By Alec Meer on January 6th, 2012 at 5:06 pm.
We’ve already seen some minor willy-waving from Valve regarding the bumper 2011 they had with Steam, but now they’re full-on doing The Crab and asking you to admire their big, shiny guns. After ten years in this business I’m a bit bored of saying “only idiots think PC gaming is dead”, so I’ll let this do it for me.
Below: many statistics, and a lie.
- 1800 games now on Steam. Wonder how many of those I’ve played? At a total blind guess, around 400.
- 40 million accounts registered. Doesn’t mean they’re all being used, of course. I know I’ve got about four myself due to assorted login-forgetting and review code registering issues and LAN gaming sessions, for instance.
- Year-on-year sales increased by over 100%, for the seventh year running. Blimey!
- Simultaneous users topped 5 million during December. Partly due to the holiday sale, Skyrim and MW3, I think.
- Served over 780 petabytes of data; twice that of 2010. I don’t know how many megabytes a petabyte is, but I presume it’s a lot.
- Chat Faliszek consumed over 900 live dogs during the development of Portal 2.
- Over 14.5m Steamworks games were registered, 67% up from 2010. This one is probably the real biggie for Valve, as it means their community/cloud/achievement/DRMy stuff is increasingly becoming the PC gaming norm. Much as Steamworks tends to be useful, its move towards becoming the Xbox Live of PC gaming is something I have mixed feelings about. Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!
- Steamworks is now in over 400 games. See above.
- Over 19m in-game items were traded (still only for Portal 2 and TF2, I think?)
Also, Big Picture UI mode – aimed at using Steam on your large TV – is apparently on the close horizon. I’m looking forward to that one, and if it’s good enough I might build a second PC specifically dedicated to TV gaming that boots directly into Steam. BECAUSE I’M A MASSIVE NERD.
(I’d quite like it if they sorted out the technical problems that the last Steam update seems to have introduced first, however. It’s been a flaky old thing for the last few days).
06/01/2012 at 17:11 Spinoza says:
Let me guess: Jim on the right , Alec -middle and Adam on the left. John needs all separate picture.
06/01/2012 at 17:24 sneetch says:
Actually, the picture was taken inside one of the veins on John’s left arm (that’s the blue background).
06/01/2012 at 17:25 Caleb367 says:
You mean my favorite gaming site for gamer nerds has been written by people not looking like gaming nerds? Preposterous!
06/01/2012 at 18:06 Phantoon says:
Naw, I’m pretty sure the guy on the right is Gary Busey.
06/01/2012 at 20:47 J-Spoon says:
I’m relieved that RPS decided to be charitable about the article photo, ensuring that we are not subjected to the areas below that crop.
06/01/2012 at 23:09 battles_atlas says:
Dude on the right is trying too hard: I like my life-devoted-to-muscle-mass people to look like they’re not trying
07/01/2012 at 00:04 mpk says:
Actually, all of the men above are trying to simulate the vein that appears in Jim’s head whenever he thinks about EVE PvP circa 2006.
They fail.
07/01/2012 at 02:09 nikiasfae says:
Eken M007 8 inch Google Android 2.2 Tablet ultra-thin Screen MID & E-Book Reader with Wi-Fi/Webcam Silver registered to buy! There are manners both hands! Do not hesitate! http://migre.me/7r8MJ
07/01/2012 at 16:49 Muzman says:
The real story is that those guys are PS3, 360 and Wii.
Pictures of PC are over here
06/01/2012 at 17:12 Williz says:
Spiral Knights too (On the Item trading front)
06/01/2012 at 17:17 johnpeat says:
They could be including the rash of trading which the Gift Pile triggered too, I guess…
06/01/2012 at 17:16 MiniMatt says:
Somewhere between 780 billion and 840 billion or so depending upon how you do your counting. But you’re right, “a lot” is a far more useful descriptor.
Now you mention it, I don’t think I saw one of those “no animals were harmed in the making of” lines during Portal 2 credits. Those evil, hungry, bastards.
