An open letter about Steam and its future
I really dig digital delivery and I think that, if the corporations will start to look at it in the right way (as a service, not as an exploitation), it would be a great asset against piracy and digital contents affordability. When Steam launched the in-game advertising features for Counter-Strike, I felt myself morally compelled to write this open letter to Valve Software to ask why some things are the way they are on the Steam platform and why there’s so little regard for end-users. Let’s hope Valve will respond to us and give us reasons to believe in them again.
To Mr Doug Lombardi
PR of Valve Software.I know Italy and Continental Europe in general are not the primary target of any Game Developer that has worldwide notoriety, but I think I will share my years-long Italian Counter-Strike experience in this open letter with you. In these years, I’ve seen literally hundreds of HL, HL2, CS and CS:S copies sold at the gaming conventions here in Italy (especially in Milan and Rome). In Italy CS is a very popular game and the community is always expanding, we have lots of amateur and professional clans, we have lots of official and unofficial tourneys. Most of these realities have their own dedicated servers, giving a place to play to many others who bought this online-only game just to have some fun. In short: the community is passionate, involved and very clever, local magazines and game sites are giving us lots of support.
Recently, we learned that in-game advertising for CS 1.6 is going to be a reality and that CS:S may soon follow. I won’t point the impact these aim-level billboards can have on gameplay, I will focus only on more pressing (or depressing, point of views) issues that in-game advertising brings in a more community-centric scope.
To get straight to the point, how can Valve justify the use of our own hardware resources, bandwidth and money to cash-in with third party advertisement? Here, a quality dedicated CS server can cost from 30 to 50€ monthly if rented. Pardon us if we feel like being exploited to be compelled to stream ads for you, with no cheaper hosting options, no revenue sharing plans, nothing. I think that disregarding the dedication and monetary efforts that many players undertake to keep your game one of the most successful online affair ever, it’s a great form of disrespect. Many other IGA partners are offering free clients for game offering in-game ads, in some cases they are also running the dedicated servers (in some cases massively multiplayers servers) by their own. Here you are asking us to invest money on dedicated servers to make you earn money by selling more game copies and streaming more ads.
Many people see in Steam something more than a simple game aggregator, something menacing. Today it is crystal clear that your first goal was to build a client-based content distribution platform using the worldwide success of Half-Life and Counter-Strike to bolster your installed base and to attract more licenses from third parties. Being an insider on SOA-based value added services and knowing their revenue models, I can say it was a logical choice and a well planned move. Still Steam has several huge issues for customers that still need to be discussed and properly addressed.
For starters, the much promoted community features of Steam took months just to start working and, frankly, they still are disappointing in quality and feature sets. They seem more and more like an excuse to justify the client installation, than a real coherent social platform for gaming.
We are now sure that games on Steam will be subject to arbitrary marketing changes. With these premises, why a person should find affordable to buy a game off Steam (let’s say Civilization IV, but the Steam catalog is full of shameful examples like this one) for $49.95 when a popular worldwide-free shipper will be able to send us a physical copy of the same game for just $20.98? It’s Valve becoming just another middle man in the retail chain, raising the costs again to secure bigger profits? If that’s not the case, how can you motivate the lack of competivity in services and affordability against archaic practices like moving boxes around the globe? Digital delivery is not supposed to be cheaper?
Who can assure us that in the future end-user licenses won’t be changed again? That a game that was accessible for free after a one time payment will start asking us a subscription? That in the future Steam won’t start to ask to trade off our privacy to continue to play games we bought?
Will people who bought the game before a certain date, under different EULAs and without any clue of what would happen in the future, be able to opt out from the new user policies?
I apologize if you will find these questions too provocative or just plain impolite but since I’m seeing questionable plans coming from a company that years ago played as the beacon of the independence of developers, championed the advantages of digital delivery for customers and sponsored the great potential of an affordable gaming aggregator able to foster communites, I thought that these questions just have to be asked.
