Have faith in Valve

http://www.steampowered.com/news

They will eventually get this right...and it will hopefully allow Valve to prosper and continue to produce quality game engines for modders for years to come..

I'm looking forward to DoD 2.0, NS 2.0, etc...

All that release said to me was, ""We''ve crapped our pants and we''re doing our best to clean the stains from the underwear."" The fact that they''re phasing out CS 1.5 in favor of their Steam version angers me. Just let us play the effing game. I''m making a proclamation, here and now: Steam sucks. It won''t work correctly for a long time, and the enormous download required is {ableist slur}. All so we don''t have to patch the game ourselves? I can do it myself, I''m a big boy. Quit trying to make the PC a console; let the *giggle* Phantom do that.

I don''t know. They are trying way to hard to ram rod this steam crap down everyones throats. I just want to buy a game and play it. I want to go to a LAN party and just play it, I want to pull up th all seeing eye find a server and just play. I don''t want to deal with somebodies proprietary middle-ware, locked servers and constant downloading of updates every time I want to go online, none of that crap is fun. I coudn''t find a profit break-out statement but I will bet dollars to donuts that valve is just sure that it can use steam to make huge piles of money and so they will try their best to make that a self fulling prophecy litterly through many different kinds of expense to their customers. Now I''m not saying they shouldn''t make huge piles of money, and I''m perfectly happy to give them my money in exchange for a game I want to play, it''s the rest of the crap that I am steadily appreciating less and less. Honestly, do any of us really want or need one more company grasping greedily after our wallet every month just to keep the product they sold us ""working""? I''m tired of this subscriber business model that every seems to feel they are entitled to use, just sell me a dam game that is finished and tested and then leave me the hell alone until you have another one.

This whole debacle stinks of some arrogant corporate drone with no concept of how the game industry works. Guess what, monkey-boy: If you make it a giant PITA to play your game, people are just going to play something else. All the marketing money in the world won''t make up for people screaming about ridiculous product activation/rights management idiocy (see: TurboTax).

This goes back to a point I made earlier when I must have been smart for a moment or ate some Mentos or something: Companies keep harping that subscription-based models are the pricing model of the future because they want it to be so. I could go out and get one of those ""Rent-to-own"" tv''s, but guess what -- I don''t. Because, while the monthly payments may be low, I would end up spending a lot more money in the end. What a farce, and what a horrible attempt at pulling the e-wool over our e-eyes.

"KillerTomato" wrote:

This whole debacle stinks of some arrogant corporate drone with no concept of how the game industry works.

Well, for the fairness of the argument... Valve doesn''t employ a thick layer of corporate drones to come up with marketing strategies like that... It''s a pretty lean company that proved that they do know how the gaming industry works, to say the least. And this whole Steam decision came directly from Valve, not from some morbid corporate bowels of a publisher (Vivendi/Sierra).

Valve isnt forcing a subscription model down anyones throat..calm down.

If you feel Valve is another ""arrogant corporate drone"" then you need to seriously buy a clue... Think for a second how much free gaming you recieved because of Valve.. This isnt EA here..

I''m confused..many people scream that music and movies should be downloadable...that demos and patches should be made freely available... so here Valve is trying to be forward thinking and develop a broadband based distribution that will freely (given enough bandwidth) make your lives easier..

Yeah sure there will be bumps in the road but thats to be expected with everything.

They will be forcing a subscription model, look at the big picture and how they are positioning steam. Look at how they are forcing all connection points through it weather update, subscription or LAN. There is about steam that is ultimately going to be free, nor will they continue to always have alternate non invasive patching (really they don''t even have that now since it''s bundle ware. The only page they are taking her is a page from gator, if you are not paranoid about this then it''s time to wake up and catch them gently stroking your wallet muttering precious. There is absolutely noting magnanimous going on here, they are creating a profit center and marketing machine, that is not a bad thing for a business to do but they are positioning it to be very aggressive and to force their customer base into it, that is also not a bad thing for business to do, if it works. I for one won''t stand for it and will take may cash elsewhere when this starts to play out the direction it can not help but go. Just look at the technology and ask yourself how you would make back your investment on building it with only being minimally Evil as a business, it''s pretty easy to see why they are going this way.

If you feel Valve is another ""arrogant corporate drone"" then you need to seriously buy a clue...

