Steam Tops 15M Users, 158% Sales Growth
In today's announcement, Valve trumpeted Steam's free community features, the upcoming release of the cooperative zombie shooter Left 4 Dead, and the recent revelation of Steamworks--Valve's free offering of its internal server tools to all PC developers.
"PC gaming is thriving, and has evolved into an era of constant connectivity," said Valve president Gabe Newell. "That connectivity gives us the ability to have a much better relationship with customers, not just for delivering our games, but across all aspects of our business--including the design, development, and support of our games."
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FrankPoole
replyI used to really dislike steam, but I have actually grown quite fond of it over the past year or so.
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I hated it at first because there were so many issues. It seemed like every time I logged in it updated for 5 minutes, crashed at every turn and screwed with my game performance. Most of that is solved now (updates can be disabled, aren't as frequent, higher internet speeds are more common, etc).
The only real issue that remains is the escape plan if anything went south. Not that steam will die, but I mean even if one specific dev/publisher does and you lose your game unless you have a backup. I'm just curious, as it hasn't happened yet.-
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How do you figure? That money must go somewhere. Let's pretend for a moment -
1) Activision dies (theoretical)
2) Bloodlines now has NO publisher and NO developer, it becomes essentially abandoned
3) It gets removed from the purchase list because let's face it, the money goes nowhere since no one owns the rights (unless valve owns a piece of every steam game)
4) Customers who own the game don't lose it, since it's stored locally and can be backed up
All is well? Now I uninstall steam the day before this occurs. I reinstall. Hmm, bloodlines is dead, cool. I click "install" on Bloodlines in my game list. The game goes to their server and...what? Downloads thin air? No one is paying to host this game anymore. It's dead. Do we get a refund? Of course not, Activision and Troika are dead. Valve doesn't care, it's not their game. So unless you backed it up you are boned.
Keep in mind this is all theory. I don't even pretend to know how steam's agreements work. Maybe valve will step in and host, but how on earth can they do that for EVERY game to ever come onto steam forever? Not going to happen.
Also if I backup a dead game, will steam always allow me to restore it even if it's no longer available online?
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Still not terribly fond of how slow it is, and that's saying something when you have a 10meg connection. If they can fix that and not limit games to having to play while Online (most games on STEAM are good that way but there's always the odd-ball out there), then STEAM will be fine.
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Same. I actually launch ALL my games through Steam now, regardless of whether or not I bought it via Steam. It gives me one nice centralized launch point for all my games and it also lets you use the overlay to message people, see what they are playing and access a web browser all without alt-tabbing.
