and now for a word from someone who's not so hot about steam

In plenty of previous posts, I've gushed about how Steam makes getting games painless and how cool the service is, but here's an article with the opposing viewpoint from some guy called Randy Pitchford.

His big thing seems to be that he simply doesn't trust Valve and that he thinks currently Steam is taking an unfair percentage of the game sale.

Which might be true.

But I tell you, I probably never would have bought CoD4 or Bioshock if they hadn't been on Steam and playable in a few hours. I know for a fact that I never would have jacked around with Titan Quest or the Oblivion games if they weren't on Steam and sold as cheap bundles as I wasn't about to drive out to Best Buy and go sifting through the bargain bins just to find copies of them.

I think the power of their distribution system is how easy it for games to keep selling beyond the initial launch window.

game over... steams wins, best buy loses

In the previous and unbacked-up incarnation of this blog, I had a few posts gushing about how Steam was cool because it basically offered up online delivery of PC games.

A while back, Activision (now Activision Blizzard) started releasing their stuff through Steam, and now EA has jumped aboard for the big win.

I like Steam because it gets rid of the hardcopy, real-world product. That means it takes less time to purchase a game through Steam than it does to jump in the Spoonmobile and run down to Best Buy or Wally World and grab it from amongst the shuffle hordes of shopping zombies. After I get the game, I don't have to enter the ever-growing string of alphanumeric characters just to play it. Nor do I have to worry about finding the CD or hunting down a nocd crack and rolling the dice on picking up a virus when I want to play it later on down the road.

What the game companies like about Steam is that the authentication system providing proof of purchase. It doesn't make piracy impossible, but it does make your product more customer friendly and removes the need to license DRM and other copyright protection schemes. That decreases the cost to deliver the product to the customer, and oddly enough might contribute to actual legit sales because the lower price might make the hassle/risk of pirating a game less likely. They also like that Steam opens up the potential for episodic releases of game content, which further drives down production costs because instead of needing $10m and 2 years to produce art for a 30 hour AAA title, you can just break off $1m and 6 months for the first episode and see if the game is popular enough to warrant going on to episode 2, etc.

This is absolutely crucial for us PC gamers, because Steam is about the last ray of hope for convincing publishers to stick with the PC platform. They have been increasingly looking towards consoles as the solution to the problems of being able to reuse IP and reduce piracy, and the PC game market has taken a hit as more and more stuff gets designed for the Xbox first.

web games the future, eh?

So there's starting to be more talk that the web is the game platform of the future, or more specifically that Flash gaming is where the audience (and money) is going to be.

Why, then, are there so many game companies who think their biggest selling feature is level of detail in their game? Why do all the game rags gush about how realistic graphics are if Flash (or even worse, Silverlight) level graphics are going to be the foundation for next generation games? We're talking about a platform where the best you can hope for is "campy cartoony" because rendering 3d primitives or anything resembling raytracing isn't gonna be happening.

I suspect that they're right, in as much as the web as a gaming platform will (already has?) open up the casual gaming market. I'd also guess that major studios will start hiring ActionScript and Silverlight monkies to pursue online exploitations of game franchises. We might even see a couple more iD-like rags-to-riches stories as indie game houses give up on trying to wallpaper over 3 year old engines and opt for lower-cost-of-development web games.

But I don't think the console (or even PC gaming) is going anywhere any time soon.

In the meantime... are there any current web games you're playing now that fun/addictive?

sims franchise hits 100 million

Cnet's got a story about how the Sims franchise has shipped 100 million units. If you assume sales at around $30 per box as an average (to account for folks purchasing from the bargain bin), that's... $3 billion.

For a franchise whose core concept is basically playing dolls.

Something else to keep in mind here is that for a "triple A" title, selling 500,000 units is considered Pretty Darned Good(tm).

Maybe there's more money to be made in letting players dress up their avatars and "socialize" with others than there is in machine guns, misanthropic aliens, and grumpy dragons. Or maybe the Sims just did an excellent job of appealing to a wide range of casual players by not really having any objectives in the first place. What will be interesting to see is if this is repeated with Spore (which should be released later on this year).