In a message to those of you complaining that you can’t get the game via Steam in Europe please grow some balls and buy it from the developers themselves. C’mon, I know Steam makes things easier but seriously if you want the game just buy it. There are countless games that don’t come to Steam or are sadly not available to use Europeans, but how many times do you actively refuse to buy the game for that reason? If you do, then please realise that while digital distribution is the future of games distribution it isn’t perfect yet. If you want to play a game just buy it, it won’t hurt you to have a game not downloaded from Steam will it?

If you have anything to say, no matter how small you may think it is, then just drop a comment or throw me an e-mail at contact(at)evo-gamer.com

Hop to it then.

Everyone praises Steam and its ilk nowadays, digital distribution is the big hot topic amongst developers, publishers and anyone else associated with gaming. Almost everyone is praising digital distribution as if it were the second coming. The voices of discontent are minimal, but there are issues to be considered. Digital distribution, is it really all that great?

The Steam group, Rest of World (missing a ‘the’ in there I think) has been a voice of criticism against many of the issues with Steam which is one of, it not –the- leading method of digital distribution on the PC. The group which is over five thousand members strong is campaigning for developers and publishers to provide a fair and equal service to all Steam users regardless of nationality.

Steam suffers massively from issues of pricing and availability of games in different parts of the world. Games such as Call of Duty 4 have cost $40 more to buy in Australia than in the US via Steam. (cnet.au) Many other games that are readily available in the US are not available in Australia or other parts of the world.

Ubisoft the mega-developer and publisher from France has a large range of games available on Steam. These games are only available to those Steam users from the US. While the people who set the prices of games on Steam (not Valve) may have reasons for these examples of poor and equal availability these are not shared with the people who matter, the gamers.

When Rock, Paper, Shotgun enquired about these issues representatives of Ubisoft and Atari provided variances on the classic ‘No Comment’ line.

This isn’t an issue exclusive to Steam, a visit to both the US and UK Direct2Drive sites reveal some startling differences. The US sites has five pages of PC games for sale, the UK site has only two. Looking at specific games to purchase Bioshock from the UK Direct2Drive site costs around £5 more than it would from the US site after taking into account currency rates.

With Bioshock costing £2 less on Play.com that the UK Direct2Drive site with free postage, the question must be asked, is digital distribution worth it, especially for those of us outside of the US. If it is cheaper to purchase a game from retail, or if there is no option of a digitally distributed copy then surely the whole system must be reworked in order to remove this issue.

The question also arises about micro-transactions. With games moving ever more consistently online surely the rise of digital distribution has played a role in the rise of micro-transactions in games. Battlefield Heroes will use micro-transactions as the key part in its revenue making process and even Valve are thinking about getting in on the act (IGN Interview)
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The rise of digital distribution is surely a key factor in the rise of micro-transactions, with the idea of paying for a digital product put into peoples minds then it surely makes people more susceptible to micro-transactions.

The days of unlocking new clothes and suchlike has gone, now if you want anything extra to what you buy originally it seems that you have to use micro-transactions to give yourself more choice. This is a sign of the games industry changing, and changing for the worse.

Digital distribution also raises the issue downloading all those gigabytes of data. While broadband speeds may be getting ever faster for some, games are becoming ever larger themselves. With Call of Duty 4 and Assassin’s Creed clocking in at 8Gb they will take a fair bit of downloading even on faster connections. The latest Steam Hardware Survey reveals that over 30% of respondents are on an internet connection less than 1Mb/sec.

Downloading games such as Call of Duty 4 will take quite a while, a long, long while in fact for those 30% of Steam users. This presents a clear impracticality of digital distribution, if you want to play a game immediately after playing then you will need a retail copy. Digital distribution is taking away the immediacy that should be present in gaming.

Other issues arise when it comes to playing games downloaded via digital distribution sources. Some require connection to a program separate to the game itself, take Steam as an example. Now while often you will be able to play these games fine there are numerous instances when problems arise. These problems are often that the program like Steam recognises that the game needs to be updated to play.

