CLOUD GAMING EUROPE: Valve platform must streamline for widest audience, says Gaikai exec
The entire games landscape could change if Valve’s PC platform significantly improved how accessible it is to new customers, the CEO of a leading cloud gaming firm has said.
In a discussion point filled with caveats about how “brilliant and important” Steam is to the industry, Gaikai CEO David Perry nevertheless believes Valve’s core games platform should undergo a series of enhancements to appeal to new customers.
“The whole games industry could improve dramatically if Steam moved away from old tactics,” he said. “Steam still has far too much friction.”
Speaking at the Cloud Gaming Europe event in London, Perry provided a video demonstration of all the hurdles a player had to overcome to play PC game demo through Steam.
And although he laced his talk with how much respect he had for Valve, his demonstration pulled no punches.
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Perry walked the audience through the 43 steps each new customer had to take. Players will have to fill out an end-user licence agreement before they were asked what language they spoke in. They had to download an old version of Steam before, later on in the process, they were asked to update that version.
“Why are they doing this?” Perry asked. “Why not just allow me to download the most current version first? I know the current way is easier for the programmer, but it’s not easier for the customer.”
The demonstration showed that a full version of a game must be installed on Steam to run its demo. After registering, the customer is taken to the store’s front page as opposed to the product they installed Steam for.
“Throughout this whole process, Steam has probably lost 95 per cent of their possible new users,” Perry said.
“The games industry could improve dramatically if Steam moved away from these old tactics. Steam still has too much friction. I say that with love, Steam is very important and it’s number one.”
The demonstration was part of Perry’s wider talk on how cloud technology could be the key to true mass market gaming.
“I don’t believe the videogame industry can be the number one form of entertainment,” the games veteran said, living up to his reputation as an outspoken industry exec.
“Music and movies are just far too accessible as entertainment forms. The only way games can become the number one entertainment form is if they are far more accessible.”
That’s why Steam needs to adapt, he explained, whilst taking a moment to promote his own company as a solution.
As long as a network’s bandwidth permits, Gaikai allows customers to play games and demos within a matter of seconds. The average play time on a Gaikai-powered demo is eleven minutes, Perry said, because unlike Steam it allows people to try demos near instantly.
He also expressed how the tiniest elements of UI and design are absolutely crucial to appealing to internet users.
For example, once the Gaikai team changed the phraseology of loading screens – from “checking your bandwidth” to “loading your game” – player retention improved by eight per cent.
Steam currently houses about 40 million active users, according to Valve. Perry’s overarching argument was that, if online players cannot even tolerate waiting for bandwidth checks, imagine how far Steam could go if its 43-step registration process was reduced to a single click.
Are you fucking kidding me?
as a steam user i have no concerns with the registration process as it is.
(probably misinterpreted the bit with the music + video) I'm sure plenty of steam users aren't even bothered with the fact that steam doesn't allow music or videos to be played through steam and i'm not bothered by this because i use steam for its integrated chat and gaming services.
This is STUPID, I have installed steam countless times and never taught it was an issue, yeah there is the thing about entering codes and stuff, but I rly don't care about that... coz it means my account is secure.
Randomly integrating the cloud everywhere IS NOT the solution to the worlds problem! oh there is a war going on! PUT IT IN THE CLOUD!! PROBLEM SOLVED. Utterly Stupid.
Yeah cloud my be good for some people but maybe your Salesmen should target that rather than anything and everything.
"As the CEO of a company with a service competing with Steam, it is in no way my best interest to point out the various shortcomings of their registration service.
By the way, did you know that my service doesn't have all these problems that I've just highlighted for your benefit?"
Look, dickhead, Steam isn't perfect, but given it keeps breaking its own records for number of concurrent users, I don't think they're in any trouble of finding new users just at the moment, do you?
Pathetic concern troll is pathetic.
Since I last checked I'm sure that insulting people who could possible be potential customers is a great way to get new customers?
Tbh I think all they are trying to say is that steam works great, and they don't face these problems that are 'highlighted for there benefit' and ofc people are going to get annoyed if someone comes along and just rips at there gaming platform.
To be honest, its a fair point. I've tried to get a few casual gamers to use Steam but they find it far too complex. It isn't all that slick to navigate and is a bit of a hassle if you're just wanting to try a demo.
I'd be surprised if many of Develop's readers struggled with Steam, but that's hardly who Perry is talking about.
This makes me loose hope in humanity.
Why does everything has to be so easy so it only requires 1 brain cell to do?
No wonder they dumb down all games nowdays when people cant even put any effort in doing anything.
They cant even play the game if there isnt an arrow pointing to where they have to go.
Lighten up, guys. He has some valid points.
However, I just tried to use his service out of curiosity, and I ended up being forced to switch browsers (Opera to IE8) before having to install java, refreshing the page, and then finally trying out 2 demos which both told me they had encountered an error before they had even started to run.
Not exactly the most smooth service, either, Perry.
"To be honest, its a fair point. I've tried to get a few casual gamers to use Steam but they find it far too complex"
I made a similar experience.
"Why does everything has to be so easy so it only requires 1 brain cell to do?"
You don't get it. The question is: Why do things have to be more complicated and cumbersome than they really need to be? Things should be as simple as possible, but not simpler. (Einstein quote) Also, it's not that Steam is "hard", it's just a junky piece of software that isn't nice to use. I get "failed to load the page" errors all the time, *especially* when purchasing things. (seriously, I get those at least half of the time during the purchase process and not everyone is as patient as me when there is a money transfer involved) The game icons have to be reloaded all the time, I have pending invitations that annoy me at every startup and I can't get rid of them because I need to setup a *seperate* SteamID to get rid of them, apparently. (which I don't want, I don't care about the Steam Community) There's no central way to manage my savegames... I could go on, but it would maybe become a bit unfair.
I don't think a figure such as 95% is in any way realistic, but things *could* be made better and I don't think valve is doing much in that regard, seeing that the client has not changed much for years.
Compare 43 million people to the number of people who watch movies.
What is that? Three or four billion.
Steam is obviously failing.
Just because you hardcore users have no issues doesn't mean there isn't a problem. If anything it points to the arrogance of tech-heads.
(PS: Yes, I'm a steam-user, and I map with Hammer - which is also a bitch to use.)
I can see how some of the security features such as SteamGuard could benefit from being explained more clearly.
As for the service itself being confusing I don't understand what he means. It's very straight forward, not much different from having to go through a regular installer for a game or program.
If anything he should have focused on what's most confusing to the vast majority. Things like keeping drivers up to date and why certain games just work poorly on certain systems. That's where services that stream games has a clear upper hand.
Your All Stuqid and Ignorant fagnuts, l2Game Steam is awesome, stop crying, don't put it in the cloud.
Thread Closed
Greenmangaming have a really nice and easy demo setup.
They use cloud gaming and a small java applet so the demo works pretty much like OnLive.
It's a beautiful demonstration of how cloud can be used to drive your sales.
And it loaded fast, all within the browser.
If Valve did this, it would be epic.
