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''Steam'' is a Content Delivery , Digital Rights Management and Multiplayer system developed by the Valve Corporation . It is currently used to digitally distribute and manage games including '' Half-Life '' and '' Half-Life 2 ''. Steam also replaces WON , the original authentication framework for ''Half-Life'' multiplayer games and a number of other now largely or entirely defunct titles. HISTORY Steam was primarily developed to attain 'secure content delivery and rights management' (primary source lost, consider secondary ), allowing users to download, update and use content wherever they are, ensuring in the process that they own the product. This reasoning came about after Valve looked at their own products and realised that patching and getting new content (for example mods) for them could be a very slow and laborious process, with enormous, monolithic Patch files that the user had to both find out about and find a download for themselves. From this idea came today's system, which also incorporates Anti-cheat Technology (see VAC 2 ), marketing tools and communication services. Despite popular opinion, and perhaps their past actions, Valve does not presently seem overly concerned with using Steam DRM to combat Copyright Infringement Of Their Software . Their future plans focus more on making the platform more useful for developers and customers rather than more frustrating for anyone stealing the games. [http://www.steamreview.org/?p=20 Steam's ability to allow a game developer to "cut out the middleman", namely Game Publishers and storefronts, and to thereby directly sell and Distribute their products to users via the Internet , has led many to predict that Steam and future concepts like it will revolutionize the Gaming Industry in the same way that P2P threatens the livelihood of the Music labels and Movie publishing houses. This possibility was poignantly highlighted by the legal battle between Valve and their publisher Vivendi Universal Games , where VUG argued that Steam was an attempt to circumvent their publishing agreement. However, on November 29 , 2004 , Valve announced that the courts had granted their motion of Summary Judgement in this case. The client application, Steam version 1.0, was first made available for download in spring of 2002 during the beta period for '' Counter-Strike '' 1.6. At that time, it appeared to be a method of streamlining the patch process common in online Computer Game s. Installation and use of the Steam program was mandatory for CS 1.6 beta testers, but Steam remained an optional component. In late 2003 , Steam was revealed as a replacement for much of the dated framework of WON and ''Half-Life'' multiplayer and also as a distribution system for entire games. Valve's Doug Lombardi announced in October 2004 that ''Half-Life 2'' required activation via Steam in order to play the game. When ''Half-Life 2'' arrived at some stores earlier than its intended release date of November 16 , Valve reported that their contract with Vivendi prevented them from activating the Steam authentication servers until the 16th. Recently, Valve has been negotiating contracts with several publishers and independent developers to release their products on Steam, typically with a pre-order discount of 10% off their MSRP. Rag Doll Kung Fu and Darwinia are two recent examples, and European publisher Strategy First announced in December 2005 that it would be partnering with Valve for digital distribution of current and future titles. VALVE CYBER CAFé PROGRAM Steam has also allowed Valve to run a subscription-based cybercafé program {Link without Title} , the Valve Cyber Café Program, which is now the only legal way for a cybercafé to offer Steam-based games. There are two pricing models, a flat-rate per-client fee each month or the upcoming 'Valve Time Tracker' system that offers a pay-as-you-go model. Program Benefits In addition to what is offered by the regular Steam client (see above), the Cybercafé program:
Program drawbacks
VALVE ANTI-CHEAT (VAC) Although in the public eye longer than Steam, VAC was left abandoned for many months while Valve engineers worked on its successor, VAC2. It swiftly became useless during this period. VAC2 is currently in fully functional beta – while to all intents and purposes final, no announcement to that effect has been made. Success is hard to measure with delayed banning and the fast-moving cheat scene, but reports of cheaters in secure servers on the Steam forums are few and far between compared with VAC1, as are complaints that cheats are slipping past. Delayed bans, criticism & rationale VAC2's motives are often called into question due to its 'delayed ban' system. When a user connects to a secure server their system memory is scanned at any number of random points for cheats (the precise manner in which cheats are detected is secret). If a cheat is found the player's Steam account will be flagged as cheating, but the player will not be banned nor receive any indication that they have been detected. It is only after a certain, variable delay, roughly three days for VAC1 and officially less than three weeks for VAC2 {Link without Title} , that the