This is a common problem when people attempt to play games from Steam without an internet connection as they will find Steam prevents them from playing with the game not up to date. This sometimes constant need to be connected to the internet to play a singleplayer game is another major downfall of digital distribution. If the game had been bought from retail and used a CD/DVD then this issue would likely not have arisen.

We can therefore see that there are many issues surrounding digital distribution right now, some are pretty small issues, while others are much more pressing and need to be addressed. If these issues are not looked at then digital distribution will stall and fail to evolve and grow.

Blizzard have entered the world of digital distribution via their swanky Blizzard Store.

Currently they have Warcraft III Reign of Chaos, the expansion The Frozen Throne and the Starcraft Anthology. Warcraft III and The Frozen Throne clock in at $19.95 each which is about £10 and Starcraft Anthology is $14.99 costing about £7.50. (Rock, Paper, Shotgun money changing)

Good to see more companies embracing digital distribution especially with classics such as these! Lets hope Diablo appears there soon!

You may remember that a couple of days ago I blogged about a game known as Stalin vs Martians a Real Time Strategy being made by Dreamlore, BWF and N-Game.

The game immediately grabbed my interest for the obvious possibilities of playing as both Stalin and some Martians all set in a fun action packed environment. I decided that I wanted to learn and sent off an e-mail to the information e-mail address on the Stalin vs Martians site. To my surprise I received a reply from Alexander Shcherbakov the head of Dreamlore and Producer/Lead Designer of Stalin vs Martians.

I have been exchanging numerous e-mails with Alexander over the past few days and have been able to glean a lot of information regarding Stalin vs Martians, other Dreamlore projects and his thoughts on digital distribution.

Alexander’s humour is evident in our e-mail conversations and it is clear that it is this which is playing a large role in the development of Stalin vs Martians.

First off some basic information about the game. Alexander tells me that the team working on the game have a lot of fantastic ideas and plans for Stalin vs Martians and he promises me that some really awesome stuff will be revealed further down the line.

In response to comments he has read regarding the graphics in the screenshots currently available for the game that people are complaining that it looks outdated Alexander informs me that the engine is a heavily upgraded Blitzkrieg 2 engine which has been worked on by N-Game.

According to Alexnander the game is fast, bright and absolutely crazy. He goes on to say that therer are plans in place to use Chinese pop music in the sountrack as our tests showed that combination of mandapop/cantopop and Stalin game makes brains explode instantly. And that’s exactly what we want to achive with our project.

The goal the developers have for the game is as Alexander says to make a games which seems impossible to most of the people. Stalin, martians, cartoonish parody aliens, a dose of Pythons, and the atmosphere of a psycho circus. Truly Alexander envisages a game which will pile on the humour in great amounts.

He also has some interesting things to say regarding the way Stalin vs Martians will play, and answers the question ‘Will this have multiplayer?’

We don’t have any plans for multiplayer. At all. We intended to make Stalin a singleplayer-only with missions that differ greatly one from another. The objectives will be different, the units you can use (some missions may be infantry oriented, some – designed for a tank rush), plus lots of additional features like earning money to buy offmap abilities to kill the boss (yes, the boss), special units like Stalin himself (and some other absolutely unexpected “guest stars”).

Alexander went on to reveal that he feels that the game has received better attention from the West than in Russia so far. He says that this is because the idea of absurdist humour as he calls it is better developed here in the West than it is in Russia.

From here we went on to discuss this issue in greater length and it is evident that Alexander feels that initial slow reaction from the Russian media is because the Russian PC market is plagued by totally uninventive games, so sometimes people are shocked when local developers are making something that doesn’t fit into the boring monolith of cliched products.

In an example of how far reaching our conversations have been this leads to Alexander providing me with a glimpse into the Russian PC gaming market right now. He reveals that many small publishers and distributers are acting like small EAs and have become stuck in a rut whereby they see that by making a WWII strategy game they will sell 80K guaranteed domesticaly. He reveals that the PC is the top gaming platform in the former Soviet Union and that many developers and publishers taks about new innovative IPs but are scared to take a chance on them.

