Steam

I was one of the first people in the country to have broadband internet access at home. Seriously, I lived in one of the most expensive areas of LA, Ca, and the year was 1997. At the time, the World Wide Web ( as it was still known then ) had only been brought to us a scant few years before by Tim Berners Lee. Most people were still using AOL or similar dial up services, with proprietary clients providing a very limited and extremely slow representation of what was to become the web as we know it today.

At the time, Steam was little more than a glint of the future, and such a service was wholly impractical as it is implemented today. Originally envisioned as an automated patching system for Half Life based online games, Steam was something that many of us really paid little heed to for a number of years.

Counter Strike never held my interest. Indeed, the world of “Run around, shoot other people, scream at everyone, die, repeat” has never held any sway for the sophisticated gamer, and thus, having a service running and taking up valuable system resources just to keep such a mindless multi-player experience running was seen as a waste.

This is not a slight at Valve in the least. These FPS games are in fact the most profitable genre for “console kiddies”, and that’s fine. The fact that the FPS is the absolutely least suited genre to a gamepad and console and is the most popular form of gaming on them is a sad state of affairs, but this is not Steam’s fault. Steam grew up. Soon, it became more than simply a patching system.

A lot more.

Gaining Steam

As if distributing their own games directly to players wasn’t enough, Valve has grown Steam into the premier online digital distribution platform for games. Today, the Steam client is its own social network, online store, and gaming container.

Gaming Container?

If you can get past the loss of a boxed product and paper manual, Steam offers something that you cannot match any other way: Stability.

When you buy a game through Steam, you download a special version of the distribution. Every game bought through Steam is stored inside the Steam folder, and is launched through Steam itself. Why is this important?

Ever dig up a game CD that’s a couple of years old, to try to install it?

What you’re feeling right there is pain. The install may not go smoothly, and then you have to manually locate patches. Maybe you didn’t even download the LATEST patch. What about DLC? Saved games? Driver issues? It’s a NIGHTMARE. Certain games are extremely picky about this stuff. It takes up so much time, and is so frustrating, that many of us don’t bother with those games.

How does Steam help?

Steam keeps it all “in the family”. Buy once: Play forever. Just keep your Steam client up to date, by launching it at least occasionally, and all of your games, even that copy of Dark Forces, will stay up to date, and fully playable on the latest Windows 7 x64. EVERY last game.

How’s that for convenient?

As a professional hardware reviewer and tech, I often need to move things around between DOZENS of systems. I have taken to keeping my entire Steam folder on an external drive, with an eSATA interface. Now when I do a fresh install of Windows on a build I just did, I can simply plug that drive in and have dozens of games ready to play in about a minute. All I have to do is launch Steam with Admin Privileges, and in about a minute I have all of my testing tools ready to go. If you have not done this already, I HIGHLY suggest you get an external for your Steam folder. It will save you hundreds of hours of downloading time in case of disaster. This saves me so much time and effort that many of these games would be worth it at twice the price.

Twice the Price? How about Half the Price?!

The insidious genius of Steam doesn’t stop at convenience. Much to the dismay of Game Stop; Steam can offer third party games at a fraction of retail price.

On any given weekend; Steam conducts a sale on both recent games and older games. Many older games, as in three years old or so, can be had for as little as $2.50 to around $7.50. Many brand new titles are about $29.99 or even less. Go ahead; walk into your local Game Stop or Wal-Mart. How much are those very same titles? $49.99? $59.99? Add local tax, and you can see the value here.

What’s in a box?

I know what you’re thinking: “But we don’t get a box!” or “What if Steam goes down?” or “I like to be able to install the game wherever I am”.

Think about this for a moment. How many of you have Steam installed and use it daily? Ok, how many actual, boxed games have you bought in the last three years? How many games are in your Steam folder?

Chances are, there is a huge disparity between how many boxed games you’ve bought and how many Steam games you have. Why is that?

I have a number of theories, and it’s all about number theory . . .

“Impulse” isn’t just a rifle type

Right now, if you haven’t recently, go launch your Steam client, or visit the web version of the store, here.

The first thing you are greeted with is the friendly online store. On top is your modern scroller, much like this site, followed below by a tabbed set of categories.

Click on “Specials”.

What do you see? Depending on when you read this, it could be anything, which is part of the fun of Steam. I will tell you what I see:

I see fully SIX games under $5. Some of this is really good stuff too.