07/01/2012 at 05:16 Thermal Ions says:
Now expecting PETA to get all up in arms followed by Gabe, Chet and Doug appearing naked and eating tofu on a Game Informer cover as a visual statement against the consumption and skinning of live dogs.
Hey I couldn’t un-think it, so why should anyone else be allowed to.
07/01/2012 at 06:27 Phantoon says:
You are a terrible person. That’s what this says about you.
06/01/2012 at 17:17 slick_101 says:
780 petabytes = 837518622720 megabytes… Now that is scary…
06/01/2012 at 17:19 terry says:
That’s enough room to install TWO copies of the Force Unleashed!
06/01/2012 at 17:25 sneetch says:
That game was bloody ridiculous! It’s larger than any MMO I’ve come across!
Bought it in the sales.
06/01/2012 at 17:30 westyfield says:
How many peggles is that?
06/01/2012 at 17:39 TheTourist314 says:
But what about Pedobytes?
06/01/2012 at 18:02 Cooper says:
That’s fifty-five billion, eight hundred thirty-four million, five hundred seventy-four thousand, eight hundred and forty-eight Imperial Peggles
(Which is twelve billion one hundred thirty-seven million nine hundred fifty-one thousand and fifty-four Metric Peggles)
06/01/2012 at 19:47 slick_101 says:
How many nibbles do you guys think it is? (without looking it up)
06/01/2012 at 21:21 Aninhumer says:
1.56 Exanibbles obviously.
07/01/2012 at 10:12 LionsPhil says:
780 petabytes is:
798,720 terabytes
817,889,280 gigabytes
837,518,622,720 megabytes
857,619,069,665,280 kilobytes
878,201,927,337,246,720 bytes
1,756,403,854,674,493,440 nibbles
7,025,615,418,697,973,760 bits
07/01/2012 at 10:13 LionsPhil says:
Or roughly (amount of sigfigs may not entirely account for rounding errors, ahem):
16,357,785 Blu-Ray discs (double-sided)
187,160,018 DVDs (plain old single-sided single-layer)
1,288,490,189 CD-ROMs (plain old 650MB ones)
595,568,798,379 DOS-formatted high-density floppies
2,382,275,193,514 REAL floppies
649,711,416,413 C90 cassette tapes
35,128,077,093,489,867 seconds (111,696,419 years) of cassette tape, assuming high-end data density (using slightly different numbers)
07/01/2012 at 10:16 LionsPhil says:
The spamfilter won’t even let me crack wise about how I’d run out of digits computing how long it’d take to pull it down over dialup. Bloody thing.
(Technically it’d be faster than cassette tape! Probably.)
07/01/2012 at 12:04 Norgg says:
There are 1,000,000,000,000,000 bytes in a petabyte, 1,125,899 906,842,624 bytes in a pebibyte.
111,428,571,428,571,428s (3.5 billion years) to download 780 petabytes over dialup.
07/01/2012 at 12:16 Carra says:
Unless if you sell harddrives. Then it’s 780000000000 mb.
07/01/2012 at 12:48 Norgg says:
Is that in millibits?
08/01/2012 at 11:36 LionsPhil says:
Nobody with two brain cells to rub together wants anything to do with that particularly idiotic piece of revisionism. Changing the meaning of a term already deployed in common use doesn’t fly.
Also the “ibi” prefixes all sound like words from Tellitubbies.
06/01/2012 at 17:17 wccrawford says:
They probably shouldn’t be trying to show off while there are so many server issues. It’s been pathetic the last week, even after the Winter sale finished.
06/01/2012 at 17:32 MuscleHorse says:
My thoughts exactly. I’m an outspoken fan of Steam but they really do appear to be cocking up more than usual. There was a point shortly after the recent client update where no one was able to launch a game unless they booted offline mode up.
06/01/2012 at 18:08 Captchist says:
An outspoken fan of steam?