This is where some major issues currently surrounding the PC games market in Russia are revealed. Alexander informs me that while piracy is slowly falling year by year, though this has only been achieved by distributers selling games at an average of £5 a pop so as to make piracy seem less worthwhile. This though is a risky strategy according to Alexander.

This scheme has some problems. For example, the audience is almost unaware of what budget titles are, ’cause everything costs almost the same. There are exceptions (there are always exceptions), but basically Tetris clone and Crysis may be sold in retail for the same amount of money. The second problem is that £5 is not enough, it brings almost zero to a developer. There are many other things that come out of this situation.

Alexander has really provided me with a shocking insight into the Russian gaming industry as it is right now. I raised the issue that surely it is digital distribution which offers the chance for developers to reap the rewards they are due. His thoughts regarding this are very interesting.

Alexnader views digital distribution as a great thing for the future, though the problem right now is that too many consumers are unaware of the benefits of it. Alexander see issue with the growing number of digital distribution platforms with Steam leading the way, but behind that many other platforms are failing to get the attention they need. He also reveals that with publishers like EA investing in their own digital distribution platform the consumer is loosing out.

So if you will sum up all the information you see a picture that yes, it’s very interesting, it’s the future. some of the indies may start to use these schemes right now (and obviously large brands like Blizzard too), but basically it’s only a dawn of what may come, it’s hard even to name a well-established e-store that can sell in good quantities (aside from Steam). We need few iTunes-like services and that will be something.

Alexander is a big fan of the possibilities offered by Apple right now, he see the iPhone and iPod as being very viable portable gaming systems. He stresses that a game currently known as Red Cosmos 2, a visual novel mixing Red Star comic, Battlezone, space opera and anime is being targeted for an iPhone and iPod release.

Finally Alexander addresses some questions surrounding the development of Stalin vs Martians. As mentioned early the game is being developed by BWF, N-Game and Dreamlore. How has this combination come about and how does it work? I’ll let Alexander explain.

In short, the idea of a project was born out of the talk I had with Black Wing’s CEO. We decided to make a project together (that gives us two companies) and then added N-Game to the list. N-Game mostly deals with technical aspects (they have a solid base in making RTS titles, especially using Blitzkrieg 2 engine which they’ve partly rewritten – check Frontline: Fields of Thunder or upcoming X-Team), BWF and Dreamlore deal with producing, lead desing, art direction guidance, various business aspects. That leads us to a funny situation when we have three companies. Theoretically we could label N-Game as outsourcers (like many other companies do), but it is not quite true and doesn’t seem proper for us. We have some kind of strategic partnership right now (sometimes you can’t even understand where BWF ends and N-Game begins), but decided not to invent a separate “joint brand”, but to present ourselves like it really is: three different companies.

My chats with Alexander have been extremely interesting and he has opened my eyes to many things which I had never thought about or known about. His insights into the Russian PC Market and Digital Distribution have been very enlightening. It is also obvious that Stalin vs Martians is a very promising game that should be a tremendous blast to play later this year.

“PC gaming as we know it is dead… secure gaming is the future.”

That is what Chris Taylor said in coverage of a GDC conference by Gamasutra, this is following on from a recent interview with IGN where he explained that piracy is killing the PC.

Ex-Sony exec Phil Harrison agreed with Taylor;

Ex-Sony exec Phil Harrison concurred, saying, “There is a generation of kids who are already on the planet who will never ever buy physical media,”

The advocacy from two leading figures in the games industry for digital distribution shows the platforms like Steam are the way forward for the PC.

“The PC games sales landscape is changing to one that is increasingly reliant on digital sources of revenue. Our sales reflect the retail climate but there is a lot of gaming sales activity that is generated from digital downloads and subscriptions. I think the PC market continues to be quite healthy and we’re continuing to work on how to get our arms around the spending that occurs outside of retail. A number of our [surveys] ask respondents to indicate which platforms they game on, and the results of those questions make it very clear that the PC remains very prevalent, if not dominant, in the total gaming picture.”

Sales figures from digital distribution must be substantial, Steam has over 13 million subscribers and there are countless other channels for digital distribution. If figures from digital distribution were to be included in the total PC sales then it is likely that total figures would be closer to what they were in 2004.