A few years ago Valve rolled out their “Steam” service, a form of direct download for their games. The idea behind Steam is that when you want to buy a game, you pay money for the right to buy a game, and Steam downloads it to your hard drive, no CD involved. It’s more than just an online purchase, because Steam is doing some sort of authentication to try to avoid piracy. There are lots of services like this now (Stardock’s totalgaming.net service, and direct2drive, for example). You can think of Steam as being an attempt to make something like iTunes for AAA games.
I tried it out at the time and gave it my key for the original Half-Life, which I had bought at retail. I was fairly put off, mostly because the Steam application is such a sham and a travesty — it’s one of those Windows facehuggerware programs. It starts itself up automatically on a reboot, it opens dialog boxes at inconvenient times, and worst of all — this should be a firing squad offense, by the way — when you click the “Quit” button it minimizes to your taskbar and puts up a dialog box telling you “I didn’t really quit! I hate you and I hate freedom! Tee-hee!” I more or less ignored the broader debate going on about Steam: it was clear to me that anyone who didn’t like it must be right, because it was so obviously bad.
The broader debate, it seems, focused what it means to “purchase” a game. The “Out of the Box Experience” for Half-Life 2 was apparently terrible, because of Steam. You would go into a store and pay them real money for a sticker with an activation key and a real CD, which apparently contained a 20kb Steam installer and a few hundred megabytes of porn. Then you would wait for 36 hours while Steam actually downloaded the real application, browsing the porn while you waited. Eventually, the servers would time out, the download would fail, and you shot yourself. This is why everyone who enjoyed Half-Life 2 played it on the Xbox.
This install procedure, purportedly, was traumatic enough that I could imagine it permanently scarring anyone who went through it. I don’t know; I didn’t buy Half-Life 2 because my computer at the time wasn’t expensive enough. I believe psu did, however, which would explain why, when I told him I was writing this post, he gently reminded me that anyone who says anything nice about Steam is his mortal enemy.
The other day a publisher set me up with a CD key for use with Steam to review a game. So I downloaded Steam onto my Windows box, and started it up. Incredibly, I remembered my username and password. And there, waiting for me, was a menu item with all of the old Half-Life games that I had registered with it.
Now, you need to understand the context here: I am not what you would call an organized person. I lose games. I lose CDs. I lose those little goddamn stickers with the CD key on them. If you held a gun to my head and asked me where in my house the Half-Life discs are, I would not be able to answer you. So for Steam to have remembered this for me and made it possible for me to play these games again, on a new computer, by just clicking a button seems to me exactly the sort of wonderful thing that technology should be doing.
There are downsides to systems like this. Obviously, it just about squashes your ability to resell games. But since I have an irrational habit of installing old games, I never do that anyway.
So sign me up for the lock-in, fellas. If it means I don’t have to remember where I put those stupid discs, I’m all yours.
So… you gonna replay Half-Life?
Replay? NO, duh. I just liked installing it.
Like some of my friends, I swear by Steam. I pre-ordered Half-Life 2 and Half-Life 2 Episode 1 and had a virtually flawless experience both times. They preloaded ahead of time and then activated once the titles were live.
Some of my other friends have, from my perspective, an irrational hatred of Steam. Without any obvious provacation. Why is that? Some of it, I think, stems from them losing control of their games. Some of it also stems from problems trying to use Steam under Linux. Talk about masochism.
From my friends experience with retail copies of Half-Life 2, what you described isn’t accurate. They installed the game from disc, then had to update/activate from Steam before playing.
Half-Life 2 scales very well, btw, so you could probably play it on your current rig. Good luck.
Greg
Peterb, I am glad you were able to reconcile with Steam in time for Valentine’s Day. Really, I am. But, since we are baring our souls, I must tell you that Steam was the kiss of death for Valve’s hopes of ever getting my PC-gaming money. I will not abide facehuggerware, not even for the cheap thrill of reliving the past. I still have my pride.
