Gabe Newell's vision for Steam: More choice, more democracy, less Greenlight

http://gamasutra.com/view/news/186168/Gabe_Newells_vision_for_Steam_More_choice_more_democracy_less_Greenlight.php

by cjh_ • 13 years ago

42 48 13 years ago

jiggy20115• 13 years ago

Wow, what? They're opening their servers up as a way for anyone to host anything? How will that scale?

I assume they're going to have to do something to prevent people just uploading cracked versions of games that are otherwise available for money.

cjh_3• 13 years ago

I too am very interested in the logistics of this, I imagined some kind of 'pull' system where the higher the demand the more it is replicated.

The piracy issue will be interesting, although I guess this could be dealt with by using a team of mods and/or scanning their servers for possible infringing files.

Interesting times ahead.

TillE• 13 years ago

The best thing for them to do would be simply to adopt the app store model, whether it's Apple's or Google's. Open to all comers who can pay the fee, but with a brief approval process.

Greenlight was a failed experiment, and it's extremely encouraging to see them acknowledging that. Valve could be, if they want to, the platform for all indie games, not just broadly popular ones. So far they've resisted that, and I can't imagine it's been a particularly good business decision.

I know people want "curation", but have you seen some of the crap that's already on Steam? Probably not, because it rarely features on their storefront, which can always be curated regardless of how many other games they accept and sell, which might only be found through a search or a direct link. That's the best of both worlds.

james4k• 13 years ago

Interesting...while reading this, I started picturing Steam becoming something a bit more like Etsy, but for digital goods. Anyone else sort of get that vibe?

rndmize• 13 years ago

Yep. There's a lot of potential for some games to almost go beyond being games and become platforms - Skyrim, Minecraft - if the community was allowed to sell material they created for it.

prezjordan2• 13 years ago

I still want to see a complete redesign of their UI. It's slow, unresponsive, and I don't even think it's native code. They have the resources to do it.

lcampbell• 13 years ago

If you're talking about the in-client store UI, I believe it's PHP-generated markup rendered in an embedded WebKit browser. Given that the overlay browser uses the same tooling and also renders pages slowly, I'm inclined to believe they're doing something inefficiently, but don't necessarily need to resort to native code to fix.

Native code may be runtime faster, but there's huge advantages to leveraging HTML. You'd have to either -

* Define your own serialization/markup for describing a UI, then specify a network transport for it.

* OR, just bake the whole UI in native code and fill it in with data pulled down from an API. Update the binary when you want to make UI changes.

Neither solution comes with the ease-of-development and flexibility that HTML/HTTP provide.

prezjordan2• 13 years ago

I was mainly referring to the steam UI (friends list, library, etc). The store UI might not have the best UX, but it's not "slow"

Zikes• 13 years ago

This might explain the odd scroll behavior I've experienced on my laptop. Mouse scroll wheel works fine, but touchpad scroll gestures never do.

cobrausn2• 13 years ago

Part of the allure of Steam is that everything on that service has been vetted before I ever see it, if not for fun then at least for being a game and not malware.

Not sure how I feel about this. Sure, the users will catch the problem eventually and get it pulled, but in the meantime you would be really leery about downloading something new.

jiggy20115• 13 years ago

Yep, Steam to me has been a place where I know there is a certain quality standard.

If I wanted to just download random files I'd go to pirate bay or mega upload.

hayksaakian2• 13 years ago

This is largely an illusion. Take the war z. They were able to release a dishonest incomplete game, and it took community outrage to bring it to valve's attention.

endianswap• 13 years ago

It's not that it required community outrage it bring it to Valve's attention, necessarily; sometimes fixing problems involving business and business relationships just takes more time than folks want/expect. When a product is released with a simple bug, it's usually not the users complaining for hours nonstop about it that gets it fixed (though sometimes it is), but that it takes time to debug, fix, test, and ship the fixed version. The same thing often applies to business decisions like this.

cobrausn2• 13 years ago

Again, I mentioned that it wasn't screened (necessarily) for completeness or 'fun' - just that it wasn't malware disguised as a product.

dwerthen• 13 years ago

That is why the user created stores would be great. You'd still get curated content, just not from steam. So it might be even better than today, in the sense of "properly" curated content!

nextparadigms• 13 years ago

In a recent speech by Gabe, I think he said they'd still check for malware. But he didn't give any details, so I'm not sure if he actually has a plan to open the market, but in the same time has a system for checking malware, or he was just saying that.

ollysb• 13 years ago

Seems like they could offer both. If they watch the traffic they could approve the most popular games but still allow people to use games immediately if they want to.

shmerl4• 13 years ago

Let him make it DRM free first.

