Running on Steam

Of privacy and personal info

The question everyone wants to know: How much info does Steam keep on its servers regarding our purchases, personal info and play habits?

"None," Doug answered without hesitancy.

None? Not even a little? I decided to ask the question a different way, curious about what info could be had if a person's account were to get stolen. After all, then user info could be changed, including purchase information, right?

"Nope. We don’t store end user information, so it’s not an issue."

That's it, end of story. There is no smoking gun on Valve's servers, including your credit card information or personal habits. The best that exists is a username that you choose, an email that you choose, and the games registered under that username.

The cost of convenience

One thing that Doug could not comment on was the frequent price discrepancy between Steam prices and the brick and mortar stores of High Street shoppers. Many "blockbuster" titles like Activision's Call of Duty 2 are slightly more expensive on Steam, an issue which makes many gamers feel overcharged. After all, the publisher loses the problems of physical media as well - no CDs to make, no boxes to print, etc.


Though Valve is undoubtedly not able to get into much detail on this, the industry at large has had to duck the question repeatedly. The answer is there if we look hard enough, though. Scott Miller (CEO of 3D Realms, maker of Prey) once made a comment on the prices from the Triton content delivery service, which went down in 2006:

"Take2 even admitted that retailers are doing everything they can to slow down digital distribution. They even threaten, they even threatened Take2, “if you guys drop the price on your digital side, then we’re not going to be taking as many games, or ANY games, on the retail side”. The retailers right now are doing everything they can to keep their share of the pie."

Steam often will keep its prices fairly in-line, but it is simply not possible to beat most of the traditional retail chains at their own games of advertisement, price markups and subsequent sales.

Of course, gamers buying these titles from Steam can take home a consolation prize - patches are distributed automatically and many multiplayer setups run through Steam's servers, complete with some of the best anti-cheat provisions in the industry.

The bright and rosy future

Before I was done with my interview, I had a couple tough questions for Doug regarding the future of Steam. One of these questions has been answered by the recent press release discussing Valve's upcoming "Steam Pages," the company's entrance into the web 2.0 world. If you didn't get that info, make sure to catch the press release here.

But on to bigger fish - Steam has grown rapidly, even moreso than Valve may have anticipated. At some point, could managing the biggest game network in the world stop one of the world's best game makers from focusing on what it does best?

Doug utterly dismissed the idea of Valve needing to separate from Steam:

"I’ve heard this before, but I don’t understand the reasoning behind it. Valve originally took on the development of Steam because no one else was working on anything similar. Over the years, a dedicated Steam team of developers have amassed in the building, and having those developers work directly with the game teams is the very reason why Steam has grown so fast in the short amount of time since the first commercial release – the team doesn’t have to guess what features game developers want, they can simply walk down the hall and find out first hand."

But what about server load? This level of content doesn't come from thin air, it has to be stored somewhere. And that somewhere has to survive a load of user hits at once. It also can't slow to ridiculous levels like it did when HL2 launched, or it will lose much of that 'convenience' feature that it has. Blizzard's answer to this problem in the World of Warcraft world was to turn towards what most software manufacturers consider their enemy - P2P.

Would Valve ever consider bringing some P2P elements to Steam?

"Stay tuned..." Doug said with a smile.

You can bet we will.

I'd like to personally thank Doug Lombardi and the whole team out at Valve Software for their precious time in answering my questions. Now that it's done, they can all get back to work on Episode 2!