Thanks for your time, I’d like to see an official reply from you or from one of your representative as soon as possible. A copy of this E-Mail will be shortly available at my personal blog, listed in the signature. Your answers will be reported without any editing on the same website to allow public reading, please tell me if you prefer otherwise.
I also sent the mail to a couple of reliable and independent, well known gaming sites, let’s see how it will end up.
Apparently mine wasn’t the only open letter sent to Valve. Here it is another one.
May 20th, 2007 at 11:08 am
[...] the Tom Brawnell’s article: It [in-game ads] even led certain server administrators to write open letters to the developer questioning its stance. When asked whether it would be possible for server admins [...]
May 21st, 2007 at 12:44 am
1- Ads are cliend-side
2- VALVe doesn’t chose the price of products that they don’t own
May 21st, 2007 at 3:32 am
Actually, Valve does choose the price. Look at Red Orchestra. That was a free mod for UT2004. Valve brought it to steam and are now forcing people to pay for the mod. Do some research and think. Valve likes gloating over all the things Steam is capable of doing, but in reality Steam is little more than a medium for Valve to take advantage of customers. You can go to a store and find games they have available on Steam much cheaper. Wasn’t the reduction of prices for products on Steam a selling point. Now Valve wants to use the CS community to make them even richer by forcing ads into online games hosted by people that pay good money to rent those servers. I’m absolutely disgusted with Valve’s antic and will never pay for a product bearing their name again. Heck, now they got rid of the Black Box and are forcing us to pay for HL2 and Episode 1 again.
May 21st, 2007 at 8:30 am
@HostFat
This is a common misinterpretation on how ads in CS or BF2142 works.
The Ads aren’t completely client-side (like in SWAT4, to make an example): they require a specific version of dedicated server and require people to play on those servers to receive ads. People are compelled to upgrade both clients and servers to continue playing. The dedicated servers orchestrate the streaming and locate the clients and relays informations to Valve that in turn get back the appropriate ads provider, as much as happen with doubleclick, adsense or other third party advertisers.
From a technical point all ads are client side, but they are effective because there’s a server or a community where people gather and socialize. The software that control ads must be in the gathering point because ads are profiled (CS ads too) and tailored for a specific community, so the dedicated server has to interpret a lot of data received from clients in a user-based basis: how many time people watch a specific ad, for example. In future even in-game chat will be monitored, like text on webpages to provide themed ads. Without the efforts of who build communities (like this site, CSNation or a dedicated server staff) all these ads mechanics remain useless because people won’t have place to gather.
Oh and btw in the late 90s several professional web-hosting companies tried to inject ads on webpages used by paying customers, shielded by a change the EULA. They were denounced and made illegal because it’s a form of software hijacking, that is forbidden by law.
Many games that have a server or client-side ads platform that works are completely free, like Anarchy Online (MMORPG), for example. For normal software, adware made only a huge decrease of software quality and the spawn countless of malware. The ads never were effective and to recoup the costs advertising companies started to inject spyware via the advertising. Today spyware and adware software is just a minority, often related to scam and frauds.
Why the game industry must be successful on something was a failure since it’s inception? At the moment it’s just a tactic to grab some money by IGA, an ad startup that hasn’t a clear future but that, at the moment, has lots of money to spare, as all start-ups. Game Publishers are hungry for money, so they will try to take advantage from the situation even if advertising in interactive content has only an history of failures.
June 12th, 2007 at 9:28 am
I also want to point out that there are countries which clearly forbids advertising aimed towards kids. Some scandinavian countries for example. I am not shure about EU in general.
http://www.ppu.org.uk/chidren/advertising_toys_eu.html
I dont agree that its undemocratic to put regulations on ads for kids. To be able to be democratic you must be able to vote. And how many countries allow 11 year olds to vote? No, they are concidered to young because of lack of experience and maturity. But it is ok to expose them to ads in a game?
It would have been better if Valve developed some sort of donation support when you play a third party mod instead of looking up some Paypal button on their webby.
Why not have “Donate to this mods development” in the steam client? If valve wants to be payed for administrating this with a tiny % it would be better than ads.
My 2 cents