Valve Set To Make Big Steam Improvements

Peter Chapman 22 Comments

I’m not sure Steam can get much better. In fact, if I had to choose one thing that I’d like to see improved with the service, I’d be hard pressed to think of anything aside from the fantastical like “make everything cheaper” or “speed up downloads”.

Hold on, that second one isn’t a pipe dream – Valve are actually going to make that happen.

In an open letter, published on the Steam website, Valve have laid out their plans for updating Steam. Basically, it comes down to three things:

  • Speeding up downloads at all times.
  • Increasing capacity so that they are better able to cope with spikes in use of the service, for example, when big games are released and everyone tries to download and play them at once.
  • Making it easier for publishers to get their content onto the service.

All things which will make the Steam store even more convenient to use and hopefully lead other download services – like the PSN, XBLA and EA’s new Origin service – to bolster their own bandwidth.

Oh, and Valve also throw out a little casual mention that DotA 2 will utilise the new distribution methods. So that’s as good as confirmation that DotA 2 is on the way very soon then. Hurrah!
Source: Valve

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22 Comments

  1. “I’m not sure Steam can get much better”

    You know…. its a bit annoying while looking through the many games and you don’t even know if they’ll be bad? Steam doesn’t even have a proper rating system yet Impulse features a star rating customer stuff.

    Many stores have that I think?..

    Way better than Metacritic in my opinion. I’d love to see that

    • Good call, although the amount of orchestrated campaigns by users trying (and succeeding) to rig user scores kind of makes them less useful. It would be great to see some sort of rating or ranking on Steam.

      • Hell, even a counter of how many copies sold, although some publishers mightn’t like that…

    • It shows the metascore from metacritic on most games.

  2. My only gripe with Steam is that I can’t purchase content from other countries. The German store tends to offer low violence versions of games. It’s probably a legal thing…

  3. If only they could just bring Steam out on the PS3… I don’t ask for much.

    • If the steam store discounts came to Ps3 I’d be bankrupt in a week

    • That won’t happen, as it’d be a direct competitor to the PS store. Not to mention that it wouldn’t actually end up being cheaper than the PS store, where prices are decided by the publishers, not Sony, though Sony does take a percentage of each sale in royalties.

      • We already have competitors to the video store.
        Oh, Amazon USA sell codes for PSN games, with quite a few being cheaper than the actual store price.

  4. “Go on, buy it, what’s another £6”
    “But Steam, I’ll never play it?!”
    “But who cares, its so cheap?”
    “Errm, errm, OH GOD, YOU’RE RIGHT!”

  5. Am I being thick, but what is DotA?

    • You’re not. I wish people (sorry, Peter, not angled at you specifically) would get the acronym spelt out once for us numpties that have to trawl the internet to find out what the damn thing is! However, I then found a link with some gorgeous character artwork.

      Regarding Steam, they’re hitting the nail on the head. The servers are often busy and slow on the weekend and I’ve noticed that patches and downloads can be a bit nasty at peak times even though when it quietens down they are slick as snot.

      Team Fortress 2 is 10GB and was 35 minutes. Yet, a 100MB patch for Left 4 Dead was 20 bloody minutes as it was a Friday evening. Ugh!

      • Dont forget their bi-annual sales. Downloading Portal 2 in the sale took over 6 hours, and yet I usually get a 2Mb/s download rate. PS3 in my opinion has by far the fastest download speeds, I usually get 3-4Mb/s, which makes downloading items soooo fast.

      • Oh, really sorry guys, I should have elaborated in the post.
        Defence of the Ancients was a mod for Warcraft that got really popular and Valve picked it up to do a sequel. People have been waiting years for it.

      • There are also games that have copied the idea and made it into their own like, League of Legends and Heroes of Newearth.

  6. I’d like it if Steam would open web links in my browser of choice and not in Steam browser.
    Or if there was more options to sort your library.

  7. Nice, though as you say Peter, Steam is nigh on perfect as it is.

  8. Steam is brilliant, although I couldn’t agree more with the second bulletpoint, it frequently goes down for big releases, similar to how the PSN Store goes down for the COD DLC – why won’t Sony learn from that like Valve?

  9. What i might wan’t from Steam is that it would log my gaming hours even if i’m playing a game from a disc like i’ve been playing Runaway and it doesn’t log the gaming time

  10. there are only two things i would like to change about steam, get rid of the drm on disc games so the disc isn’t locked to a single user.

    and get some steam store cards in shops.
    hell, even nintendo have those, not steam store cards, nintendo store cards, you know what i mean.

    • Those store cards would be really nice

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