GNG News Guy
04-30-2008, 04:54 PM
http://i.dslr.net/urls/26/1026.gif (http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Valves-Pipe-Dream-Five-Years-Later-94029)
Valve's broadband video game delivery system Steam (http://www.steampowered.com/v/index.php) had a rocky beginning (http://www.thegng.org/shownews/32981), the company barely able to keep their then 500Mbps pipe operational when the most recent Counter-Strike patch was released. But the system is now home to some fifteen million subscribers, and offers roughly 300 games for download. In a new interview (http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/the-last-of-the-independents-), Valve's Doug Lombardi says the company hit up several major players for help, but nobody was interested:You know, we went around to Yahoo, Microsoft...Who else was around at that time? Probably Real Networks and anybody who seemed like a likely candidate to build something like Steam. . .We went around to everybody and said "Are you guys doing anything like this? We need this for our games, and therefore other people are going to need it someday soon." And everyone was like: "Blah, blah, blah...That's a million miles in the future." So we said "We need it now" and everyone said "Well, we can't help you."
The latest Steam statistics (http://www.steampowered.com/v/index.php?area=stats) show that only about a million or two of their 15 million subscribers are playing at any one time. Their hardware survey (http://www.steampowered.com/status/survey.html), taken by some 1,657,629 users, highlights the average user's broadband connection speed and PC configurations. Back in 2004, the survey reported (http://www.thegng.org/shownews/54840) that 36% of user connections were slower than 256kbps, a number that's dropped to almost 18%.
Valve's broadband video game delivery system Steam (http://www.steampowered.com/v/index.php) had a rocky beginning (http://www.thegng.org/shownews/32981), the company barely able to keep their then 500Mbps pipe operational when the most recent Counter-Strike patch was released. But the system is now home to some fifteen million subscribers, and offers roughly 300 games for download. In a new interview (http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/the-last-of-the-independents-), Valve's Doug Lombardi says the company hit up several major players for help, but nobody was interested:You know, we went around to Yahoo, Microsoft...Who else was around at that time? Probably Real Networks and anybody who seemed like a likely candidate to build something like Steam. . .We went around to everybody and said "Are you guys doing anything like this? We need this for our games, and therefore other people are going to need it someday soon." And everyone was like: "Blah, blah, blah...That's a million miles in the future." So we said "We need it now" and everyone said "Well, we can't help you."
The latest Steam statistics (http://www.steampowered.com/v/index.php?area=stats) show that only about a million or two of their 15 million subscribers are playing at any one time. Their hardware survey (http://www.steampowered.com/status/survey.html), taken by some 1,657,629 users, highlights the average user's broadband connection speed and PC configurations. Back in 2004, the survey reported (http://www.thegng.org/shownews/54840) that 36% of user connections were slower than 256kbps, a number that's dropped to almost 18%.