Greg,
I think the difference stems from the expectation of experience.
My experience with Steam for this most recent game was fine because I went into the transaction expecting to use Steam. I understood from the get-go that I was downloading a game. However, I think someone who walks into a store and pays real money for a physical disc, and then gets home and finds out that she is forbidden from playing the game she paid for because some authentication server somewhere crashed would have every right to be pissed.
I also must oppose any force that decides it should keep running when I say quit. I don’t like or use iTunes, so why would I want the iTunes of games? I want digital stores to just sell me something and let me download it and then go away.
I also like seeing if older games will run under wine on linux. I have a copy of fallout on it’s way through ebay and hope to play it again. I have to admit it would be cool to be able to try old games I used to love again. But most of the time I am disappointed when I do.
Tom,
Perhaps my perspective has been skewed by having my Windows box destroyed by a game that installed Starforce on it.
In other words, after Ike Turner puts you in the hospital, suddenly Snoop Dogg’s little drug problems don’t seem like such a liability in a boyfriend.
My hard drive died shortly after installing Half Life 2 (which, by the way, took SIX HOURS, thanks to needing to download stuff from Steam). After I bought a replacement hard drive, Steam refused to allow me to install it again, saying that I hard already installed it on one computer and could not now install it on another.
Half Life 2 might be the best game ever made, but it’s not good enough for me to buy it twice.
I detest, despise, loathe and abhor Steam. It takes over your PC. It is more invasive than an anal probe. And it refused to let me play the game I had paid real-life money for.
I’m never going near it again. I don’t care if they’ve fixed the bugs. It is fundamentally flawed in principle, and the fact it was (and may, for all I know, still be) flawed in execution only rubs salt in the wounds.
For what it’s worth, not only is Half-Life 2 not the greatest game ever made, but I didn’t even think it was particularly good or interesting.
I’ve been told I’m in the minority in thinking this.
I recently used e-link, which appears to be less annoying than Steam. The only real problem I’ve had with it is that it uses its own pretty UI elements which don’t really look like Windows UI elements. You can’t tell if the program is actually installing the game or is sitting behind the power supply selling old Magic cards to your serial ports. Eventually you hit some random button which you think is “quit trying to install” but actually is “delete the 2gb of downloaded game files”, forcing you to redownload the game. Since that attempt to redownload was pretty smooth (10 hours of smooth), and it didn’t try to charge me for the game again, or tell me I couldn’t play it because I was already logged in as me, I was merely annoyed and not dramatically torqued off. That said, had I realized the level of nonsense I’d go through to actually get the game set up I’d have just ordered the DVD off Amazon.
I signed up with Gametap a few months ago. I did this for the sole purpose of playing Uru Live, but it turns out they have some other stuff like, say, the first three chapters of the new Sam&Max series. Also all the Infocom games. (I already own them, but maybe you don’t.)
The Gametap interface is not evil. Oh, it’s ugly and noisy and plastered with ads. But it runs when you run it and shuts down when you shut it down. It’s never refused to let me play a game, and I’ve only seen the app crash once. (During a self-patch at startup, and it ran fine when restarted.)
I’m sure they can get away with this because they’re offering old games, and the Global Piracy Empire just doesn’t give a crap. But it sounds a heck of a lot more pleasant than what you Steam users have to go through.
(I made a perfunctory attempt to steal the Zork 1 datafile out of the Gametap system, just to see if it was possible. I failed. Considering how easy it is to steal Zork 1 online, foiling a perfunctory attempt is probably their antipiracy design goal.)
So games get more complicated, take up more space, and our download speeds go up too. I wonder if there is a point where the games won’t really get any bigger because there is no worthwhile added complexity? Will our data pipe catch up to the game size to the point where it only take 5 minutes to download a good game?
