About Opentopia
Opentopia Directory Encyclopedia Tools

Steam (content delivery)

Encyclopedia : S : ST : STE : Steam (content delivery)

Steam is a content delivery, digital rights management, multiplayer and communications system developed by 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.

Contents

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. [link] Their future plans focus more on making the platform more useful for developers and customers rather than more frustrating for anyone stealing the games. [link]

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 2002 during the beta period for Counter-Strike 1.4. At that time, it appeared to be a method of streamlining the patch process common in online computer games. Installation and use of the Steam program was mandatory for CS 1.4 beta testers, but Steam remained an optional component. Some time after CS 1.5 was released, Steam and WON users were allowed to play against each other on the same servers. Later, Steam version 2.0, complete with a new VGUI2 interface previously only seen on the Tracker component (which then became Friends), was released along with the Counter-Strike 1.6 beta. 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], 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 predating Steam, Valve Anti-Cheat has been fully adapted to its network, and, since the release of VAC2, has seen considerable success.

VAC was first released with Counter-Strike 1.4 in 2002, after Valve rescinded their PunkBuster license in favour of a proprietary solution. The initial version, VAC1, saw success for a period, but in March or April 2004 updates ran dry as the Valve engineers producing it moved on to the production of its successor, VAC2. VAC1 swiftly became all but useless during this period of development, but since its 20 June 2005 launch VAC2 has successfully overseen a precipitous decline in the number of cheating players across the entire multi-player Steam library.

VAC2 theoretically support all games, and has today been implemented in GoldSrc, Source, and Unreal Engine 2 titles. It is included in the Steam SDK for licensees.

Advantages

Successes

On June 20 2006, a prominent cheat distributing source "informed the top cheat distributing sites to mark all cheats as [VAC] detected until further notice", citing VAC's server-side CRC detection as the reason why cheat users were routinely and frequently receiving bans, even though the VAC code on client computers had not been altered for some months. There have been no publicly acknowledged breakthroughs in circumventing VAC's protection since, although private cheats still exist for the few who have access to them.

Polymorphism

As VAC2's influence became clear, the few cheat writers with the skills to do so began to experiment with polymorphism, a technique common among virus writers that sees the compiled code change its internal structure – and thus CRC – in an unpredictable manner with each execution.

However, such techniques are complex and require skills that are far beyond most cheat producers' capabilities. Few polymorphic cheats have been produced, and each has been addressed by Valve through other means.

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], that the account is banned. When this happens, the account cannot be used to play on any server that runs in secure mode. Bans are permanent for all games. VAC1 originally banned Half-Life 1 engine games for one to five years. However, with the release of Source engine games and VAC2, all bans are now permanent. For example, players that cheat in a game such as Day of Defeat, may 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].

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.

See also

External links

Criticism of Steam

Perennial Issues

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.

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. Valve head Gabe Newell made the following statement [link] on the issue:

Another commonly debated issue is that of Steam's auto-update model. By default, to play a game offline, Steam and the game itself must be fully updated, and updates are consistently checked for when starting Steam while online. Whenever there is an update available, the user is forced to wait for update process to finish before being able to play again, online or offline. The worst affected are dial-up internet subscribers: not only are they the ones who are most likely to use offline mode, but they are the ones least capable of updating. Equally, once applied an update cannot be rolled back by the user; thus, outside of offline mode, even problematic updates can be mandatory.

The auto-update model can also affect the large mod community surrounding Steam games. Several times in the past an update to a game has damaged its third-party mods, sometimes to the point at which they cannot run. However, this issue has largely been eliminated with the Steam's beta test function, which allows mod makers to test an update themselves before it is released to the wider community. The process relies on the modders to spot errors, and is as such far from infallible (an issue with one update, which crippled Garry's Mod, was well-known during the beta period but not addressed by Garry or Valve until after release), but has in general improved the situation considerably.

Finally, the purchasing subsystem revolves around credit cards, prohibiting people who own several major forms of debit card (including the popular Switch/Maestro cards) from using them for purchases. People with poor credit histories are excluded, though services exist in a number of countries that offer prepaid or secured credit card services to bypass these problems.

Recent 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 negative feedback concerning Steam was at its peak, particularly when the former WON validation system was shut down (despite warning WON users for months prior that this was going to happen) – 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.
Half-Life 2 Release
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.
Pre-order Credit-card Problems
Around September and October 2005, unsubstantiated numbers of customers who had pre-ordered games through Steam found their purchases invalidated, with the reason given being 'incorrect information' when entering their credit card details. Despite their protestations this was in fact true: the AVS 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 had been understandably overlooked by the users [link]. 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. Valve posted an explanation and apology on the Steam forums [link] two days later, explaining that the increase in purchases made at the time had resulted in the reports of payment errors, and that proportionally the success and failure rates remained the same.
SteamID reporting error
From the closing months of 2005/6 to around March 2006, user SteamIDs were reported incorrectly when using the 'status' command to view them. Although the issue did not affect VAC, third-party tools and humans become confused and carried out their various actions on the wrong players. The error also provided a security hole 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 disabled accounts using them whenever possible. It is still possible to circumvent Steam's authentication process and download some 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.

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 (6 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.

VAC2

From May 6, 2005. See Valve Anti-Cheat (VAC).

User Interface

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].

Friends

The Friends 3.0 chat client has been in beta since January 31, 2006, with a more easily accessible revision, not requiring a command-line parameter, released on March 13, 2006 [link].

Friends was officially released on May 31 2006, ahead of [link].

Products

Recent Releases

See for a list of all products.

Future

Valve games
'' and
Portal
Team Fortress 2
Other developers
The Atari PC back catalogue, as a part of Atari's GamersFirst budget range (excluding ).
Defcon [link]
Garry's Mod
Pirates of the Burning Sea
SiN Episodes series
Unnamed game developed by Laid Back Gaming, inspired by X-Com
Unnamed game developed by Warren Spector & Junction Point Studios. [link]
Unnamed game developed by Turtle Rock Studios. [link]
Various Strategy First titles (ongoing). [link]

See also

References

External links

Official
[Steam website] - official Steam website
[Valve Software] - Valve's official website
[Valve Developer Community/Steam] - Steam category on the official VDC Wiki
Community
[Steam Users Forums] - official discussion forums
[The Steam Review] - Analytical comment and discussion on Steam
[How to run Steam in Linux using Cedega (formerly WineX)]
[GCFScape]: Tool for viewing and extracting Steam's GCF format
Competitors
[GameShadow]: Patch, demo, mod and trailer download service for a wide range of titles
[Triton]: Steam's direct competitor. Formerly known as Games xSteam
[Vapour]: Community-built mod download service supporting various games and mods

 

From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.

Search Titles
0123456789
ABCDEFGHIJ
KLMNOPQRST
UVWXYZ?

E-mail this article to:

Personal Message: