The Economy By Steam
<div class="IPBDescription">by halflife2.net's SubCog</div> Came upon an interesting topic in HL2.net and would like to share.
It's a very interesting read and has sparked quite a debate. Not only does it discuss bandwidth and LAN issues, it aruges the pro's and con's of the <b>business model</b> of Steam and what it means in terms of future game publishing and how people will either despise Steam or be unable to live without it.
<a href='http://www.halflife2.net/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=8216' target='_blank'>http://www.halflife2.net/forums/showthread...=&threadid=8216</a>
It's a very interesting read and has sparked quite a debate. Not only does it discuss bandwidth and LAN issues, it aruges the pro's and con's of the <b>business model</b> of Steam and what it means in terms of future game publishing and how people will either despise Steam or be unable to live without it.
<a href='http://www.halflife2.net/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=8216' target='_blank'>http://www.halflife2.net/forums/showthread...=&threadid=8216</a>
Comments
As addressed further down in the thread, the online steam requirement for lan and sp are only temporary. Not that they make this clear in the FAQ, instead decide to tuck that away in an off-topic post "Whats ur fav type of pr0n", on the 51st page right in the middle of a flamewar debating the pro's and con's of underarm deodorant. Well not quite but you get my drift.
Steam will be alright in the end, but it wont clear up problems with downloading patches. However, and here is something he didnt consider. What if the patches are released incrimentally. Like a 1meg patch every week or so just to fix up minor problems. That is now entirely possible, and instead of waiting for 6months to fix all the bugs they can find and then releasing a 90meg update file, they can fix them quick and release them.
That should address his bandwidth problems.
EDIT Saw this further down in the thread
quote:
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And finally, STEAM SERVER BANDWIDTH WILL ALWAYS BE MASSIVELY INSUFFICIENT. You see, any time any new game patch is released, there is a bottleneck in the imediate available bandwidth.
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Wrong again. In case you haven't been following, Steam has a feature called 'pre-caching' which downloads data to your HD before it is 'released'. The Steam Final release couldn't use precaching because it required a whole new client, but the HL2 media has used precached in the past. So instead of everyone jumping on a file server the day that a big patch/game/update is released, the file gets preloaded onto your machine and when it's released, it's suddenly fully available to you. That's a hell of a lot better than waiting in the fileplanet queue for 2 hours and then waiting an hour for the download to happen.
However, hopefully we will be The Generation to bring morality into business. Time conquers all, and this is true as well to the internet. This net-morality generation will eventually replace the old business generation, and hopefully many people will still have retained their anti-capitalism approach to the internet and business, and will work out a way to make money from "moral" business plans. The main issue I believe will be breaking the pre-existing monopolistic stranglehold business structure - but I think that all it will take is one or two major break-away ventures that are able to sustain and protect themselves from the stranglehold, and then The Revolution will happen.
Don't turn this into an anti-steam, pro-steam thread, it's not about that. This thread, and the one in the link, is about the business aspect of Steam, and the ideas and theories about how it will work.
<b>Steam is not here because people want it. Steam is not here for people to like. Valve is using its must-have products to push steam onto people who don't want it. I added up the numbers in the planethalflife poll. If you eliminate the people who havn't tried steam, 78% hate steam, 12% like it. Will people gradually accept it? Possibly. Will they like it? No.
Steam is here to help Valve earn more money. That's all. It simultaneously reduces piracy and cuts out the publishers and retailers. This means that every penny of every Steam subscription goes strait to Valve. This is unheard of in the intellectual property economy. And the only cost: Inconveniencing or completely screwing the consumers.
There are 4 major problems with steam on the consumer end. First is that low-bandwidth systems will ALWAYS have trouble with Steam. You will not be able to download a patch from a computer with a fast connection to use on low-bandwidth or closed-network systems.
Second is that the end consumer will not be able to run a lan game from a closed network. Because Steam requires each system to authenticate steam before they can play a lan game, you must have unrestricted internet to play on a lan. If you are on a closed network, or your ISP goes down, or if your firewall restricts internet use, you will not be able to run a lan game. Lan parties, Lan events, Lan tournaments, etc., MUST SUPPLY ADAQUATE UNRESTRICTED INTERNET BANDWIDTH, otherwise there will be no Lan gaming.