account is banned. The banning might take over a month in some instances. When this happens it is unable to play on any server that runs in secure mode. Bans are permanent for all games. VAC1 originally banned Half-Life 1 games for one or five years. However, with the release of 'Source' games and VAC2, all bans are now permanent. Also, if you cheat in a game such as Day of Defeat, you can not join any other VAC secured server in any other game, such as Counter-Strike. Any one-year bans given before VAC2 was released have been 'grandfathered' in and will expire on their original expiration date. Valve's reasoning behind the system is that it makes it harder for cheaters to tell if the cheat is 'VAC-Proof' or not. They claim that in the time it takes from the cheat being detected to the first banning, many more cheaters will have been caught than had it banned the first person on the spot and allowed the alarm to be raised immediately. Critics claim however that this gives cheaters a counter-productive 'grace period' where they can freely cheat with no repercussions. Others charge the system (delayed bans or not) with existing to make Valve money, on the basis that cheaters will buy another copy of the game in order to continue cheating rather than desist. While it is not unknown for cheaters to steal copies from shops in order to do this, the purchasing of new ones has only been reliably observed in those caught and reformed, mainly through their apologetic posts on the Steam User Forums {Link without Title} . Those that have been caught by the system also criticise it, usually with the claim that it has made a False Positive . The only recorded instance of a false positive was under VAC1 in 2003, when it detected the in-game MP3 player HLAmp, a plug-in frequently bundled with cheats of the time, as a cheat itself. The mistake and its effects were reverted approximately five hours after the first users received bans due to it. CRITICISM OF STEAM On November 16 , 2004, ''Half-Life 2'' was officially released. While the launch was mainly regarded as successful, later in the day a significant number of buyers (both through Steam and retail) found themselves unable to play the game, due in part to a bottleneck of Valve's Steam system. The European authentication servers went down for about 5 hours before being fixed, preventing those with accounts stored on them from decrypting or playing the game they had bought. The problem was, according to Steam engineer Taylor Sherman , "a little more involved" than lack of bandwidth. He predicted that the problem would never happen again. Privacy concerns have also been raised, as one needs to Log In and validate with Steam online at least once in order to play any Steam game. While there is an offline mode available, critics point out that it can only be accessed when not connected to the internet - there is still no command line Parameter . There are also no alternate methods of activation such as via Telephone or Fax . These issues have caused those with computers with sporadic or no internet access often to be denied from registering their purchased Steam products. Another major issue is the auto-update model. To play a game offline, Steam and the game itself must be fully updated; and updates are always checked for when starting Steam while online. If there is an update the game is marked as not up to date, regardless of whether the user wants to update or not. They must then update the game before being able to play offline again. The worst affected are Dial-up users: not only are they the ones who are most likely to use offline mode, they are the ones least capable of updating. Once applied, an update cannot be rolled back; thus, outside of offline mode, even buggy updates are mandatory. Some players have also expressed concerns that Steam is going to become a subscription-based Pay-to-play service at some point in the future. Valve, however, has repeatedly denied this and pronounced such fears as unfounded. Another concern regarding the condition of Steam is the question of how Steam activated products will be activated if Steam no longer exists, due to either Valve going bankrupt or moving onto a different delivery system. Without Steam, purchased products will no longer function unless a 'final patch' is released. Steam remains a controversial issue within the ''Half-Life'' communities. Centralised issues Occasionally a centralised issue appears, which prevents users from accessing the service or parts of the service through problems directly under Valve's control. Early Instability Up until early/mid 2004, Steam was a very unstable system in all regards. Catastrophic Crashes , constant connectivity issues and general Glitches prevailed. It was during this period that Steam generated a huge amount of the negative feedback it still suffers from, particuarly when the former WON validation system was shut down – while the service did not cope with the extra load in an unusually bad way, the huge influx of new users increased the volume of complaints immensely. February Downtime In early February 2005 a backend Steam server crashed, causing exactly half of all users to be unable to log in (all those registered to one