06/01/2012 at 17:18 Spooner says:
I hope that Big Picture UI mode is useful for me on even regular sized screens. So fed up of reading IM windows with minute text (I know I can edit XML to increase the size, but it resets every time Steam updates and if you expect me to manually edit xml there is something very wrong D: ). Why can’t they imagine some people might want larger text (or, for that matter, some want smaller)?
06/01/2012 at 18:32 Monchberter says:
I really hope it works too. I run a HTPC as well as a desktop and decently resized text on a 40″ tv is tricky to obtain when Windows 7 can’t even zoom effectively without breaking how games render.
If Valve are aiming to make Steam TV / Sofa friendly, they may want to do more about sorting out gamepad compatibility as well. While recent games such as Portal 2 and Left 4 Dead play very nicely and with an Xbox controller, older Valve games are crippled, despite being advertised as ‘controller enabled’ (i’m glaring at YOU Team Fortress 2).
There’s also the problem that many PC games such as Modern Warfare 2 and Bad Company 2 even have gone so far as to strip out the option of using a pad altogether on PC. Callous in the extreme for console ports!
If Valve’s intention is for big screen mode to function like a console, then they need to consider standardising gamepad input coding as part of any steam game, or develop their own third party input schema in steam that will handle any game you throw at it.
06/01/2012 at 19:51 whydidyoumakemeregister says:
You can’t navigate the menu in Left 4 Dead 2 with the Xbox controller. A seems to work for “OK” and B for Cancel in most of the popups, but other than that the controller only works in-game.
06/01/2012 at 23:47 Monchberter says:
@ whydidyoumakemeregister
I forgot about Left 4 Dead 2′s half way house.
DOWN WITH THIS KIND OF THING!
07/01/2012 at 11:34 RegisteredUser says:
People playing FPS with controller?
That goes a way towards explaining why some of my random L4D2 teammates are such utter crapnoobs.
07/01/2012 at 12:01 Monchberter says:
@ RegisteredUser
Which is why I always add ‘with Xbox pad’ after my name if i bother to play with PC players. There should be a workable filter for people using gamepads for exactly this reason, and to group pad players together perhaps. TF2 (apart from Engy) is pretty unplayable against mouse + keys so auto matching against pad users would make a lot of sense.
Valve, make it so.
(Why do I even attempt to use a pad? Just because I sometimes like to veg out on the sofa with a game!)
07/01/2012 at 18:43 RegisteredUser says:
In my opinion Valve needs a matchup system that goes a lot further.
There should be a per-player and per-game statistic of your kill vs death ratio(and related) so that servers and lobbies automatically line up people of ROUGHLY(I am aware sometimes you just goof off, but after 100+ playtime hours, you can get a good picture of a player) the same skill level and attitude.
06/01/2012 at 17:19 Eroy says:
Wait…I can’t tell which is a lie…
06/01/2012 at 17:22 mouton says:
Steamworks, actually allow to circumvent most ridiculous pricing policies – you can buy the game retail, cheap, and activate it on Steam. Sure, there are atrocious regional limitations in place, but the option of buying retail can save you a lot of money, as they still have this nice ancient system where the store sets the final price, not the publisher.
06/01/2012 at 22:35 Emeraude says:
Is it me or i there a weird inversion here ?
Steamworks allows to circumvent pricing schemes ? Surely you mean retail does, and Steamworks allows Steam users to benefit from that ?
The way you’re presenting it, it’s like Steam is allowing something that should naturally happen in the first place, if not for Steam’s existence.
Or am I missing something ?
07/01/2012 at 01:43 jezcentral says:
.
06/01/2012 at 17:23 westyfield says:
Peta is the prefix for 10^15, or quadrillion (or thousand trillion, or million billion) (short, i.e. ‘American’ billions etc.).
BUT computers are silly and have the same name for a different number, in this case 2^50 (which equals 1024^5).
Some people use pebibyte when they mean 2^50 bytes, and petabyte when they mean 10^15 bytes, which is far more sensible.
06/01/2012 at 20:03 MadMinstrel says:
About the only people who would understand petabyte as 10^15 are hard drive manufacturers, computer illiterates and salesmen.
