Garry Newman has a lot to celebrate this holiday. It’s been two year since he offered his Half-Life 2 mod up on Valve’s Steam for just $9.99. Over 312,000 downloads later, Garry is thrilled that his passion could also make him a living. Do the math. That’s a lot of cash, no matter what his cut is. Garry sums the experience up on his blog.

“The popularity took me and Valve by surprise. As soon as it went on sale the steam servers were temporary knocked out, due to the demand. On the first day it sold 5,729 copies. Wowzer.

I kind of expected that it would sell a big number of copies for the first day, then sell very few after that. I was kind of wrong, because over the next 2 years it went on to sell 312,541 copies. Which has totally knocked my socks off.”

Garry’s Mod is not just an innovative mod its a great tool. Built on the Source Engine, this sandbox mod allows gamers to create their own levels and items for games. It can also be used place and pose ragdolls making it possible to create comics. For more details on Garry’s Mod and what you can do with it visit the Garry’s Mod website.

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I know, I know, another DRM topic. Are we beating a dead horse? I don’t think so, it’s a fairly important and controversial issue, and when people like Valve president Gabe Newell speak, we listen. It seems that game gods are more approachable than we suspected. In what I’m sure is a very rare happening, Newell responded to a direct email sent by a concerned gamer about Valve’s involvement with EA, a notorious pusher of the evil DRM scheme, SecuRom. In Newell’s response, he explains, “Around the world we have a number of distribution partners to handle retail distribution of our games (i.e. make discs and boxes). EA is one of those partners.” He goes on to say, “As far as DRM goes, most DRM strategies are just dumb.”

I tend to agree, Mr. Newell. He continues to explain that “the goal should be to create greater value for customers” which is what Valve has done with Steam. Reality is, Steam is a quasi DRM scheme. Valve games require you to have Steam and verify that you purchased the game through an online authentication system. But, the upside outweighs any perceived inconvenience it may cause. Steam isn’t like SecuRom, its not a malicious piece of software that breaks your computer and limits installs of a game you paid $50+ for. Steam, while protecting the games associated with it, offers online gaming benefits much like Xbox Live and will soon store your saved games and keybind settings on their remote server so that you can access them anywhere. It also adds very easy access to free content like mods and making installing and running mods, very easy.

Just like there are many critics of SecuRom, there are critics of Steam. Some people have horror stories how they got screwed in some way by Steam. In some responses you might have thought Steam mugged their grandmother and kicked her down a staircase. The truth is, Steam is a very reasonable DRM method, if you can even call it that. The concept of Steam is not out of line. Steam is no different than the idea of the console, it’s a controlled environment under which your game runs. It’s really hard to pirate a game when you don’t have the platform it runs on. It’s no different than needing an Xbox 360 to play Xbox 360 games. The school of thought that all DRM is bad and not needed, is a little to idealistic. Thats like leaving your car doors unlocked in the bad part of town and expecting your stuff to be there when you get back. Steam does what it needs to do and keeps the honest man honest, while adding tons of features that consumers today demand. It’s perfectly acceptable for developers to want to protect their IP and Steam does that in a way that we can get behind. Thats not so wrong, is it?

Valve’s head honcho Gabe Newell isn’t exactly the biggest fan of DRM. In a recent correspondence with a concerned customer, Newell called modern DRM protection strategies “dumb” and opined that the goal of the developer shouldn’t be to restrict, but rather make games more available to the consumer. Without saying it, Newell expressed that Steam (go figure) is one of the best methods of both protecting and ensuring playability with consumers.

From the letter:

As far as DRM goes, most DRM strategies are just dumb. The goal should be to create greater value for customers through service value (make it easy for me to play my games whenever and wherever I want to), not by decreasing the value of a product (maybe I'll be able to play my game and maybe I won't).

[via Game Politics]

Valve’s head honcho Gabe Newell isn’t exactly the biggest fan of DRM. In a recent correspondence with a concerned customer, Newell called modern DRM protection strategies “dumb” and opined that the goal of the developer shouldn’t be to restrict, but rather make games more available to the consumer. Without saying it, Newell expressed that Steam (go figure) is one of the best methods of both protecting and ensuring playability with consumers.

From the letter:

As far as DRM goes, most DRM strategies are just dumb. The goal should be to create greater value for customers through service value (make it easy for me to play my games whenever and wherever I want to), not by decreasing the value of a product (maybe I'll be able to play my game and maybe I won't).

[via Game Politics]

But the feature doesn’t mean anything if no one’s playing it.

Developer Valve recently leased an initial batch of game usage statistics for “Left 4 Dead,” based on achievements unlocked one week after release, providing our first hints towards an answer.

Here’s what it tells about Versus Mode, where you play as zombies:

* No Versus achievements have been unlocked by at least 50% of users
* “Double Jump” is the most unlocked achievement, at 36.7%
* 0% of users have completed the “Lamb 2 Slaughter” achievement (”as an Infected, incapacitate a Survivor who has entered and left a safe room”)
* Smoker and Hunter zombies have the most unlocked achievements (note: by design, they are also played more often by gamers)

There is something very important to note about these week-one statistics, however: only 25.4% of gamers have reported finishing “Blood Harvest,” the final campaign from the perspective of the game’s zombie apocalypse survivors. Just under one-fourth of gamers have not completed “Left 4 Dead”’s main draw, which may not give them much reason to check out the other modes yet.

We’ll have to keep watching Valve’s updates, however, to see if the zombie killers of the world decide to finally give the undead a fair shot.

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Yes, one of the first fruits of the Left 4 Dead modding scene has revealed itself, and it’s a doozy. Fancy slaying deadheads by the metric crapton in a Dawn of the Dead-esque shopping mall?

It’s actually a remake of a map for the old Half-Life 2 mod No More Room In Hell, but there’s hardly anything more appropriate for Valve’s top-notch zomb ‘em up. In fact, it’s the kind of setting I’d guess Valve have considered themselves, and it’s vaguely amazing there wasn’t a mall in the initial L4D release. As the architecture for this Crossroads Mall map exists already, hopefully we should have it very soon. A beta’s due by Christmas, in fact. Until then, there’s a video beneath the cut.
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Read the rest of Dawn Of The Left 4 Dead (61 words)

Posted by ento. | 4 comments | Donate or subscribe to RPS | Post tags: Left-4-Dead, mod
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