Steam is taking over...

[BobtheCkroach]

Did anyone read this?

http://www.megagames.com/news/html/pc/valveandvivendisettlelegaldispute.shtml

The gist of it is, as of August of this year, Valve and Vivendi will go their seperate ways, and in all future games, Valve will only be releasing games via steam - no purchasing a box at the stores...

[Dangerous Dan]

hmmm.... i tend to like this part though...


What we all agree on is that if the middle-man is to be eliminated and if we are to experience a revolution in the gaming industry we will no longer be able to accept the same pricing. Starting with Valve's games for example, we have to see drops since we are sure that the staff and resources of VU Games must have added to the price and that now Valve can begin selling their excellent product for a much more, consumer-friendly price.

If this settlement between Valve and Vivendi is to bring about a revolution it had better be one that gets rid of excess baggage and ends up making the final product much more widely accessible.

[SALvation]

It just means Vivendi won't sell the game. Valve can still sell it themselves through retail if they wanted. I'm sure you will still see it on shelves from someone this fall.

[PJ'l_Master]

sounds good to me...

:thumbs:

but again the dial up ppl are teh screwed

[JIMINATOR]

bah, they are just doing away with the publisher. lots of people are not on highspeed or do not have credit cards or blah blah blah. Steam is nothing like the browsing experience looking a game boxes. all of those sales would be totally gone....

[OUTLAWS The Machine]

Hate to be on dial up....

[FUS1ON]

I've never used this method and I know most don't READ them, but I do. What do you do about the instruction manuals?

[PJ'l_Master]

they will prolly be PDFs or something like that

[OUTLAWS 9.99repeating^32]

I don't think this changes very much, I think that developers will still need publishers in the future. I think publishers provide critical services for developers, like funding (the most important), advertisement and community exposure, manufacturing and shipping services, and setting a deadline (although some may argue that deadlines are bad for developers). Without these services, I think many games would have never made it anywhere in the industry.

For example, take Painkiller, developed by People Can Fly. Before PK, People Can Fly was a relatively unknown developer. Without Dreamcatcher I think that PK would have gotten much less exposure and would be much less popular than it currently is. The same could be said for Serious Sam. I think that Valve can get away with not having a publsiher for a couple of reasons, mainly because they have quite a bit of funds to begin with and can provide most of the publisher's services themselves, and because they have Steam with a large fanbase. So with the possible exception of a few mega-developers (like Blizzard or EA Games), I think that the high majority of developers will still need publishers and thus will not follow Valve's lead and dump their publishers.

[Dangerous Dan]

I don't think this changes very much, I think that developers will still need publishers in the future. I think publishers provide critical services for developers, like funding (the most important), advertisement and community exposure, manufacturing and shipping services, and setting a deadline (although some may argue that deadlines are bad for developers). Without these services, I think many games would have never made it anywhere in the industry.

For example, take Painkiller, developed by People Can Fly. Before PK, People Can Fly was a relatively unknown developer. Without Dreamcatcher I think that PK would have gotten much less exposure and would be much less popular than it currently is. The same could be said for Serious Sam. I think that Valve can get away with not having a publsiher for a couple of reasons, mainly because they have quite a bit of funds to begin with and can provide most of the publisher's services themselves, and because they have Steam with a large fanbase. So with the possible exception of a few mega-developers (like Blizzard or EA Games), I think that the high majority of developers will still need publishers and thus will not follow Valve's lead and dump their publishers. serious sam got exposure from oldmanmurray.com (http://www.oldmanmurray.com/), when they made the first ever interview (http://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/73.html) and brought it to everyone's attention... the publisher did very little before OMM steped in...


