So what happens when you stick some hot ideas in the hands of the people who made Half Life? You get Steam.
A review on Steam seemed like a pretty good thing to do, considering it is at the forefront of online media distribution. IT also seemed to be a good idea considering the laws being passed throughout the Western hemisphere regarding illegal file sharing.
The other day, the British government helped make a deal between the UK’s biggest ISP’s and the music industries (BBC News Report). The BBC and other bloggers pointed out a few problems with the deals and how pissed off people are going to get. At the very basic level, anyone who downloads any songs illegally is likely to get a letter through the door. The chances of any legal action being taken are probably low, but it seems there is a definite crack-down on downloading music. I expect that the music industry realised that it probably shot itself in the foot, so there is talk about introducing services that allow people to download music for an annual fee. Problem is, no –one really knows what this fee will be. iTunes is a leading distributor of online DRM protected music and the prices on there are ridiculous, I’m never going to use iTunes if I’m perfectly honest.
So where does Steam come in? The attack on illegal music file sharing is only the first phase of a wider crack-down. Game companies are reporting losses on most PC game titles and that means most of them are moving towards consoles. Look at Unreal Tournament 3 for example. The game, which was traditionally a PC only game, was released for both the PC and PS3. A couple months later it was released for the Xbox 360. Although game development companies have more control and power over use of cracked games, they are probably still losing money.
Steam, however, seems to completely fix this problem. The software is full of rock solid security features that protects all the games that are featured. The prices are also pretty good and the weekend deals are a great idea. The fact that you can download demos for most games in one place before buying them and being able to talk to your friends whilst doing the Master levels on Peggle Deluxe makes Steam an all-in-one wonder package. I must have spent about £30 buying games on there already and I don’t have a problem spending more.
If the music industry really is thinking about creating internet based services, they should talk to Valve. People already use Steam for games, so they might as well use it for listening to music. Heck, Valve should just set up its own record label. Many indie software developers use Steam as an easy and cheap platform for releasing their games without having to give a ton of cash to software distributers. Unknown music artists could really use that type of ideology. Most of the music that’s in the in the charts is complete crap anyway, we could really use an incentive to actually pay for music.
Final Thought Byte : Change is in the air when it comes to music, gaming and movies. Everyone is going to start complaining and we all know that governments can’t really stop illegal file sharing. What they need to do is create an incentive for people to actually spend their hard earned cash on music. Steam has done this for games, so they might as well do it for music.
Tags : DRM, file sharing, games, music, Steam, Valve
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