Yesterday while surfing the Eve Online forums I came across one thread that was about The Escapist’s 2009 March Mayhem polling with matches against various game developers. This particular match was CCP against Valve (you don’t even have to guess who won, should be obvious) and there followed a nice discussion on the two. The competition doesn’t really matter, there was no way for CCP to win against millions of Valve fans, but it did bring up some points to think on. Mainly, what kind of innovation or excellence have these two companies attributed? I’ll cover CCP tomorrow (have to make these posts last) so I’ll hit Valve today.

The one thing most people think about when they hear ‘Valve’ and video games is Half-Life. HL and HL2 are two of the most quality shooters and games out there. I don’t think I’d call them highly ‘innovative’ since most of what they did was done to some degree before, but the two games simply took that content and did it really, really well. This is like World of Warcraft — it used the same mechanics as other MMOs, but did it extremely well. The biggest point of innovation that I see from Valve is with Steam — that little app that so many absolutely hated when it was first introduced, myself included. At the time it was the first app that required you to have an internet connection to play a single-player game and brought all kinds of rambling about what Valve might be doing with your computer, information and such.  But over the years Steam has become more and more accepted, as well as more featured.

Steam is not only a form of social networking tool (you can IM friends, keep achievements, forums, etc), but it’s also a software distribution platform. Valve not only sells their own games, but games of other companies and even Indy developers. Having an online distribution platform allows access from anyone with an internet connection and makes for a very large potential customer base. While those of you living in larger/major cities could just walk down the street a few blocks and pop into some store and purchase the game, people like me who live in rural areas with only a Wal-Mart for games can find Steam very, very useful. Especially for the Indy developer games.

Steam has, over the past week or so, been doing a bit of a special on Indy games. They’ve introduced quite a few new titles and had price cuts on them — this is truly excellent. Getting games from Indy developers was not too easy before, if you didn’t know about their game from some media source you likely weren’t going to ever know about it. Now they have a distribution platform with Steam. (Direct2Drive also has an Indy section, but honestly their site and prices are not nearly as good as Steam) Just a few days ago I wrote on Caster, I would never have played or heard about it had I not seen it on Steam. Zeno Clash is another that I’ve pre-ordered and never would of heard about without Steam.

Apart from Indy games and mass distribution capabilities Steam also has one more feature that I like. Discounts. Every weekend there tends to be some sort of special where you can get a game or games for upwards of 50% off. There are quite a few games that I would not of bought if they hadn’t been on sale. I wish I could see the real numbers on how many people buy the games when they’re discounted just because of the discount — I’m thinking there’s quite a few. Having that kind of control over their inventory is pretty amazing though. (I’m sure they go through a bit of hoops to get those discounts, or just take a hit in profit)

So, there’s the innovation: Steam. An application at the forefront of electronic distribution.