Valve, Vivendi settlement

The article was a little presumptous. All that has really happened so far is the Valve and VU have broken apart so VU won’t be publishing for Valve anymore. Also, according to http://www.planethalflife.com Doug Lombardi said that they were making arangements to continue retail distribution.

Personally, I think this is a good idea, however good online distribution is, too many people have too slow or no connection, are two distrustful of a service that dosn’t put your product on a physical medium that you can lose or break (/bias), or just plain don’t know about it.

At the same time, online distribution needs to go forward. Even if it never completely replaces retail, there’s just too many oppertunites in convenince, cost saving, ease and width of distribution, and just plain avoiding risk averse publishers. Sites like http://www.garagegames.com have already shown how online distribution can work and is vital for the indie game, and now Valve seems to have shown how it’s important for the established developer aswell (although finding out how many HL2 games were bought over Steam would be good info to have for this point).
Essentially, while I think there will always be some sort of retail market for games (and I could imagine video game shops putting heavier emphasis on VG mechandice and other physical stuff that can’t exactly be downloaded online), I’d like to see more growth and popularity in online distribution so it’s benefits can be seen and reaped hence providing us with more diverse games and more open oppertunities for game development.

By the way, I had no problems with Steam, in fact, it was the only way I could buy the Silver HL2 Edition without waiting for it to be sold here, another advantage of online distribution. I think it would be nice if Valve would allow third party non-mods to be sold on Steam, or maybe a varient of it.

Looks like there an opening in the marketplace for a steam like (online only) publisher that would publish games for multiple companies.

I believe i read on CVG sometime ago that their was a some mainstream online distribution being adopted by the likes of Epic and others. Last I heard Duke Forever was to be released via it. So as you can imagine with concrete news like this post of mine, Duke and this online system should be ready this side of christmas.

Yep its the only new Duke news in an age. Its going to be distributed by Game XStream. Here is an article relating to the announcement…

Just a quick post, but the current setup of sequels and publishers controlling the entire distribution network will sooner or later be replaced by downloads, at least for pc titles in the short term. Consoles on the other hand are a different situation as these are content driven technologies, but Xbox Live is leading the way with downloadable content paid for via credit card.

On another note though, publishers also provide many roles to game development companies, primarily funding during development, marketing budgets and dealing with the press on developers behalfs in many regards, so think of it in terms that publishers will have their grapple loosened over the development process, not the “death knell for publishers” that the article states.

Jamie