Sorry that was misread - I was referring to the strangeness of the decision, not the overall worthiness of the company. What I was trying to get across was that this seems like a bizarre misstep for a company that''s seemed so responsive to gamers in the past. The only explanation that I could come up with was that a no-nothing ubercorporate was forcing Valve to do so. If that''s not true, then... I dunno. (shrug) This is something that seems to offer very little benefit to gamers, and lots of obstacles that are going to make their core audience very, very angry.

We''re all so much in the ""GIVE ME PLEASURE NOW"" mode as gamers that this was indeed risky. Personally I just assumed it would crap out no matter how much bandwidth they have until enough people had downloaded the main stuff that things would ease up a little.

So each day I''ve patiently clicked on my little steam icon and thought, ""well, let''s see how far it goes today."" Yesterday it went so far as to try to connect me to a CS server, but it lagged out.

Oh well.

I guarantee that The All Seeing Eye (my fav) will work with Steam since i''ve already used it with steam. I like better. And dude I paid my $10. I''m quite sure that Valve will watch the majority of the gaming community want shiny CDs/DVDs for their very own, and just do subscription for the ""must have now no matter the cost"" techies. What I see Steam really doing sometime in the future is protecting their investment from kiddie scripting. Not hacking per se, mind you, but downloading hackerware and hitting the buttons. In order to do that, as Blizzard keeps trying to get right, they have to make more stuff server-side. Or more invasive from the server side. I''ve been reading those ""this server is set up to run stuff on your computer dude, sign off now if you don''t like it"" on CS servers for a very long time. So far at best I''ve hoped people get auto-banned from my fav DoD and CS servers.

So I guess I''m saying that I plan on relaxing so long as Valve keeps their commitment to keep WON IDs alive until Steam is alive.

On a side note, what Valve really wants to do is license Steam to other software companies who want to bypass publishers, cause dude *that''s* where the big money is. If they were to get say $3 for every copy of some game they didn''t even create, and all they do is manage steam distribution of the game...

They''re trying to make something that developers will love and publishers won''t.

Roo is 100% correct.

Developers have been trying to do that for a long time. They tried it with Quake, remember? If you got the demo, you already had the game, just call, give them your card number, and they''d give you the code to unlock it.

This is along the same lines, and it helps keep the hackers at bay with the auto updating.

Valve will make A LOT more money if you buy the game through steam. It cuts out the publisher and store space cost. All the money you spend will go to them. Got for them.

Why am I so calm? You can still buy the game from the store, right? I don''t care if it''s a month later, but you will still be about to go to GameStop and grab the a box and walk out with it, won''t you?

If you tell me no, then I''ll probably start ranting with the rest of you.

You can still buy the game from the store, right? I don''t care if it''s a month later, but you will still be about to go to GameStop and grab the a box and walk out with it, won''t you?

True. What I was freaking about was the following ''interview'' with Gabe:

We''ve implemented a system very similar to Windows Product Activation, which prevents you from installing the same copy of Windows on more than one PC. In our case, it allows one copy of HL2 per machine. This will hold true for those who purchase it over Steam, and those who buy it in a box at the store. You can activate your copy over the Internet, or by mailing in the activation card that will come with the game. Steam users will obviously have their game activated over the Internet.

Now that this interview has been declared to be a complete fake by Mr. Newell himself, I don''t have any problem with what Valve is doing. By avoiding EB, Babbage''s, etc., they can significantly reduce the price of the game AND get it to gamers faster. As long as I can have a real game box that I can hold in my hands, I couldn''t care less what other options are available.

I for one have no problem with Steam.. I''m not an overly parnoid person and working for a VC and dealing with alot of the behind the scenes business aspects of Game Development I know just how little money sometimes ends up in the hands of the actual developers instead of the publishers..

Trust me..some of these people working for big publishers are the spawn of the devil.. Certain of these people are doing theyre best to kill the industry.. Not on purpose but because they are so clueless..

ANYTHING that puts more money in the pockets of WORTHY devs is a good thing for everyone involved. I''ve long since given up believeing that my efforts can stop people from learning about my spending and lifestyle habits.. IF someone wants info on me they''ll get it.. and there aint sh*t I can do to stop it. (thankfully my life is fairly boring...job/wife/dog/house).

Steam may suck ass at first..but in the end I think it will offer tangible benifits to everyone.

"TheGameguru" wrote:

Steam may suck ass at first..but in the end I think it will offer tangible benifits to everyone.

