It would appear that good things happen when people leave Microsoft. Gabe Newell left the Empire to create Valve and Valve is just consistently 110% awesome.

Their latest work of awesomeness is Steam and Steam continues to improve. The two things I wanted to write about today are Macs & community.

Windows games on a mac

Although Valve had nothing to do with it, playing Steam on my MacbookPro is just 10 kinds of krazy fantastic. At least it would be if it worked.

Thanks to the power of virtual machines and Parallels version 3.0, I can install Steam and download Windows games and play them all within the MacOS. Could this be the end of my Windows PC, whose sole, money-pit-pupose in life is to play PC games? Could this really be the end of that giant box on my desk and it's noisy fans?

Like an excited kid, I bought Parallels and installed it, followed by good old XP (and the 85 "critical updates"). Then I installed Steam and it worked just like it should. I logged in with my account, it told me what games I own. I picked a few demo's because they are smaller than the games and started to test.

The first demo did not work. I tried another. No dice. So I consult Google - Google knows all. Parallels does not ship with DirectX support on. So I select that and reboot my virtual PC. (Oddly, my virtual PC Windows boots faster than my actual Windows PC.)

Try the first demo. Same results - no picture, bizarre crackly sounds, need to reboot the virtual machine because it sucks all my CPU cycles.

Try the second demo, Darwinia. This vector-graphics game sort of runs but it only supports 800x600 and runs (lurches) along at about 5 fps. *big sigh* Consult Google again.

And again, Google knows all: "That shit dont work!" They told us Parallels supported games. They posted a youtube video playing Quake. But most games dont seem to work at all. Apparently down in the fine print, they said DirectX 8 would work - too bad we are all on DX9 if not DX10.

Sadly, my ultimate solution does not work today but I still have hope that a year from now, I will be able to run all the PC games I want on my silent, awesome MacOS machine.

Community

The other news from Valve is the open beta of Steam Community. I have not tried this myself but I got the gist from the 1UpShow. SC is Xbox Live for PC's - and it is free. Free to users and more functionality than XBL.

Ouch.

Im not predicting a big success for Microsoft on this one. And I think it is another example of fine engineering held back by inbred-marketing decisions. Why offer a service for free when we can charge for a lesser service? Why indeed.

XBL has a captive audience on the Xbox 360 but the PC is going to be tough competition. And if Sony is smart, they will hire the team from Xfire (who will be put out of business by SC) and create their own PS3-PC system that unites their strong PC MMO community with their console community. This would be especially useful when they release some cross-platform MMO's like The Agency.

a tree falling in the retail-woods

The bigger story here is the story for retail. PC gaming is dying in retail and Steam just keeps hammering nails into that coffin.

More often than not, if you go to the PC game section of a big-box retailer, it feels more like Deadwood Gulch than Las Vegas. Sad old, games all mixed up. As a long-time PC game, its depressing to see.

More importantly, retailers exhibit a lot of influence on games; both on what games get made and what games sell. Retailers demand a premium price for shelf space and only want to stock units that move and make money. (Hello Madden 40) Moreover, they charge a large premium for stocking a game, upwards of 20% of retail price. If you thought to get rich writing a game, think again: publishers and retailers get almost all the money for a game.

But if the retail experience stinks, why go? The Steam platform is a solid distribution platform and it continues to catch on. With 13M registered users and a growing list of old and new titles, not to mention unlimited "shelf space", it has an opportunity to dominate the PC game industry.

Online distribution could be better for game makers too. It allows little companies to put out "indie" games that would never make it to retail (Darwinia, DefCon). And that 20% for the retailer goes somewhere else - it could go to the game companies or even to lower priced games.

At the moment, new Steam games have the same price as retail. Instead of the physical CD, the cheesy box, and the mentally deficient manual, Steam buyers get convenience.

The obvious convenience is instant gratification and no trip to the store. But I would argue that the most important convenience is not having that CD. Why? Because if you dont have a CD, you dont have insane ^%$@*&! garbage like StarForce copy protection. You have a killer PC, a massive hard drive, buy you have to find the physical CD and put in your computer to play a game? Copy protection schemes treat paying customers like myself like criminals and I CAN NOT STAND IT.

Steam makes all that kruft disappear. That's right, Steam provides DRM that actually provides a positive customer experience. It ties games to you, your personal account and your credit card. You can play any game you own on any PC you have. If you delete the game, you can always install it again later. It is a simple thing but this is how PC games (and all digital media) were meant to be played.

The only downside I can think of here is also an upside to game makers. Without a CD, there is no game to buy or sell used. This eliminates the eBay/Amazon Marketplace purchases of used games. That will cost consumers but it will mean more sales to game companies (who would do well to lower prices in return). Although I personally purchase a lot of used games (why pay more?), I would gladly live with this to be rid of StarForce.

Hey! Ho! The green's got to go!

My only complaint with Steam so far is their UI design. Guys, army green is, umm, lame-ass. Do us all a favor and hire a happy-friendly UI designer. I know it rains a lot up here in Seattle but that's no reason to depress everyone.

So long-live Steam! Now if only I could play Civ4 on my Mac...