didn't have some sort of extended tutorial and help menu within the actual program itself? Moreover, is that game available on Steam!?

I may come off as being a tad too irrational, but the amount of unjustified hate that Steam as a simple idea gets (from both inexperienced individuals and companies alike slam it with) is totally insane. Don't knock it until you've tried it.

4. Valve and other companies often make their full games available during a particular weekend; while the tide of newbies can annoy regular players of these games during these periods, this is an awesome trial mechanism (and needs to be used more often!).

I'm getting all my friends to pre-load TF2 for this weekend, heheheh.

 

[TheLostSkeleton]

Somebody once said that such things were the paths to progress - that big companies only care about profit now, doing things the same way they've been done because they are proven money-making venues, and how it's the little guys - the unknowns - that really shake things up and find newer, better ways of doing things.

I'd say this is the perfect example of that.

 

[REDPill357]

My one complaint about Steam (well, that Valve could fix without much effort) is that they don't include manuals. They could simply attach a PDF file.

I think if you right-click on the game, it has a "read manual" button. I know one came with S.T.A.L.K.E.R.

 

[stompy]

I'll seriously consider Steam when Australia gets better 'net connect, and I get a decent computer (my problems, not Steam's). Though, this seems like a stupid move by Yahoo and Microsoft.

 

[marfoir(IRL)]

I ask two things of the people complaining about the lack of manuals on steam:

1. Who the hell actually reads manuals?

2. What is in the manual that if you insist on reading it you would not find in the game? For exmaple I took the game at the top of the holy box pile handily located next to me and it happend to be CoD4. I open the manual to find what ammounts to what is officially known as bugger all. There was some install info which is explained during installation and explanations of the indicators on screen...great. Oh yeah and about three pages of licence agreements. Now wasn't that useful...

 

[aiusepsi]

As REDPill357 said, Steam does have manuals.

I think you may be getting Steam confused with Valve games, which generally don't have manuals these days, but that's mostly from the philosophy that nobody reads manuals anyway, so you have to ensure they can figure out what's going on from the game itself. If they can do that, then there's no need for a manual.

Have a look at this one for TF2 anyways. Not really a game manual, but fun anyway.
http://storefront.steampowered.com/Manuals/440/SentryManual_web.pdf

On a broader note, Steam's one of those things that you realise the value of when it's not around. Say I wanted to play... UT2004. I'd have to hunt down the disc (and hope I brought it to Uni with me) find out what the current patch version is, hunt down the patch etc. etc.

With my copy of UT2004 on Steam, I login to my account, it downloads the right version, I play.

Steam's just better. Incidentally, they're running a free TF2 weekend this weekend.

http://steamgames.com/goldrush

So you can see for yourselves!