King Arthur - The Role-playing Wargame for $2.99. THREE DOLLARS. At this point, it makes no sense to bother pirating such a game . . .

Wait what? Pirate? Me?

Yes, I’m talking to you. Don’t pretend you’ve never heard of piratebay, demonoid, or torrents. Someone out there is seeding those torrents, and chances are good you’re one of them. Hey, look at it this way. How much is your bandwidth worth to you? What about your TIME? If you pirate a game, how much time are you spending troubleshooting it if it doesn’t work perfectly? What about the patches? You will have to hunt down a new crack every time it’s patched. Most games are very online oriented these days too, and that often means you’re shut out.

Steam as Anti-Piracy?

Yes. Absolutely.

Let me walk you through it.

Let’s say I want to play Half Life 2, but I don’t want to pay for it. I’m a cheap pirate. Maybe I’m just used to NOT paying for software. Whatever the reason, let’s say I try to pirate HL2. I go on a torrent site, find 6-7 different hacked up copies of HL2, and try one. The instructions are convoluted, and maybe it doesn’t even work correctly. In fact, HL2 is well known to give pirates a run for their money. I think this is hilarious myself. If you work; you will spend FAR more dollars in TIME LOST than you would have had you simply bought the game through Steam, and had a legitimate and working copy.

Does this make sense yet?

I often see Half Life 2 with all expansions on sale for as little as around $10. If there is anyone with Steam that doesn’t own this game yet, I’m shocked. Number theory indeed . . .

But let’s get back to today.

What else is on the store right now?

Cyan: Complete Pack for $14.99. That’s Myst, Riven, and three other games from one of the most unique and creative game entities on the market for fifteen bucks. Sold. Easy.

And this is a Thursday evening. This isn’t even a weekend sale, or one of Steams’ famous Holiday Sales.

This impulse buying mode is where Steam really shines, because to their already crazy low prices they add one last simple but super effective ingredient:

Gifting.

Want to buy a gift for a gamer friend? Just buy it on Steam, and give it their email address. They don’t even have to own Steam already for this to work. They “open” their gift, install Steam, and now they too are hooked on Steam.

It’s a self-perpetuating system; made more effective by incredibly addictive little games such as “Plants vs. Zombies”. Who HASN’T had zombies on their lawn?

So what have we learned? A combination of Impulse Buying and an Anti-Piracy business model has made Steam MORE attractive than NOT PAYING FOR THE GAMES. This on top of the fact that chances are good that you will BUY many games you would not have otherwise looked twice at.

It’s brilliant, elegant, and exactly the sort of thing that I value here at uryaen.com.

Steam Rolling ( Blame the puns on my girlfriend )

Steam is like a virus. It self-replicates through gifting. Every time you buy Plants vs. Zombies for four dollars and send it to someone, they are “infected” by the fever to impulse buy games both for themselves, and for all of their friends and family. Soon, Steam is on every computer on the planet, and retail stores are obsolete. At least; that’s how I see it.

The new Gift Basket.

On holidays, Steam will sometimes offer “packs” of a game. This is a one price purchase, and includes four, eight, even twelve “copies” of a particular game, usually for less than the retail cost of ONE copy. Now you have a bunch of gifts you can send out, thus making the impulse purchase even more compelling. Now it’s a game unto itself. Can I actually use twelve copies of a game? Do I know that many people?

Am I that popular?

I’m not, but many people are. Games are being bought and flung around faster than EVER, and more money goes straight into the pockets of the people who worked hard to MAKE those games. ( This is more of that anti-piracy stuff ) Believe me, I know, I’ve been involved in game development longer than many of you have been alive. It’s a thankless, stressful, and HARD job. There is nothing more demoralizing than seeing more pirate “copies” of your game out there than actual sold copies.

Do you want new games?

I sure as heck do. Steam is not the ONLY online game distribution platform, but it is the best, most mature, and stable by far. If anyone is going to “save” PC gaming, it’s Valve.  Convenient patching, “go anywhere” installing, and impulse purchasing have made PC gaming Easy Again.

Full Steam ahead ( Ok, last bad pun, I promise )

So what could be next for Steam? Certainly releasing Steam on every platform known to man: PCs, Macs, Linux, Consoles, maybe even portables, and phones.

But I have a different idea. Why not expand the content into two other traditionally heavily pirated areas?