07/01/2012 at 12:56 Norgg says:
They don’t have the same name for a different number, petabytes (PB) are 10^15 bytes, pebibytes (PiB) are 2^50 bytes. Petabytes have been used to refer to 2^50 bytes in the past, but it’s Wrong.
07/01/2012 at 22:05 Saiko Kila says:
@MadMinstrel
You are so wrong.
08/01/2012 at 11:57 jalf says:
Wrong? Says who? Get over yourself. If you think it was only used that way “in the past”, you seriously need to get out more.
No one ever accused human language of being consistent. But peta/whatever-byte has been used to designate 1024^n bytes since the term first came into use.
It is not **wrong**.
*Wrong* is trying to change the meaning of a widely used and accepted term.
What you mean is that you, the Wikipedia editors and a few others *want* the accepted meaning of kilo/mega/peta/whatever-byte to be wrong.
09/01/2012 at 02:57 vagabond says:
Says the International Electrotechnical Commission since 1998.
What was wrong was taking the SI prefixes and applying them incorrectly to terms in the first place.
Don’t pretend that people using kilobytes to mean 1000 bytes is a relatively new thing. The term has been ambiguously used since it’s inception to mean either 1024 or 1000 bytes.
Human language may not be consistent, but technical language within a field should be.
09/01/2012 at 04:01 Consumatopia says:
What was wrong was basing everything off base 10 in the first place. Damn finger-counting primates. Giving the more useful binary prefixes such annoying names only compounded the mess. (Annoying not only aesthetically, but in terms of clarity: the decimal prefixes distinguish themselves with two syllables, but the binary prefixes only get one syllable in front of “bibyte”.)
06/01/2012 at 17:24 Colthor says:
Worried Pony shares your fears about Steam becoming the PC’s sole dictator.
07/01/2012 at 01:57 thegammaray says:
According to my encyclopedia of mythical creatures, that’s clearly a unicorn.
EDIT: Hence the worry, perhaps…..
07/01/2012 at 02:42 Jahkaivah says:
Though of all the worst things that could happen, would it be the worst possible thing?
07/01/2012 at 02:45 MadTinkerer says:
In Equestria, Unicorns are a kind of pony, not a kind of horse (although pony and horse are 100% interchangeable when it comes to puns, much like rabbit and hare in Bugs Bunny cartoons).
You see, once upon a time, the Earth Ponies, Pegasus Ponies, and Unicorn Ponies were separate societies. They also had cute little costumes, the Pegasi being the most adorable of all because they apparently thought they were Spartans or something. Anyway, the three societies had a grudging alliance which eventually broke down into outright war when a particularly nasty bit of winter weather threatened the food supply.
Wait, why am I explaining all this? Just watch the last episode.
EDIT: Frankly, I’d rather have Steam as the sole dictator of AAA games than GFWL or Origin. It’ll never be the sole dictator of Indie by definition, though.
07/01/2012 at 06:46 Phantoon says:
“…outright war.”
This happens in a kid’s show??
07/01/2012 at 09:06 bear912 says:
It’s never too early to teach children that war is hell.
07/01/2012 at 10:02 terry says:
People will go to great lengths to justify watching a children’s show, I get it.
07/01/2012 at 20:15 DoucheMullet says:
I guess it is a good thing then that we don’t care about the opinion of manchildren.
08/01/2012 at 12:27 pipman3000 says:
http://broniepologist.deviantart.com/art/Bronie-Sociological-Analysis-Flowchart-267486038
:D
06/01/2012 at 17:26 dwl says:
I would imagine that the Big Picture mode would also work well on tablet devices and I think we all approve of that boot to steam PC. Project Steambox is go! ( and looking for a new title)
06/01/2012 at 17:27 Dana says:
I, for one, welcome our new Valve overlords.
06/01/2012 at 18:16 Roshin says:
/holds up lighter
Take me now, gaben, I’m ready.