This is my problem with it. It will definately offer tangible benifits to developers, but why should I want this? What tangible benifit does it offer me? Until they can give me the game over Steam without me losing features (backups, fair use, ect.) I don''t want it. I just find it hard to believe that Valve hasn''t figured this out yet. Can we make backups? Can we play single player and LAN games offline? If the answers to these questions are yes then Steam will become the best thing since sliced bread. Until then I am holding my breath.

I would also love to see some sort of authenticated p2p distribution method, something like bittorrent but with thier authentication, simply because it would make popular items easier to distribute. Right now you''re punished for success, with p2p you are rewarded for it. I''m not really sure why they aren''t even talking about doing this either.

*edit* actually, the more I think about this authenticated p2p thing the more it makes sense. You can download the files encrypted with something PGP, then decrypt them with the private key that Valve gives you, which could be attached with your username and password. That way people could connect to the p2p network and help distribute files that they haven''t even paid for, and they can''t use it without paying. You could have a disk space limit on what Steam can use, and it will just fill that up with whatever files people request.

"TheGameguru" wrote:

I''ve long since given up believeing that my efforts can stop people from learning about my spending and lifestyle habits.. IF someone wants info on me they''ll get it.. and there aint sh*t I can do to stop it. (thankfully my life is fairly boring...job/wife/dog/house).

Yes, but we want to know how much your dog''s yearly income is, how many CDs it is planning to buy in the next six months, and if it enjoys hiking, arts & crafts, stamp or coin collecting, cooking, and/or other.

(If other, please list below.)

"Pyroman[FO" wrote:

""]

"TheGameguru" wrote:

Steam may suck ass at first..but in the end I think it will offer tangible benifits to everyone.

This is my problem with it. It will definately offer tangible benifits to developers, but why should I want this? What tangible benifit does it offer me? Until they can give me the game over Steam without me losing features (backups, fair use, ect.) I don''t want it. I just find it hard to believe that Valve hasn''t figured this out yet. Can we make backups? Can we play single player and LAN games offline? If the answers to these questions are yes then Steam will become the best thing since sliced bread. Until then I am holding my breath.

Well for one.. if in the very least it handles mod updates or map updates I''d need for a particular server without me having to disconeect and scour the web to find the particular mod and/or map and then rejoin the server which may be full by now then whoo-hoo! you got a winner!

I play Wolfenstein:ET almost nightly for hours and let me tell you its a royal pain in the ass to jump on a server and discover you now need beta 3 of xxxxxx map and you only have beta2 so the server kicks you out with a .pak missmatch error. If steam can facilitate this christ I''d leave my machine on all day and have it push down map updates as they are made available so when I do get those precious few hours to actually play I''m not forced to waste 30-45 minutes getting maps/mods in order TO play. To me that makes sense!!

When I''m at work and my Wife is at school my bandwidth for the most part goes unused.. as I said I''m not paranoid so its no big deal for me to accept remote updates to my software...

Christ..I want Microsoft to do this.. imagine if servers and desktop OS''s could be made self updatable...to me you got a winnar!

Not to mention server side patches.. its a pain in the ass when your favorite server hasnt yet updated their end so you can no longer see them on your end [CCM1 in ET comes to immediate mind.. p.s. get off your asses and patch allready ]

"TheGameguru" wrote:

Well for one.. if in the very least it handles mod updates or map updates I''d need for a particular server without me having to disconeect and scour the web to find the particular mod and/or map and then rejoin the server which may be full by now then whoo-hoo! you got a winner!

Tribes 2 can do this, except for map autodownloading, which other games can do. It doesn''t require you to remove features from the game in order to facilitate this. That was my whole problem with the thing, I am not willing to give anything up in order to get these features, which I admit would be pretty awesome.

Christ..I want Microsoft to do this.. imagine if servers and desktop OS''s could be made self updatable...to me you got a winnar!

They can do that now, just put Windows Update to automatically install critical updates. Or do you mean something else?

One of the main reasons that this isn''t turned on by default though is one of the main problems I have with Steam, you''re essentially turning the keys to your computer over to some corporate data center that has to manage 30 million computers alongside yours. The latest update break your system? We''re sorry, please buy more Microsoft software. Same thing with Valve, ""Did we break your Half-Life? Oops, reinstall."" or even ""Oops, say goodbye to your $50"".

