Valve’s Steam gaming platform got off to a rocky start in 2004. It was buggy, slow, and fielded complaints from thousands of angry gamers for changing the paradigm so drastically. Remember, before Steam, people had to go to stores and buy physical disks. Weird.
Times have changed. Steam is the King of the Hill in terms of digital game distribution services. There are competitors, but all they do is sell games, really. EA’s Origin is a potential competitor, but it’s in its infancy, is plagued with issues, and isn’t quite ready for prime time. Yet.
Okay, so Origin may one day be able to compete with Steam for gamers’ attention; especially if exclusivity comes into play. The next generation may very well see “console wars” happen on the PC gaming side. It will no longer be “PC vs. Xbox 360 vs PS3”. It will be PS4, Nextbox, Steam, and Origin. If you want to play Half Life 3, you’ll need Steam. Dragon Age 3? Origin. Maybe. We’ll see.
However; one thing that Origin will probably never be able to do that Steam does right now is be used as a beta test platform for other developers—both Indie and smaller studio.
Using Steam for Beta testing
Futuremark Game Studios sent out a press release today for their upcoming UFO tower defense game “Unstoppable Gorg“. The press release was announcing that Unstoppable Gorg just got approved for XBLA, as well as posting a new dev diary for the game. Dev diaries are cool because they give an insider glance at game development straight from the team that’s working on the game. What struck me about this particular dev diary, however, was this part:
A few people have asked whether we can open the beta up to people playing on Xbox or iPad. This is something we would love to do but unfortunately it is not very practical for the type of beta we are running. One of the (many) great things about Steam is that we can update the game whenever we want. The processes involved with Xbox LIVE and the App Store would just slow us down.
* They will deny it of course, but there really is a big red button at Steam they press to release games and updates.
Check that: “We can update the game whenever we want”. That’s some serious power for a beta test platform. Updates could go out daily if they wanted. This makes the beta test look extremely responsive. Players test, post reports and suggestions, and the devs can roll out patches that very night if they want to.
I can’t say much about my own beta test experience with Unstoppable Gorg, except to say I’ve been extremely impressed with the response of the developers. Steam gives them the ability to be extremely responsive to global beta testers in different time zones and countries. That’s something we won’t be seeing in any other distribution platform for a long time, if ever.
The evolution of Steam
I imagine that Steam has been a somewhat surprising and auspicious victory within the hallowed halls of Valve HQ in Bellvue. Sometimes parts of their success seem like happy accidents; Steam really changed the DLC landscape when they made it extremely easy for users to make purchases. New features like Steam Cloud are making even bigger differences to developers and gamers alike.
Steam will very likely continue to be the de facto standard for PC game distribution for quite some time because as history has shown, the more developer-friendly a product is, the better it does.
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