06/01/2012 at 18:33 Monchberter says:
New? More like ‘middle aged’ at least now?
06/01/2012 at 18:43 Vorrin says:
yeh, me too I think :)
06/01/2012 at 17:27 Navagon says:
Am I the only one who respects Chat Faliszek a lot more after reading that?
What do you mean “lie”?
06/01/2012 at 17:38 ExplosiveCoot says:
This! I’ve only managed to consume 6 live dogs in my entire lifetime, 900 is just … wow …
06/01/2012 at 17:49 Navagon says:
I can only assume he stuck to the small yappy ones. Not much meat on those. But it takes some willpower to stick to a diet like that what with all the noise the little bastards make.
06/01/2012 at 19:55 stupid_mcgee says:
“Do you remember now, Chet… the feel of eating… the chewing of bone and sinew?”
07/01/2012 at 09:22 bear912 says:
I’m fairly sure the “lie” that’s referenced in the article is the statement that “Big Picture UI mode is … on the close horizon.” It’s Valve, so nothing is ever on the close horizon, even if one horizon were closer than another. Chet’s appetite for live dog seems fairly plausible by comparison.
06/01/2012 at 17:28 JohnnyMaverik says:
“Much as Steamworks tends to be useful, its move towards becoming the Xbox Live of PC gaming something I have mixed feelings about.”
I have faith that Valve will never charge us a subscription fee for the service (and that if they did pc gaming would say “fk that” and move on), and that they themselves don’t want us to be forced into using just that service (I believe only Valve developed games are made exclusive to Steam by Valve, even steamworks games can and are sold elsewhere digitally). That’s still a lot more freedom than you get on the console toys.
Still, I get where your coming from.
06/01/2012 at 17:33 MonolithicTentacledAbomination says:
Yeah, I’d be more wary about Steam’s rising dominance if it weren’t for how well Valve has behaved throughout. I do still buy PC games from other DD retailers, GOG, Amazon, and D2D, primarily, but I like Steam’s client and social stuff the best.
06/01/2012 at 17:37 frymaster says:
given even MS don’t charge for the _actual_ xbox live of PC gaming, I think we’re safe ;)
06/01/2012 at 17:37 psyk says:
I don’t see people leaving thousands of pounds worth of investment
06/01/2012 at 18:09 Hallgrim says:
@ Frymaster: Charging a fee for GFWL was their original plan though. They only changed their strategy when they realized that PC gamers weren’t stupid enough to pay for it.
06/01/2012 at 19:48 gwathdring says:
I’m not worried about Valve. While I don’t always like their decisions (either as developers or Lords of Steam), I believe they are a customer oriented company. My worry isn’t what Valve would do with more control over the PC games market, but rather whether Valve will ever be forced to sell Steam or whether, if it’s current leadership departed, Valve would retain it’s unorthodox business style.
06/01/2012 at 20:09 InternetBatman says:
@gwathdring That is my worry too. It won’t stop me from buying games from Steam cause, you know, steam sales, but it is something I worry about with both Valve and Google.
06/01/2012 at 21:49 Jonas.w says:
I do worry a bit. I’m coming from the other direction though, as I don’t use Steam at all. I simply don’t want a client through which I play, download, and possibly (however unlikely) get shut out from. I certainly understand people who find this convenient, and not particularly worrisome.
What’s starting to worry me is that Steam is so effectively eliminating its competition, not always through better deals or services, but rather by requiring it to play the games in the first place. Civ V, Darksiders, Terraria, Rock of Ages, and Sonic generations are all some relatively recent examples of games I couldn’t buy due to this, in spite of me having absolutely no interest in the multiplayer/achievements that the steam interface provides.
I simply hope that this development won’t eventually force me to abstain from all but the most obscure of games.
06/01/2012 at 22:42 Emeraude says:
I don’t see people leaving thousands of pounds worth of investment.
This. The more people stand to lose by leaving the service, the less likely they are to leave, especially for things that they can internalize as “trivial”. If anything, a slow, gradual degradation is probably the worse to fear.
