Via Blue’s News comes word of a big announcement from Valve regarding their Steam content distribution system that’s worth mentioning. From the announcement on the Steam website (Link):
June 20, 2007 — This summer Valve will ship a major update to its online gaming platform Steam, introducing an advanced set of community features to more than 13 million gamers around the world.
Beginning in July, Steam users can set up their own personal Steam pages and profiles, create and join groups, schedule games with friends, review who they’ve played with, see how well everyone played, chat with groups, chat via voice, and more. These new community services and features can be used with all Steam games, which include new releases and classic titles from leading publishers and independent developers.Free of charge, the new community features will be accessible via the Steam desktop client and via the web.
Nice. Though I have to admit wondering why this wasn’t done a long time ago.
So… can we expect a Steam Marketplace?
“Uh, yeah, hi, Sony? This is Valve, the makers of steam. We saw your nifty PS3 Home thing, and we realized immediately, ‘Gee, our system already has gaming identity over a variety of games, and we could slap down some message boards and do-it-yourself website kits and voila, we have a low-cost instant Home competitor.’ Only, we’re already signing contracts with different development studios so ours will probably be much more open than yours. Have a nice day!”
hahaha.
But again, you gotta wonder what took Valve so long.
My dig at MS (re: “Marketplace”), as you’re probably aware, is because that whole Marketplace thing has turned less into an opportunity for modders to make a little change for their maps and whatnot, and more into a way for game devs to increase their own profits. Nothing wrong with the devs using it to make money, but if they’re the only one’s, it minimizes the potential afaic.
Be funny if Valve came along and opened up the opportunities that have been sitting in front of both MS and Sony.
Still waiting on a killer Steam title. If Natural Selection 2 ever makes it I’ll definitely give that a shot. Was a fan of the 1st for awhile. (CS:S has run its course imho, nuf sed)
Last couple games I tried, Red Ochestra and that goofy ninja puppet game sort of turned me off. Tho the ninja one was was pretty clever and worth a few laughs.
OH MAN, I almost forgot about an incident with the Steam “Metascore” system I had. I posted an honest review about Red Orchestra having been a long time DoD (original) and DoD (source) player and modder, also enjoyed a plethora of historic 1st person shooters. Basically outlined the problems I had and wrote the kind of review I wish I had read before buying it.
I =ALSO= commented about the dozens upon dozens of generic 1-liner Metascore comments (that also gave the game extremely high “metascores”, all posted by suspiciously generic names, like Bill R. and Steve J. and Tim P. — not gamer tags basically).
I then refreshed my review about a 100 of times via simply re-reading it. Thus is appeared at the top of the reviews as “highly read”. A “metascore” admin of some sort replied saying that their system was truthful and couldn’t be manipulated. (Yeah right, after I had simply F5 re-freshed my post to appear at the top!!). I replied with a 100 more re-freshes bring the review back to the top.
My review and score were removed shortly there after.
I deserved it, but still, I work in marketing, but any online review system that provides a paid-for service by any industry is ‘massaged’ a bit to provide more positive than negative results in many ways.
I’m ranting! Hey. I like your blog Csven. Thanks for dropping by mine earlier. :)
Generic Blogger, Tom P.
I feel bad that I *still* haven’t tried Natural Selection. Downloaded but never played. Will have to do that.
As to the review, it’s a shame an honest review was removed. You should have done the refresh trick on something less worthwhile.
So far I’ve only gotten HL2 and Episode 1. And I’ll get Episode 2. The metascores just don’t influence me. Then again I’m probably not in their target market anyway.
Glad you enjoy the blog and I appreciate the comment. Stop by any time.