In 1993, id software released Doom. During the next seven years, not much happened (http://www.daikatana.com/). Two weeks ago a small group of Croatian programmers called Croteam (http://www.croteam.com/) unleashed a demo (http://www.ga-source.com/all/news/bits/04+30+2000/2:10:47.shtml) of their upcoming game Serious Sam. It features cutting-edge technology (http://www.croteam.com/www/engine_features.html) and demonstrates Croteam's furious commitment to recapturing the intensity of wild action shooters such as Smash TV (http://www.emuclassics.com/warning.php3?start=/SNES/SNESPRO/SMASHTV.ZIP), but in full, brightly-lit, sewerless 3D. It's an amazing piece of work by a tiny group living in a country most people thought had been blown up a few years ago. Quite obviously, it's one of the greatest news stories ever. It has everything: war, hardship, broken english, and a great, technically accomplished, already playable game. It's just the kind of uplifting, underdogs-stuggling-against-impossible-odds success story that could only happen in America or Croatia. http://www.oldmanmurray.com/images/features/zagreb2.jpgOf course, the gaming press ignored it. Instead, they rolled over, yawned, scratched their nuts, and continued to mumble in their sleep about dismal crapola like Sid Meier's turn-based dinosaur game. Sure a few sites posted a perfunctory link to the demo (http://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/www.ga-source.com/all/news/bits/04+30+2000/2:10:47.shtml), but no one bothered to inform you of just how great this game truly is. Amazingly, we, of all people, had to break the story and uncharacteristically report some actual facts about an actual game. Let me repeat that: While the legitimate gaming press was busy wiping Peter Molyneux's spunk out of its eye, this amazing game skittered right by it, so that now you have to hear about Serious Sam from Old Man Murray. Quite frankly, it's an embarrassment (http://www.gameproworld.com/) to the entire (http://www.gamespot.com/) rotten (http://www.dailyradar.com/) ****ing (http://pc.ign.com/) community (http://www.gamefan.com/).

I staged a formal coming-out (http://www.oldmanmurray.com/news/299.html) for Serious Sam in our news section. Then I sat back and waited for the big sites to commence their massive coverage. After a few days, I realized that in the gaming media's rush to publish every Diablo 2 screenshot ever taken by anyone, Serious Sam was going to go unnoticed. I contacted Roman Ribaric (roman@croteam.com), CEO of Croteam, and asked him if he'd be willing to let me interview him for my Serious Sam fansite, Old Man Murray. It was a delicate operation. If he didn't speak English, there could be no interview. If he spoke English too well and understood the American idiom, he'd be able to fully comprehend Old Man Murray, and there could be no interview. Luckily, he spoke English just well enough to be extremely polite to me and answer my hard-hitting and often unfair questions and badmouth John Carmack. He even sent me three exclusive screenshots! That's a sentence I'd always hoped you'd never have to read on Old Man Murray. You can thank Gamefan and CGO and Gamespot and Daily Radar for that. I asked Roman to send me a picture of himself, but he didn't. Here's a picture of Roman as I imagine him:


http://www.oldmanmurray.com/images/features/croteam_member_photo.jpg


We plan to provide ongoing coverage of Serious Sam and more interviews with Croteam, the developer that doesn't know the meaning of the word "crate". Literally.

[OUTLAWS 9.99repeating^32]

Dan, my point was to say that it wasn't Croteam themselves that put them in the spotlight and that developers need third-parties to do that. Now whether or not it was God Games or whoever else published Sam (I can't remember now) that actually brought the initial exposure is another matter. Surely you agree that without a publisher Sam would not have made it very far, right?

But if your point was to say that the initial exposure was brought by OMM and not Sam's publisher, than thanks for correcting me.

[Dangerous Dan]

lol, no, i'm just promoting OMM, seeing how i loved that old site and take any opportunity to rummge throguh the archives at dig up its genious...

but yeah, i agree that developers are essential.. but i don't thinkthey need to be as big as EA's near-monopoly...

[OUTLAWS high ping camper]

When the first SAM demo was being shipped with gaming magazines, you'd think GOD (Gathering Of Developers) created the game. Little was said about Croteam, the big hoopla was GOD promoting themselves.
The disc featured scantily clad women and such.
But again, without GOD's, I think SAM would have been left to flounder.

[SALvation]

FYI today Valve announced HL2 will still be available through retail after August.