@Jonas: I know your pain, missed so many games I intended to play this year.
07/01/2012 at 02:50 MadTinkerer says:
Steam is not the only service I buy games from, it’s just my preferred service. I also literally own half of everything on it thanks to five years of sales. :)
But it’s not exclusive.
07/01/2012 at 03:28 bill says:
I don’t really buy the whole “xbox live of pc gaming” thing.
Xbox live is basically a standard part of the hardware/platform. Steamworks might be common, but it’s not a standard part of PC gaming.
I guess that if you consider Steam itself to be the platform, then you could say that “Steamworks is becoming the Xbox live of Steam”.
But on the wider PC platform, steamworks is simply an option.
07/01/2012 at 08:17 Zorak says:
@Jonas
it’s not that Valve slash Steam forces these games to use Steam integration. It’s that the features that SteamWorks offers are good enough or preferable enough to devs that they want to integrate them into their games.
In other words, this is entirely a “monopoly” built on Valve simply outperforming the competition, rather than any ill actions on their part. If a developer only uses Valve because, shit, Steam treats them better and offers a better infrastructure than their competition, to the point that they don’t bother, that’s not Valve’s “fault”.
07/01/2012 at 08:58 Jonas.w says:
@Zorak
I do realize that the use of steamworks is entirely up to the publisher, though I may not have made that very clear. I’m not really interested in making out someone to be at fault here. The dominance of steam doesn’t worry me because I think that steam is some kind of evil entity. It worries me because my consumer habits are evidently so far removed from the majority that I may ultimately be unable to buy the things I like at all under circumstances I can tolerate.
06/01/2012 at 17:33 Urthman says:
THE LIE: It was Erik Wolpaw who ate all the dogs.
06/01/2012 at 17:35 cqdemal says:
*sets up camp in anticipation of Khemm’s inevitable rant/meltdown*
06/01/2012 at 19:12 Kadayi says:
Most likely
06/01/2012 at 22:35 Furius says:
Is Khemm the new Wizardry?
06/01/2012 at 22:43 vecordae says:
There hasn’t been a new Wizardry developed in the West since 2001.
06/01/2012 at 17:38 Randomer says:
I don’t really understand what Steamworks entails for games. I’ve got a few Valve games (Portal, Portal 2, L4D2, CS:S) and I assume that they have Steamworks. So what does that mean for the game? Perhaps a better question: What would be different about those games if they didn’t have Steamworks (e.g. if I straight up excised Steamworks with some mod)?
06/01/2012 at 18:03 tomvw says:
Steamworks provides achievements, cloud saves, and a basic framework for multiplayer (matchmaking, anti-cheat, voice chat, …) for games that use it. So removing it (if that’s at all possible) would probably break most games.
06/01/2012 at 18:04 Dave Mongoose says:
Steamworks enables things like Steam achievements, Steam matchmaking/server browsing, Steam high scores and Steam cloud saving.
In general terms, it lets the game communicate with Steam and its community features (even if it’s not a Valve game).
edit: Ninja’d :( lol
07/01/2012 at 00:27 ZeroMatter says:
“So removing it (if that’s at all possible) would probably break most games.”
Since Steamworks games are pirated too, obviously not.
07/01/2012 at 00:58 Xocrates says:
Given that Steamworks games also save locally, making the cloud saving optional, removing steamworks would only actually break multiplayer (component of) games.
06/01/2012 at 17:43 frymaster says:
is the 40 million total registered accounts, or “active” accounts? If the active count was 30 million back in 2010, I don’t see how the total can be only 40 million now
06/01/2012 at 21:49 Thomas says:
Most definitely must’ve meant active accounts, their latest number was 35 million active users, and on the forums it was stated that the amount of users is actually much much higer than those 35 million users.
Also active accounts are defined as owning a game and being active within the last 30 days, so old forgotten accounts aren’t counted towards that limit either.