When I finally installed HL2, having steeped in the Steam controversy for some months between purchase and install time, I realized what they were trying to do – it’s the same model that ANet’s MMORPGs use. When you buy Guild Wars, you get a little plastic box with some media in it, but that media is not the least bit required. (For the middle of the three Guild Wars games, Factions, I have never put any of the CDs in my computer’s drive at all.) The key bit is the piece of paper in the box which has the access code. Each code is a set of specific rights, basically – you’re entitled to do this, you’re entitled to have these extras, so on. Each code can be used – linked to the details of a particular user account/logon – once and once only. Everything else is disposable, and frankly, the first time you launch GW it’s gonna reload most of the content anyway, since CDs are out of date as soon as they’re pressed.
I like this model fine, and I think Steam would be a lot more likable if they weren’t so freaking paranoid. All their problems have stemmed from Steam’s “I don’t trust you and I think you are trying to steal my games” behavior, including its unwillingness to recover if, perish forbid, anything goes wrong during a game setup process. (Because *clearly* you were trying to hack it. Bah.)
I decided after a few weeks of dealing with Steam’s accusatory tone that if Valve wasn’t going to trust me, the person who puts food on their plate, then I wasn’t going to bother giving them any more money. Besides, HL2 was not all that and a bag of chips.
I recently purchased Sid Meier’s Railroads! from Direct2Drive, and was pleased with the reasonably streamlined downloader. To their credit, you could also use a plain old download link in your browser.
I’ve personally never had a problem with Steam, and while I share Peter’s opionion about HL2 not being the end-all FPS shooter, I enjoy the Steam library. They sell Introversion titles, as well as excellent indie titles like “The Ship”.
I hope that we can all agree that in the near-future, direct distribution will be preferred medium of game transport. Why do we really want disc, or DVD laying about? I don’t. If I want to collect something, I’ll collect those cute little porcelain figurines of kittens.
I don’t like porcelain. I like shiny round plastic & foil discs! They will be worth something someday, really! And they make neat zapping action in microwaves (not recommended for anyone other than me to do of course).
I purchased both HL2 and HL2: Episode One through Steam when they were released, and didn’t have any problems. I suppose I could have been one of the lucky ones.
If you know and expect what you’re getting into, Steam is great. I like knowing that whatever games I’ve purchased will just be there when I want them as long as I have my account login and internet access.
There’s a lot of general anger directed at Steam, and while some of it is justified, I think most is just the result of lingering frustration from the early days when the service truly did suck.
> I hope that we can all agree that in the near-future, direct distribution will be preferred medium of game transport
Absolutely. But not if (a) I need thirty different download clients from thirty different companies, because they’re all too selfish to settle on a standard; (b) any of the download clients takes over my PC – it does not need to run on startup, show me ads or run in the background while I’m running other games; or (c) the actual process of downloading the game becomes less convenient than just ordering the DVD from game.com.
> I like knowing that whatever games I’ve purchased will just be there when I want them as long as I have my account login and internet access.
I kinda like knowing that whatever games I’ve purchased are on a DVD I have on my shelf. I’m willing to sacrifice that for the convenience of a download; but the moment I get told I can’t play the game I have purchased because the authentication servers are down, or that I can’t reinstall it because my hard drive has changed and it thinks I’m trying to install on two computers at once, or that (heaven forbid) I forget the login-name/password combination (“your password must be between seventeen and nineteen characters long, contain at least four non-alpha-numeric characters, must not contain more than two digits in a row and may not contain any natural language words or anagrams thereof”)…. that’s when the hate and bile begins.
I really wanted to play Half Life 2. I never have. And I probably never will. Why? Because of the horror stories I have heard about Steam.
I _hate_ face-hugger ware. I also fear it — my (possibly irrational) paranoia tells me that a program this invasive probably compromises the security of my computer. The last thing I want to do is to explain to the security team at work how a video game hurt the business…
This fear is unfounded, I am sure. But it keeps me from buying this game.
By the way, the comparison to iTunes is a bad one. Sure, both iTunes and Steam sell you media online with built in DRM. But iTunes is not face-hugger ware — when you close it, it goes away.