"Pyroman[FO" wrote:

""]

"TheGameguru" wrote:

Well for one.. if in the very least it handles mod updates or map updates I''d need for a particular server without me having to disconeect and scour the web to find the particular mod and/or map and then rejoin the server which may be full by now then whoo-hoo! you got a winner!

Tribes 2 can do this, except for map autodownloading, which other games can do. It doesn''t require you to remove features from the game in order to facilitate this. That was my whole problem with the thing, I am not willing to give anything up in order to get these features, which I admit would be pretty awesome.

Christ..I want Microsoft to do this.. imagine if servers and desktop OS''s could be made self updatable...to me you got a winnar!

They can do that now, just put Windows Update to automatically install critical updates. Or do you mean something else?

One of the main reasons that this isn''t turned on by default though is one of the main problems I have with Steam, you''re essentially turning the keys to your computer over to some corporate data center that has to manage 30 million computers alongside yours. The latest update break your system? We''re sorry, please buy more Microsoft software. Same thing with Valve, ""Did we break your Half-Life? Oops, reinstall."" or even ""Oops, say goodbye to your $50"".

Let me clarify...pretty much every game will allow you to autodownload maps when you connect to the server the big problem being of course is that the available bandwidth on a server allready hosting 60 players is tiny! imagine autodownloading a 6mb map at about 2-3kbs a sec... basically it times out before you ever get a chance to play and/or the next map has allready loaded.. It would be much nicer to have a service like Steam autodownloading maps as they became available.

No.. I know all about Microsofts autodownload... but thats all it does is autodownload...it doesnt autoinstall.. YOU still have to do that portion.. what Microsoft is working on is self patching OS and NOS''s. Naturally there has to be some level of trust that the said updates won''t break something.. but hey...thats the current environment we live/work in.

"TheGameguru" wrote:

No.. I know all about Microsofts autodownload... but thats all it does is autodownload...it doesnt autoinstall.. YOU still have to do that portion.. what Microsoft is working on is self patching OS and NOS''s. Naturally there has to be some level of trust that the said updates won''t break something.. but hey...thats the current environment we live/work in.

I''m pretty sure that you can tell it to autodownload and install a certain time every week. I''ll check when I get home to my Windows box but I remember ""notify me"" ""download but dont install"" and ""download and install"" as choices.

Which I don''t have a problem with autoinstallation as long as it''s an option, but with Steam it''s not, it''s forced.

Yep, you can have it auto install. I don''t recomend that though, it can get a bit punchy.

True there is download and install but it still requires admin access and a reboot.. would still not prevent things like blaster.worm from hitting..but were getting offtopic..

I believe in the Steam beta there was an option to turn off autoupdates.. did that get removed in the final?

"TheGameguru" wrote:

True there is download and install but it still requires admin access and a reboot.. would still not prevent things like blaster.worm from hitting..but were getting offtopic..

Actually yes, that would''ve prevented the blaster worm just fine. There was a patch for it 3 months before it hit, myself and my parents didn''t get hit because I had ran windows update after that patch was released. Recently MS has been pretty good about getting patches out there, it''s just that nobody runs windows update

I believe in the Steam beta there was an option to turn off autoupdates.. did that get removed in the final?

If this is still there then I have much more respect for Steam. Good job Valve. It''s like I said though above, I really would be suprised if Valve doesn''t take care of my concerns. They''re smart people, it''s just that I haven''t heard anything yet.

"Pyroman[FO" wrote:

""]

"TheGameguru" wrote:

True there is download and install but it still requires admin access and a reboot.. would still not prevent things like blaster.worm from hitting..but were getting offtopic..

Actually yes, that would''ve prevented the blaster worm just fine. There was a patch for it 3 months before it hit, myself and my parents didn''t get hit because I had ran windows update after that patch was released. Recently MS has been pretty good about getting patches out there, it''s just that nobody runs windows update

I believe in the Steam beta there was an option to turn off autoupdates.. did that get removed in the final?

If this is still there then I have much more respect for Steam. Good job Valve. It''s like I said though above, I really would be suprised if Valve doesn''t take care of my concerns. They''re smart people, it''s just that I haven''t heard anything yet.

No it wouldnt of...if they hadnt rebooted their servers in several months... even with that option there is still some level of manual internvention.. I believe Microsoft is looking in the next generation to even eliminate this last step. We''re diverging though...