06/01/2012 at 17:52 Shortwave says:
100% every year for the past seven years? … O.o
That’s a good business model to follow.. >.>
06/01/2012 at 17:59 Ridnarhtim says:
I think it’s safe to say that Games for Windows Live is the xBox live of PC gaming.
06/01/2012 at 18:06 Navagon says:
You’ve just put me off owning a 360 more than the jacked up prices, severely outdated hardware, closed platform and lack of control options ever could.
06/01/2012 at 18:38 frymaster says:
the xbox doesn’t have the niggles it does on the PC. Instead, you have to pay for multiplayer, and when you do it’s full of 13 year olds :/
06/01/2012 at 18:38 Monchberter says:
If Games for Windows Live is the ‘Xbox of PC gaming’ then they’re doing an appalling job of it.
Even OnLive and the MacStore probably get more business and respect than them.
Steam is the only real game in town still.
06/01/2012 at 19:51 gwathdring says:
I really like Gamersgate and Direct2Drive. They offer a fairly nice selection of DRM-Free games. Gamersgate also has sales that are Steam levels of stupid (though not as frequent).
07/01/2012 at 19:20 Tams80 says:
The only time I have liked Game for Windows Live (now Games for WindowsMarketplace) was when they had the complete Age of Empires III on sale for 10p. That was the best day in my gaming life.
06/01/2012 at 18:16 Godwhacker says:
To be honest, I’d rather have Valve in charge of PC gaming than anyone else. They actually seem to care, although I’d believe that more if they got round to releasing Half-Life 3.
06/01/2012 at 19:00 Vinraith says:
Why should anyone be “in charge” of PC gaming?
06/01/2012 at 19:34 Phantoon says:
Because there is a WAY TO DO THINGS, Vinraith!
And we need a guy to lay all the blame on when something blows up, and to have posters of.
06/01/2012 at 21:14 Wonko the Sane says:
…Half Life 3
Stop the clock!
06/01/2012 at 18:53 IAmUnaware says:
As much as I love Steam, I do hope a proper competitor can rise up (Origin and GFWL aren’t even in the same league, not to mention that GFWL seems to exist only to make it more difficult to play games). Steam has treated me well and I trust them to do so in the future, but an effective monopoly isn’t good for consumers even with the kindest monopolists.
(Minor off-topic GFWL rant: Why on earth does GFWL encrypt my save files with a key that is unique to my actual physical machine? Getting GFWL saves to operate and sync on more than one box is a ridiculous amount more difficult than it should be.)
06/01/2012 at 19:54 Baf says:
Probably has something to do with their paranoia about Achievements. To Microsoft, the very worst thing that can happen is that someone might get an Achievement that they didn’t deserve. Seriously, it’s a big part of Xbox certification testing. If a player can, for example, qualify for an achievement and then log out of their profile and into a different profile and get credit for that achievement from the lingering effects in the gamestate, that’s a fail. So you can well imagine the horror these people would experience at the thought of simply copying your entire progress from one machine to another. People would post achievement-qualifying gamestates online! It would be anarchy!
06/01/2012 at 18:59 Vinraith says:
Much as Steamworks tends to be useful, its move towards becoming the Xbox Live of PC gaming is something I have mixed feelings about.
I’m glad to see a bit of concern about that. Regardless of your opinion of Valve, concentrating too much control of content access and distribution in any one pair of hands is always a bad idea.
06/01/2012 at 20:19 InternetBatman says:
It’s worrisome that it’s so huge, but part of me thinks that its statistically proven bulk has kept many major publishers making PC versions when they would have otherwise left.
06/01/2012 at 22:11 Vinraith says:
Yeah, it’s not without an upside, but I suspect that in the long term this situation is not going to work out in our favor.
06/01/2012 at 19:06 Heliocentric says:
It was a joke. Yunno lies damn lies and statistics, there isn’t really a lie.
06/01/2012 at 19:13 spudthedestroyer says:
steam for linux please!
