Steam offers in-game DLC. The pros and cons.

[weemadando]

Valve have today announced that Steam - which already takes care of most other in-game needs for the PC market - will now be offering in-game downloadable content procurement as well.

What does this mean? You'll be able to get the DLC from the same program you're launching and managing the main game from, instead of fishing around somewhere else for it. Just fire up the game, hit shift-tab and you can shop to your heart's content.

Convenient? Yes. Just don't be surprised if that convenience comes at a cost when you find in six months that some of the map packs PC gamers used to get for free suddenly are not free.

The first game to take advantage of in-game DLC will be The Maw, but since the feature can be accessed from any game - old or new, purchased from Steam or from retail - it certainly won't be the last.

I'm pleased that they are finally doing this because, seriously, fuck GFWL. I don't know how MS can produce such a shoddy piece of shit when all they need to do is send the GFWL team around to the 360 team to look at how the fuck such a thing works. Hell, it's probably just a few cubicles down.

BUt the point that they bring up - hello paid for map packs. Fuck that. And how long before someone tries to charge for a patch?

[Andrew_Fireborn]

Well, they haven't managed to have the balls to charge for patching on the xbox yet... where it is a fully contained market at the mercy of their whims...

So I somewhat doubt it'll happen on PC. Though, bundling needed fixes with Paid DLC I could see happening a lot, though I have no examples off hand.

[Stark]

I hear convenience costs money. I'm surprised Steam took this long to introduce this, but i guess it involves a level of cooperation with their clients. It's not like people weren't already paying for 'micro expansions' (ie patches) and 'map packs'.

[TheFeniX]

Scouring for maps is a bitch, but how are they going to handle server-side downloads? Back before I bailed, our TF2 server hosted numerous maps, all of which could be downloaded directly from the server (using the fastdl cvar) once you connected. Unless they disable this functionality, or add in some kind of "lock" for retail maps, I don't see how this could work. The server host may have to pay for the map pack though.

[Uraniun235]

I strongly doubt that Valve's going to switch to paid map packs for TF2, especially when the community has proven capable of one-upping Valve's map designers. Steam now hosts a pretty big variety of games. It's not like every game past, present, and future will suddenly be locked down into the Steam Optional Content Download Internet Gigabytes System - this is just another option that developers will have in the future.

[Stark]

Yeah, like I said it probably requires quite a tight partnership (not least to DRM it all so you can't just move it) and this isn't going to become the norm any time soon (not least because most devs can't be fucked).

[Mr Bean]

Steam has already recognized that DRM is a failed effort, and consider this is Valve we are talking about here. The sugar daddy of mod's. Steam is simply going forward in offering the ability for each company to better be able to customize their steam store so they can offer paid DLC just like they do on the Xbox or PS3.

Valve is going to go forward with it's state goal in life, make video games, sell them, gain the love of the people, and then use those people to make video games and sell those too. It's a brilliant strategy. Now they have the Indy game (Or at least the good indy games) flocking to Steam to set up shop and nearly all the major video game companies release on Steam. Even EA bit the bullet which means 2010 or 2011 we will see all the yearly EA francises on the console, all they need is Square-Enix and buy out something like Good Old Games so we can get Lucasart's and Black Isle's old back-catalog and they pretty much have it wrapped up at that point.

[Stark]

I don't follow; most Valve releases of the last four years are glorified HL2 mods, which people only buy because of the Steam DRM making it a pain to simply download it like a regular mod (especially when they charge a hundred bucks for shit like L4D). This is pretty much exactly what Ando is talking about; all this extra content now costing money and forcing you to use Steam.

[Alyeska]

Is it possible to register a Box copy of a game that does not have Steam, with Steam? I have the store copy of Fallout 3. Can I register it with Steam and get it on Steam as a result?

[Stark]

I'm pretty sure you can, yeah. I think I did this with UT3. Amusingly Epic releases 'microexpansions' for free?

[Mr Bean]

I don't follow; most Valve releases of the last four years are glorified HL2 mods, which people only buy because of the Steam DRM making it a pain to simply download it like a regular mod (especially when they charge a hundred bucks for shit like L4D). This is pretty much exactly what Ando is talking about; all this extra content now costing money and forcing you to use Steam.

L4D is a special case, it was a free mod which they bought out and turned it into a full game. Selling it for 50$ was odd but they've discounted it several times from 15.99$ to 34.99$, one weekend out of the month.

Also as we've established elsewhere, Australian Steam is not normal Steam. It's "fuck you" version, everything costs more, everything's slower and they add in extra bugs.
Because Valve hates Australian's as do all Video Game companies. I'm sorry

More to the point I counter that those "glorified HL2 mods" get a year to three years of expansions for free. Look at Team-Fortress 2. Look at L4D both are on track for free DLC.

As to other question, it depends on the company. If they have an agreement a game bought in the store is the same as a game bought on Steam, other games no so much. All Valve games give you steam copy's. Any game where you MUST register with Steam gives you a Steam copy.

[Stark]

That's not really 'special', it's what happened ten years ago with CS (and I believe DoD but less so). I'm not understanding where this positive attitude towards Valve continuing it's hilarious 'charge huge amounts of money for mods' program is coming from.

Frankly it's a shame GFWL is such a balls-out fiasco, as it's a similar framework without the footprint. Ironically, one of the biggest probelms with Windows Live is that it DOESN'T have a client like Steam and is ONLY fully integrated.

[Mr Bean]

Frankly it's a shame GFWL is such a balls-out fiasco, as it's a similar framework without the footprint. Ironically, one of the biggest probelms with Windows Live is that it DOESN'T have a client like Steam and is ONLY fully integrated.

I thought the issue with Window's live was that it has not features no games and occasionally decides your not authorized to play the games you bought with it?

[Stark]

It has plenty of features which amusingly work better and with fewer limitations than XBL, but the servers have had some pretty serious problems. Of course, blogs that rant about shit like that forget Steam was nigh-unusable for it's first year of life, but being smarter than the internet is something I came to terms with in my youth.

The list of games supporting it is laughably small, which is why the lack of a client is annoying; if you could use your XBL contacts in a messenging client for cross-platform voice chat that'd be cool.

[Losonti Tokash]

It would certainly make it easier to harass you while you're playing DoW2 at least.

[Uraniun235]

That's not really 'special', it's what happened ten years ago with CS (and I believe DoD but less so). I'm not understanding where this positive attitude towards Valve continuing it's hilarious 'charge huge amounts of money for mods' program is coming from.

How would you differentiate CS/DOD/L4D/TF2 as "mods" from other multiplayer games? It seems to me like the only reason they're "mods" is that they happen to share the same engine with other Valve games, even though there have been other games (like Quake 3) which have been released with even less content.

[Stark]

It's not necessarily pejorative; I just find it amusing that Valve hasn't made a decent game in fucking years outside of 'episodes' and 'mods'. Arguably Gears is a 'mod' of UT3, after all, so it's absurd to declare in some way that every game should have a unique engine (or whatever 'no mods' would mean). If people can whinge about 3V111L MICRO$OFT charging for 360 mods which would be free on PC, I can laugh at Valve for basically existing on the sale of mods for Source.

[JointStrikeFighter]

I'm pretty sure you can, yeah. I think I did this with UT3. Amusingly Epic releases 'microexpansions' for free?

That was CD keys we purchased on stardock to use with our existing UT3 iso's. Amusingly I am sure this probably violated some form of EULA. Turns out nobody cares?

[Slacker]

Well, I bought Empire: Total War in a store and it set up Steam and all the autoupdates when I installed, so I imagine most actual-box games can benefit from it. On the other hand, Empire is fairly new.