Steam: Finally Delivering?

In the past I've been pretty critical, but the most recent news about The Ship's free multiplayer weekend has finally forced me to grudgingly acknowledge that Steam has been upgraded to at least minor ass-kicking status. Those who were around, most likely playing Counterstrike, during Steam's inception will remember that the service had some growing pains. Around version 1.4 of Counterstrike, Valve heaved out the wet, quivering mass of incomplete network code that was Steam, and really, it was hugely annoying.

The History

As a new interface and authentication system, jury-rigged to lay on top of the current Half Life engine, Steam was more unrealized potential than anything else. The friends list, which promised a comprehensive instant messaging system built in to the system, basically only worked when it decided to, which was rarely. The patch delivery process, which was the whole point of Steam in the first place, ended up having lots of downtime as well, as Valve servers struggled to meet the distribution demands.

Much like the ugly-ass caterpillar, or the seed that somehow ends up buried in a huge pile of dook, though, Steam has blossomed into a beautiful butterfly. Somehow, the patch delivery system became a complete software distribution network. The servers and bandwidth are now in place so that users can expect to receive the content they pay for, and more and more games are finding their way onto the service. Steam has become a nice complement to putting physical boxes on retail shelves, which is good for hermits like myself.

Somewhere along the line, while easily redownloading Counterstrike and all the original Half-Life games for a little nostalgia, and beer, fueled fun, I realized something. All of the hassle of cds and cd keys that I had long since lost was wiped away. In the past, I would've had to search through piles of old hardware and crap just to find one of the shattered jewel cases upon which one of my cd keys MAY have been printed. In addition, I most likely would've found a torrent, or, at that time, checked on Kazaa Lite or Direct Connect just to get the actual game because god knows I wouldn't have a functioning cd. With Steam, all I need is to remember my username and password, which is easy for me because I've used the exact same ones for every single authentication procedure since 1994. Well, don't that kick a little ass.

From Shitty to Ubiquitous

Whereas Steam was, at its inception, merely another series of obstacles to getting to a damn server in CS, it has now grown into a fully self-contained system, offering content from a very wide range of sources complete down to the transaction procedure, all within the same Matrix-stylish black and grey interface. Additionally, everybody who has played CS or Half-Life 2 already has it. So, within a few years, Steam secretly sprouted all this extra functionality, and all of a sudden a user like me realizes that he's been getting demos, videos, and complete games over the service for a long time now. Steam has gone from a steaming pile to a basic fact of my gaming experience.

That is not to say that Steam is completely without problems though. There are still a lot of random issues. I don't know many people who actually use the friends list, which still goes down semi-frequently. Also, the requirement that I have to log into Steam just to play a single-player game that I own on the service can be a huge hassle if my torrents are hogging all the upstream connections. I don't like there being any barriers to me playing my own games. That being said, that little piece of DRM is the single most annoying thing about Steam at this point, and I can honestly say that, despite my years as a software pirate, I don't mind paying for my content if it's reasonable and I am almost always connected to the internet anyway, so the chances of me being in a situation where I am unable to access one of my own games are low. However, this is definitely an issue for some.

Looking past the hiccups though, Steam has slowly infiltrated all of our homes with the ability to get content directly. This has opened the gates for many modders and full-on development groups. In releasing content on Steam, one of the largest financial commitments in developing a game, that of physically producing the boxes and getting them on store shelves, has had its role obviated. As Steam sees higher penetration and more actual sales within the service, it becomes clear that user confidence in the system is solid and many games that normally may not have been made, such as Darwinia, are finding large audiences and making it into end-user hands.

So, Steam is managing to circumvent traditional distribution systems and get a wider range of titles, including the very obscure, to users at price-points that range from retail-level to what may almost be considered microtransactions. But wait, doesn't all this talk of an online distribution system seem sort of... familiar?

Steam as a Redundant System

That's right, Steam, Gabe Newell's grand vision of a network to make store-shelves obsolete, is basically a rehash of an idea that's already been perfected elsewhere. The piracy network. While Valve was dumping cash into servers and vast quantities of bandwidth, lightweight and very portable tools for decentralized distribution have already been in place for ages. It's called Bit Torrent. Every single issue that the Steam developers have had to deal with, and many that they are still dealing with, have long since been solved. Realistically, how could they expect to compete with a group that is composed of enormous numbers of individuals, all working out of their own desire to produce a functioning system for games, movies, and other data to be processed, cracked, released, and then distributed to the masses, free of hassle? In fact, as tracker sites become more and more sophisticated, even going so far as to offer RSS feeds of your searches, allowing you to set your torrent client to automatically download new episodic content as it's released, it's clear that the piracy networks in place do a far better job of helping users retrieve content than Steam ever could. Why bother inventing the wheel twice, especially if your version of it isn't as good anyway?

If the issue is compensation models, I would argue that many peer to peer networks are, in fact, already monetized to varying degrees. The ad revenue and worldwide goodwill generated for the large bit torrent tracker sites is clearly enough to keep many of them functioning. How difficult could it be to create completely legitimate tracker sites, functioning via a subscription model, perhaps, and incentivizing extra sharing? With just some minor retooling, I believe it would be fairly simple to leverage the existing file sharing communities to do what Steam has struggled to do from the outset: deliver content to people in an efficient manner.

Why didn't something like that happen? Because it's not obvious enough to everybody yet. File sharing still operates in a legal grey area, at least in some places, because the rest of the world is too slow to catch up. Large publishers such as EA are convinced they have a stake in controlling their content and how it can be used, but the internet is a tool that, more than anything else, empowers individual users. Steam works to surpass the traditional distribution system, but it doesn't go far enough in that it still tries to set up shop with its own set of servers from which people download directly. If you just surrender that control and let go of that shiny interface, you already have all the tools in place to allow the clamoring masses to get a copy of your game and share it with others. That's how you distribute some damn games! Heck, there are tons of people who will even go to the trouble of patching it for you! The original Half Life 2 release was faster if you got the pirated version.

Until that day when file-sharing protocols are as accepted as radio broadcasts, people like me, who are totally willing to compensate content creators in exchange for the ability to view what we want, how we want to, will be forced to operate in a grey area. I'll use Steam when I must, I am really looking forward to playing The Ship, but I'll always know that no matter how efficient the system becomes, it ultimately can't compete with the one I already use for everything else.