The need for physical media in gaming was a nearly universal truth up until a few years ago... when things got all hot and steamy. In 2003, Valve (the studio best known for Half Life and Portal) decided to turn out a system known as Steam - a distribution platform for games that my friend Bart has quite accurately dubbed the "iTunes of Gaming". By leveraging the ever increasing capabilities of high speed internet and the ever cheapening (great word) cost of hard drive space, Steam essentially thought outside the box by completely getting rid of it. Just like iTunes, Steam allows users to purchase games online, download them directly to their computer, and play them without the need for physical media or contact with other members of the human race. 
Steam also has a couple of other nice perks, like being persistent through multiple computers (its all online), helping to reduce software piracy, making recovery far easier and more reliable, reducing distribution costs for game producers, some pretty slick tracking tools, an Xbox achievement-like system for PC games and reducing the environmental impact of game production. And of course, no more of those hella annoying disk read errors. You know the kind - you have too many adult beverages and decide that you are a worthy DJ after practicing your turntable scratching skills on an old copy of Tomb Raider. Anyone? Anyone? Ok then... lets pretend that never happened.
The biggest problem with Steam when it was launched was that it was proprietary. It was a means of pushing out Valve's games, which, while nice, meant that if you were playing anything but Half Life, you were still buying CDs/DVDs. That, thankfully, is slowly changing. Valve has been pushing Steam as an overarching platform, a standard for digital video game distribution. As of now, they have signed 12 other publishers on to Steam distribution, pushing out more than 200 different games digitally.
One of our hopes within the EGC is that Steam might help to alleviate the daunting task of physical media distribution in a University computer lab. After all, physical disks are a physical liability, and so a system like Steam could have enormous potential to make our lives easier as the EGC Lab becomes a reality here at Penn State. Did I mention it self patches too?
Now on to a totally different topic for a moment. Saving your game, something of a must if you play games, is another interesting challenge for the EGC. For obvious reasons, Penn State secures lab computers in such a way that not all parts of the hard drive are accessible to your average user, and much of the space that can be written to is essentially temp space - cleaned away as soon as the user logs out. This presents an interesting challenge if someone would like to save their game. Or perhaps more interestingly, if an instructor wants students to begin their game from a pre-set save point, how would students access it. We have some interesting ideas on how to accomplish this, particularly one by our colleague Jonathan Holman, but we have yet to come up with anything perfect.
Now seemingly, I've presented two very different ideas. What exactly does digital game distribution have to do with save cabs in a Penn State computer lab? Oh am I glad you asked.
Ladies and Gentlemen, I introduce to you Valve's Steam Cloud - a new addition to Steam which will allow users to store save games and game configuration settings online, free of charge.
On a small scale, this might not seem all that significant. After all, most PC gamers tend to have a dedicated machine anyway, so online storage is largely a jazzed up recovery mechanism. But if you look beyond the conventional, to say, gaming cafes (big in Asia) or... I don't know... University wide gaming initiatives looking for good solutions to save games... *cough* this is a big deal.
Its unclear whether or not Steam Cloud will allow gamers to share save points with other users (think Faculty pushing certain saves to a class) but that is child play now that the foundation has been laid.
I've never been so happy to see a cloudy day.
Image from f7sound.com
Steam also has a couple of other nice perks, like being persistent through multiple computers (its all online), helping to reduce software piracy, making recovery far easier and more reliable, reducing distribution costs for game producers, some pretty slick tracking tools, an Xbox achievement-like system for PC games and reducing the environmental impact of game production. And of course, no more of those hella annoying disk read errors. You know the kind - you have too many adult beverages and decide that you are a worthy DJ after practicing your turntable scratching skills on an old copy of Tomb Raider. Anyone? Anyone? Ok then... lets pretend that never happened.The biggest problem with Steam when it was launched was that it was proprietary. It was a means of pushing out Valve's games, which, while nice, meant that if you were playing anything but Half Life, you were still buying CDs/DVDs. That, thankfully, is slowly changing. Valve has been pushing Steam as an overarching platform, a standard for digital video game distribution. As of now, they have signed 12 other publishers on to Steam distribution, pushing out more than 200 different games digitally.
One of our hopes within the EGC is that Steam might help to alleviate the daunting task of physical media distribution in a University computer lab. After all, physical disks are a physical liability, and so a system like Steam could have enormous potential to make our lives easier as the EGC Lab becomes a reality here at Penn State. Did I mention it self patches too?
Now on to a totally different topic for a moment. Saving your game, something of a must if you play games, is another interesting challenge for the EGC. For obvious reasons, Penn State secures lab computers in such a way that not all parts of the hard drive are accessible to your average user, and much of the space that can be written to is essentially temp space - cleaned away as soon as the user logs out. This presents an interesting challenge if someone would like to save their game. Or perhaps more interestingly, if an instructor wants students to begin their game from a pre-set save point, how would students access it. We have some interesting ideas on how to accomplish this, particularly one by our colleague Jonathan Holman, but we have yet to come up with anything perfect.
Now seemingly, I've presented two very different ideas. What exactly does digital game distribution have to do with save cabs in a Penn State computer lab? Oh am I glad you asked.
Ladies and Gentlemen, I introduce to you Valve's Steam Cloud - a new addition to Steam which will allow users to store save games and game configuration settings online, free of charge.
On a small scale, this might not seem all that significant. After all, most PC gamers tend to have a dedicated machine anyway, so online storage is largely a jazzed up recovery mechanism. But if you look beyond the conventional, to say, gaming cafes (big in Asia) or... I don't know... University wide gaming initiatives looking for good solutions to save games... *cough* this is a big deal.
Its unclear whether or not Steam Cloud will allow gamers to share save points with other users (think Faculty pushing certain saves to a class) but that is child play now that the foundation has been laid.
I've never been so happy to see a cloudy day.
Image from f7sound.com
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