Third is that if Valve has trouble with Steam, including insufficient bandwidth, hackers, buggy in-house programming, etc., YOU WILL NOT BE ABLE TO PLAY. If you can't authenticate in a central Steam server, you can't run a lan server or join an internet game. There is NOTHING YOU CAN DO TO CONTROL THIS. You are at Valve's mercy.
And finally, STEAM SERVER BANDWIDTH WILL ALWAYS BE MASSIVELY INSUFFICIENT. You see, any time any new game patch is released, there is a bottleneck in the imediate available bandwidth. There are many file-servers and services carrying it, but the data load is simply to big to be transfered in a single day. This transfer load is heaviest on the first day, but the pressure is slowly released until the transfer load is normalized. It takes about 3 weeks for any new patch to really become standard. However, with Steam you will be forced to update immediately, or you will not be able to play. This means that the regular 3 weeks worth of data-transer must be delivered in 1 to 2 days. 3 weeks of high bandwidth file-service (such as gamespy's) compressed into 1 to 2 day's of Valve's Steam service. Will Valve be able to deliver this? NO. It's not even a possibility. Every new Half-Life2 patch will be a new Steam patch that will (once again) overload the server. Many people are saying they prefer Steam to waiting in download cues. They have no understanding of how slowly Steam updates will transfer when the first Half-Life2 update is released. THIS PROBLEM WILL NEVER BE SOLVED, as Valve will never have that kind of bandwidth.
I offer a scenario: The first update for Half-Life 2 is released via Steam. Steam servers are immediately overloaded. Valve is unable to supply adaquate bandwidth for 3 weeks. Meanwhile, no one is able to authenticate Steam, because their not running the update. League matches cannot be held. Internet servers are empty. Lan parties will have to play Quake3.
I offer one final scenario: You come home from a long day of work. You intend to sit down and relax and play an hour of Half-Life2 online on your 640k DSL connection. A new update has been released. Steam is (amazingly) working fine. It will take only an hour to update. You will not get to play tonight.</b>
One:
Patches are automatically downloaded incrementally as is extra game content (eg. maps) I'm sure some of you have seen that if you put TFC on to auto update it shows it on the steam monitor downloading small files every 20 mins or so. (This is if you got the CS/HL installer) So when you join a game if you don't have the required files when it downloads them it starts at around 20-35% because it's already been downloading some content when it's idle. This will also mean that the patches will become much smaller. Imagine if NS2.0 was released via steam It would mean that only the main game client changing files would need to be downloaded on the changeover day. Things like new sounds, models, maps and textures etc could be released as soon as they are ready, possibly a few weeks in advance. So the main download would be only about 40MB in size as opposed to around 120.
Also Valve know they coukld have a problem with bandwidth and are adding new content servers all the time. There's already quite a few most of them hosted by the same places that host the patches for regular download, It also shouldnt be nearly as bad as it was in the inital changeover to steam. Then everyone in the HL community was trying to connect, all the CS, DOD and TFC players. While when a patch is relesed for DOD say, only the DOD community will be downloading straightaway. so the load would probably be halved at least.
As for point two.
Steam is clearly designed as a 24/7 Broadband delivery system. SO it works best if left on most of the time. Assuming you come home from work and want to play some CS and an update has been released, with an unmetered ADSL connection you should have left it on while you were out with automatic content update on (default) so when it's released steam would have got the update and patched your game for you and you wouldn't have even noticed. Besides it's only an hour or two and surely theres other mods that you can play. Unless it's a HL update in which case steam would make no difference except that if you had it enabled it would autoupdate it for you.
While steam was frustrating for the first two days, after that I havn't had any problems what so ever. Steam's pros far outweigh the cons (90% of which were from a massive overloading of the servers due to the entire HL community trying to access them at once) imo.
The way I see it, if I want it to download, I'll just leave it on while I do other stuff. Then when I start playing, I limit or pause it.