Steam For Movies

Nothing has been announced, but I would honestly find it quite shocking to NOT see this happen very soon. Steam is the perfect distribution platform for Movies and TV Shows.

If you look at the Steam client; you can imagine that it would be fairly straightforward to add the ability to sell movies and TV shows in-client fairly easily. Whether or not the studios would go for it I’m not sure, but if you’re reading:

Games are selling better than ever because of Steam. It can do the same for you.

A tab can be added for each, and sell movies at a smaller price than a Blu Ray but with a codec that looks just as good ( .mkv containers with any of a few modern codecs can be virtually indistinguishable from Blu at about 1/3 the disk space ), and I would start buying ALL of my movies through Steam.

The monetary structure could work similarly. New movies cost less than retail but more than older movies, which could cost as little as a dollar or so. Again: impulse buys. Soon, we have dozens of movies safely ensconced in our Steam folders, along with our games.

Steam for TV Shows

I do not have cable TV. Heck, I don’t even OWN a TV. I find it all quite unnecessary with big, high resolution monitors, and modern video codecs. My computers all have Blu Ray Drives. Why would I waste money on cable? I already don’t, but I have a feeling that if Steam began distributing TV Shows many others would dump their cable as well and free up that money to buy those shows on Steam.

I am well aware that one can buy shows on iTunes, and stream shows through other services. Have you HONESTLY compared image quality of “streaming” to a solid modern codec for local play? There is NO CONTEST.  Streaming is fun, and quick, but it’s not for the purist.

It’s like using Onlive for your primary gaming. It’s blurry. REALLY blurry. It gives me a headache. I’m spoiled by Blu Ray and .mkv. I cannot stand to watch video NOT encoded at 1920x1080 with a near lossless codec. It makes me ill. Even those of you with lower resolution requirements can benefit from a BETTER QUALITY encoding.

Steam could provide that. Imagine brand new shows, per episode or per season, and cheaper than any other provider, downloaded and kept in your Steam folder with your games and movies. Now we’re getting somewhere.

Older shows, such as “Will & Grace” could be made available, with a fresh encoding in widescreen, for a far cheaper price than one could find them in stores. I am a completest. I don’t want to buy an episode or even a season. I want COMPLETE series of shows, with all of the extras, and I would like it all homogenously encoded and perfectly organized. I also want to see high resolution encodings of “24”, which currently cannot be had. They aren’t out on Blu. Retail is dying, and everyone knows it. Many shows and movies simply cannot be had because it’s so expensive to distribute them to stores, knowing that many copies will go unsold, thus making the entire endeavor profitless.

One Folder to rule th- ( oops, sorry )

Steam can be the one place where ALL of your content is kept: Games, Movies, TV Shows. Heck, maybe even music, although the RIAA is so out of their minds in the last few years, I doubt that they’d even entertain the idea, so it’s not worth thinking about. Music is probably going to become obsolete soon, because the business model has imploded under its own litigious weight.

This isn’t 1997

Broadband has changed our lives in more ways than most of us really realize, and one of those ways is altering HOW we both purchase and enjoy entertainment content. Driving to a store, purchasing a game or movie on a disc . . . that’s so 1997.

An Open Plea to Gabe:

Gabe: Please, give us Movies and TV shows on Steam. Do it better than anyone. Use full resolution and near lossless codecs, and even release each thing in a variety of sizes. Let me buy a movie, and watch it right in Steam at 1920x1080, with the same audio codec as Blu, and then let me transfer that movie to my iPhone or Android phone, or PSP, and play it back smoothly. Give us commentary tracks, extra features, everything a Blu Ray has and for a lot less and all organized in my Steam folder.

Each movie could include say three “copies” on separate devices. I could have one main copy for my main Steam folder, and one “mobile” copy to transfer once at a time to any compatible device, such as the portables listed above. The DRM could work the same as it does with games; just let me “un-license” that device and be ready to copy it again later. Finally one “backup” copy I could burn to a disc, right from Steam, for playback on DVD players or even Blu Ray players.

Give me TV Shows, old and new. Let me pick up whole seasons or series at freshly baked encodings, in full resolution, and including any extras available, and as above, let me watch them on whatever devices I have.

Do it all at the same “Impulse” friendly pricing scheme you’ve built so much success with games on, and we’ll buy our content from you alone from now on.

I fully believe with all my heart that Steam can and SHOULD be the main online distribution platform for not only games, but all forms of entertainment.

Gabe: Don’t let us down.