06/01/2012 at 19:23 Lars Westergren says:
Steam for ANDROID please. I like Android as an open platform, but face it, the derth of quality applications and the fact that few Android users pay for their apps are two big problems that go hand in hand. Android fan sites brag that Market is getting close to the number of apps iOS has, but it is so many shameless clones and so little innovation. Getting Steam to publish *quality* Android games would perhaps fix both problems.
But on the other hand, if they do this Steam would become even more of a dominant power, and like Alec I am a bit worried about putting all my eggs in one basket even though I like Steam a lot.
>Big Picture UI mode – aimed at using Steam on your large TV – is apparently on the close horizon.
Awesome. TAKE ALL MY MONEY!
06/01/2012 at 20:39 Man-E-Faces says:
Second the request for Steam on Linux. Although I have managed to get Steam working just fine in WINE, but would still prefer a native client.
06/01/2012 at 22:00 Wulf says:
Geez Alec. The way you go on about canines wll make people think you have a problem, like that Waren Ellis fellow who has a reputation for it. You’ll be going on about nazi dogs on the moon conspiring agaist your morning’s breakfast, next.
:P
06/01/2012 at 22:52 Emeraude says:
Chat Faliszek consumed over 900 live dogs during the development of Portal 2.
Given Portal 2 length of development, that probably mean less than on live dog per day.
I am not impressed.
Unless those where Great Danes or Saint Bernards.
06/01/2012 at 23:29 Suits says:
As much as I like Steam, it’s going to need some competition. Since its becoming more and more a monopoly with digital distribution taking over from retail and everything flowing there.
07/01/2012 at 03:48 mickygor says:
You know, as much as people go on about it, I’ve never really seen anyone step up and discuss competition for Steam. Maybe it’s time a group of us sat down and actually worked on something.
07/01/2012 at 19:29 Tams80 says:
A program that offers achievements, cloud saves and community features (chat, forums, etc.)? Something that developers could implement if they wanted to, but that any game could be added to?
Basically a non Valve Steamworks (minus the DRM). I’d pay a (small) subscription for that!
06/01/2012 at 23:43 dahools says:
Never bought off steam before, got free games activated on it though so had an account. (e.g I got shogun 2 steam code included with a new GFX card earlier in the year.)
However I saw (and bought) Serious Sam BFE on offer for £14.99 at new year, and there were loads of winter packs out all over the festive period, (which I would have thought RPS would have shouted out about a bit more!) that were such good deals, I had to buy one.
For £39.99 I bought I bought the “2K Games Pack” which I felt was astronomical value for what was included.
Too long to list but search “2k games” in steam store and I got EVERYTHING on the 4 pages that it returns for the 40 quid!
I’m happy, I’ll never get time to play all of them!
07/01/2012 at 01:49 kwyjibo1230 says:
780 petabytes is precisely 837,518,622,720 megabytes. And that is an exact answer. Trust me. I checked. Online.
07/01/2012 at 03:58 gfhfghgfhf says:
http://ai.vc/uf
http://ai.vc/uf
07/01/2012 at 22:25 DBG says:
Spiral Knights have ingame items trading too. But what mostly is passed awound – is TF2 stuff, of course.
08/01/2012 at 12:20 pipman3000 says:
question time:
would you rather have steam dominated pc gaming or no pc gaming at all?
08/01/2012 at 12:30 Chris D says:
Isn’t that a false dichotomy? If Steam were to vanish wouldn’t one of the other digital distribution platforms take its place? I like Steam as much as the next man but implying it’s solely responsible for the survival of PC gaming seems a bit of a stretch.
08/01/2012 at 12:45 jalf says:
Question does not make sense. Why are those the only two possible options?
09/01/2012 at 12:26 netizensmith says:
Big graphics mode needs pad support too. It won’t help me at all if I still need to use a mouse to click stuff. good news nonetheless.
Also, I like the steam store but that’s the only Steam feature I care about. I hate the fact that I bought Skyrim on a DVD and was still forced to activate through steam and have forced patches applied that BROKE my game (switching off ‘don’t auto update’ resets itself on reboot so I have no way of disabling this).