of the two authentication server groupings). Because of the nature of the downtime the Steam client did not realise anything was wrong, and on login erased the old data in anticipation of the new, which never arrived. This prevented the use of offline mode. The downtime lasted approximately twelve hours. Confirmation of the problem only came in the last hour of its existence, from a staff member not directly involved in the process. GOTY crash On the release of ''Half-Life 2: Game of the Year Edition'', the re-release of the game after ''. The problem was announced early on Monday by Valve support staff, as was progress to fixing it and its resolution. See the thread ' GOTY Edition ' on the Steam User Forums. The Indian distribution of the GOTY edition indicated that the game was fully installed even before the third disc was inserted. Valve subsequently released a fix to this issue which copied the install contents to the hard disk and modified it {Link without Title} . Installing the game thus required 7 GB of free space. -- Consider moving to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half-Life_2_controversies_and_criticisms --> UI Update mod crash Despite a six-day public beta the new Steam UI released on October 11 2005 [http://www.steampowered.com/index.php?area=news&id=462 contained a bug that caused all Mods for all games to crash on load, for anyone with a space in their install path (such as "/Program Files/"). The bug had been reported during the beta, but was worsened in the final build which was released without public testing. A fix was released a day later [http://www.steampowered.com/index.php?area=news&id=464]. Pre-order Credit-card Problems Around September and October 2005, significantly large numbers of customers who had pre-ordered games through Steam ( system used by Valve's bank required an exact match for details entered in all regards, including the case of each character and trailing spaces which human proofreading would not consider important or worth noticing. {Link without Title} Users faced a choice of trying to re-order (and possibly hitting the limit of card uses without it being 'unlocked' on request) and losing their pre-order discount, or filling a support ticket with Valve and waiting. Not long after the problem was reported, Valve acknowledged it on the Steam forums and asked users to file support tickets as they went through each one. Two days later an explanation and apology [http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=347214 was posted, also on the Steam forums. In it, Valve stated that the increase in purchases made at the time had resulted in the reports of payment errors (proportionally, the success and failure rates remained the same). SteamID reporting error In the Winter of 2005/6 to date, user SteamID s are reported incorrectly when using the 'status' command to view them. Although this reportedly does not affect VAC , third-party tools and humans become confused and carry out their various actions on the wrong players. The error also provides a security hole that is currently being exploited to bypass Steam's authentication systems. SECURITY Many hacks sprung up following ''Half-Life 2's'' launch, each claiming to be able to circumvent Steam and enable the user to get the games for free. Many were actually Trojans , Keyloggers or Viruses . Some were genuine but Valve swiftly released server-side fixes to prevent users who had not paid for the software from playing online and banned accounts using them whenever possible. It is still possible to circumvent Steam's authentication process and download all of the games listed on Steam for free using various Warez programs. A re-write of the client user ticket authentication system successfully stopped illegitimate users from playing any Steam games on online servers, but has recently been sidestepped through a SteamID weakness: those users can be recognised by their fake IDs, which include VALVE_ID_LAN, STEAM_ID_LAN and HLTV.
STEAM 3.0 Steam 3.0 is the second post-beta revision of Steam. Described as being 'rearchitectured', along with any unannounced features 3.0 reportedly manages connections better, in particular those of the upcoming revision of the existing but unusable Friends IM client, by switching from UDP to TCP and maintaining a 'persistent session'. Since the first beta release of VAC2 (6th May 2005) to the time of writing, Steam users have been running versions (although the term is somewhat of a misnomer) 2.0 and 3.0 of Steam simultaneously as functions are migrated. Version 2.0 is contained within steam.dll, while the parts of 3.0 in use can be found in steamclient.dll. The first part of 3.0 that users were directly aware of, its redesigned interface, was released on October 11 , 2005 after a six-day public beta . Public beta started on January 31, 2006. Friends was released to public users on March 13, 2006. The command line is now unnecessary in the Steam shortcut (i.e. it is obselete). public beta PRODUCTS See Also: :Category:Steam products Recent Releases See for a list of all products.
Future Valve games include:
Products by other parties include:
SEE ALSO EXTERNAL LINKS
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