Semaphor4• 13 years ago

The publisher can decide if he wants DRM or not. Steam offers both.

shmerl4• 13 years ago

They don't discourage it as well and don't give you a way to filter out games which are really DRM free. DRM free has a few different aspects:

1. Being able to save the installer and install it at any time without connecting to their servers.

2. Having no extra components ("clients") running parallel to the game in order to play it.

3. Being able to play without connecting to their servers.

In contrast other publishers (like GOG) have a principal DRM free stance and simply don't accept games with DRM. This should be the position of distributors - to discourage DRM proliferation. So if Gabe Newell talks about improving Steam, let him start with the subject of dropping DRM.

cjh_3• 13 years ago

Steam itself is a form of DRM.

Shorel3• 13 years ago

You already have Desura for that.

shmerl4• 13 years ago

The more the better. I don't use Steam because of DRM, and wait for GOG to start selling Linux games (many of their Windows versions work well with Wine, and older ones are DosBox/ScummVM based so they work as well, but having native Linux games in addition would be even better). Desura is good - I use it already.

You can vote for proposal to add Linux games to GOG: http://gog.com/wishlist/site/add_linux_versions_of_games

iron_ball• 13 years ago

Nice to see an Old Man Murray shoutout. Last I heard, one of the writers of that site and other web classics was working at Valve, so maybe some of the wit and wisdom can live on.

jholman4• 13 years ago

Both of the OMM writers work for Valve these days. And you can tell, when you play Portal or Portal 2. (Or Psychonauts, which Erik co-wrote.)

All of which games you should play, JUST FOR THE WRITING.

r0s• 13 years ago

I want to play Psychonauts but it's just a mess, runs like crap on my fast-as-hell PC.

This game gets so much nostalgia cred, someone should really clean it up.

jiggy20115• 13 years ago

Thinking about this a little more, sounds like they are basically creating a cross platform package manager.

Being able to pull down a game , a movie and a web framework all from one place and be mirrored on all of my computers could be interesting.

SkyMarshal• 13 years ago

>I would buy everything from Old Man Murray. - Gabe

This brings back memories. One of the funniest OMM game reviews I recall reading was of American McGee's Alice:

http://www.oldmanmurray.com/longreviews/56.html

greggman• 13 years ago

Without a sandbox you're still at the mercy of every game you install. Even on Linux every game you install could upload the contents of your .ssh folder, your .mail folder, or ~/Pictures or whatever's in your user folders.

And, even if it doesn't do itself if the game does any networking then if there's any bugs in the networking code someone can use that as a way into your system.

Here's hoping Steam can build a sandbox.

Note: This is also the problem with systems like the old PC/Mac/Linux Boxee. How do I know the apps I'm one click installing can't read my whole HD? I don't :-(

Apple's App Store, Windows 8's app store, iOS's app store, Android's App store, and Chrome's App store all try to solve this problem. AFAICT Steam does not.

jiggy20115• 13 years ago

This is the fundamental tradeoff between security and usability.

It would be more secure to basically give every application you install it's own home folder and keep it restricted to that.

OTOH an image editing program should be able to see images used by other image editors, a file transfer program should be able to use my SSH keys to log me into various servers etc.

The only way around this would be to have some complicated fine grained permissions system that requires apps to know about other apps that might want to access it's data.

nitrogen2• 13 years ago

Linux's Capabilities framework is one such fine grained permission system. That, AppArmor, SELinux, or a similar system could be used to sandbox apps and games.

slurgfest• 13 years ago

I'm not sure why this is especially more dangerous than ordinary Linux packages provided by distros, let alone games installed by means other than Steam. A game is an executable, running any executable with your privileges provides access to your home directory. That is ordinary design for a Linux program. What is the home directory for, anyway? Again, it is absolutely normal for ordinary programs including multiplayer games to use the network.

Connect your PCs to the internet through a firewall and don't install Steam on production servers.

InclinedPlane• 13 years ago

The point being: right now distro provided packages are screened and vetted, as are steam games. Moving away from that model has obvious security implications.

Shorel3• 13 years ago

One of the things I would like for Steam is to add the original publication date of all games (not just the date they added the game to Steam) and let me sort my collection by that date.

Gabe Newell's vision for Steam: More choice, more democracy, less Greenlight

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