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Aug 23 / Ozymandias

Valve Steps Into Casual Gaming (In A Sense)

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Just saw on gamesindustry.biz that PopCap is going to be distributing many of their casual titles through Valve’s Steam ESD (or Electronic Software Distribution) network. Pretty interesting move for both partners. PopCap finds another channel to distribute their games that doesn’t require a visit to their website (a bit more push, little less pull). And Valve jumps into the casual gaming revenue pool (pun intended) feet first.


What really struck me is that Valve is continuing to expand the portfolio of titles available via Steam. It’s interesting to wonder whether we’ll see competition between other ESD providers for content in the future, or whether content providers will look to today’s retail model and simply look to distribute over all available channels (today’s analog being retail stores, of course). My guess is we’ll see a bit of both, with some exclusives in the early days and eventually leveling out with wider game distribution on all the major networks. Fun times!

Related posts:

  1. Asynchronous Games: Future of Casual Gaming?
  2. Your Thoughts on the Future of Casual Gaming?
  3. Halo 3, Grenades, and Rube Goldberg
  4. Gamefest: NPD Update on US Gaming Market
  5. At Seattle Casual Games Conference this Week

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  • Escobar4LifeX

    I don’t like electronic distribution. I prefer to have the actual game in my hands. I like to collect games. I’ll be happy as long as retail games are still available.

  • WiNG

    Steam decided to distribute Egosoft titles recently, X2 The Threat and X3 Reunion worlwide. I would not have got X3 from them since the spanish retail edition was less than one month away but it was an interesting option to those who wanted the game earlier and find importing too expensive. What was really interesting however is that after the spanish retail game hit the stores, Steam offered the game in spanish language as well and, furthermore, those who downloaded the english version could download their language patches and manuals freely. I think that is a real good move for Steam in a world of ESDs that causes in me some distrust and a lot of frustration as I rarely find localized titles available. If I had to trust a ESD at the moment, it would be Steam.

  • Knique

    I think I’m going to be one of those "old school" people that get made fun of in about 10 years because I still like to go out to my local EB, pick up the special edition of what ever new title is out (got to have my limited edition map or figurine that will never leave the box after I look at it once), bring it home and install off of a disk (floppy, CD, DVD, or what ever is next). I just love having the hard copy in my hands.

    But I do see a great market here for the casual games to be distrubuted electroniclly. It saves money for the people making the games and it lets more people actually see what’s out there.

    I know when I worked at EB long ago, the "cheapy" games as we called them, which were actually more of the casual games, almost no one would buy them…the few we actually carried. It’s got to be hard to get a publisher to box a game and a retailer to sell a game that only costs $10.

  • http://silverslides.spaces.live.com SilverSlide

    If full retail games were up on Marketplace for a discount over RRP I’d buy them. There is a case for wanting the full boxed game ‘experience’ – and I’d likely buy Halo 3 as a boxed game. But games like Table Tennis, Chromehounds and the yearlys (i.e. any EA game…), really don’t carry that sort of investment for me.

    I’d be happy to buy such games bored on a Sunday afternoon and let it download in the background (preloading, separate content chunks as well?).

  • Hasan

    Off the topic

    Should 360 owners be upset hearing this news?

    Xbox 360 Not Upgradable to DirectX 10

    http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3153097

    Was 360 too early to support DX10? or dx10 is vista exclusive?

  • Ozymandias

    Re: "Was 360 too early to support DX10? or dx10 is vista exclusive?"

    This shouldn’t be a surprise. The 360 GPU was in development for years; DirectX 10 hardware hasn’t even hit the street yet. While the 360 GPU has a lot of the functionality of a DirectX 10 part, it doesn’t have all of it – just a matter of time and space. That said, there are elements that are similar, and we’ll be looking to make it easier for developers who are doing multiplatform development for both 360 and DX10 games. Common APIs where possible, that sort of thing. Make sense?

  • WiNG

    erm… AFAIK, Crysis is not DX10 software either, so I do not see the point in the excuse they are using.

  • Misframed

    Though I have never played any of these games, they look like great fun! I will be getting each of these.  Ozy, make sure they come to the USA!

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  • http://blog.godshell.com XenoPhage

    I love the idea of ESD, but I worry about not being able to keep the media long term.  What happens if Steam folds and closes it’s doors next week?  Sure, the games I have installed work fine, but the week after my hard drive crashes..  (Bad month apparently)  So how do I get my gaming goodness back???

    I’m not sure how Steam does it, but I’ve seen some older ESD models that did not allow burning of the games.  That, to me, is a deal killer.

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