泥中蟠龍's Game愛歌 [A love song for games of the dragon waiting for an opportunity] Past, present, and future of Steam (Part 3)

泥中蟠龍's Game愛歌

[A love song for games of the dragon waiting for an opportunity]

 

Past, present, and future of Steam (Part 3)

 

There are many strong points of Steam. First of all, it supports various operating systems. The digital distribution platform, which was originally based on Windows, now provides the best possible environment for not only Mac OS X and Linux, etc. but also console games on PlayStation and Xbox, etc. and it is finding a way to assist mobile games at present. Moreover, users can select a language among more than 20 ones including English, Japanese, and Korean and they can pay by credit cards, the payment system in smartphones, or various gift cards. The payment system includes many different currencies of the world such as dollars, euro, pounds, yen, and won, etc. so that Steam provides a convenient form of payment method for its consumers in numerous countries and various environments.

 

The other advantage of the platform is that it has countless users and content. Steam now has over 200 million subscribers with its over 10 million concurrent users and more than 10,000 video games are released on the platform. Most of the regular visitors are not beginners but video game-savvy people. A newly launched game on Steam is exposed to about a million gamers on average. And there are a variety of gaming communities targeting those customers; they include not only various categories from basic friends list to chat room, profile editing, achievement, event page, and leveling/ranking system to induce cooperation and competition between players but also provide features such as social networking service, news feed, gaming forum, and game channel.

 

While the platform has definite advantages, it has some vulnerable points. To begin with, as many users complain about its login system, it takes way long time to log in to the website. Even taking security issues and various users from all over the world into account, it's too tardy and a guest under different access environment has to go through red tape-like additional procedures for identification. Some functions which are disabled under no internet access seem to be needed to improve.

 

Furthermore, there is a credibility problem with the alpha-access that has been a hot issue recently. As I explained earlier, PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds was launched on Steam Early Access. The service of the platform doesn't guarantee perfection because it is supposed to allow users an opportunity to play an incompleted game in advance. Some companies' "eat and run" cases are serious problems to be ironed out.

 

Finally, there is a security issue. Steam has tons of personal data of over 200 million subscribers and a lot of information on their payment and digital goods. The website was hacked several times and I reckon that the company should make every effort to regain users' trust by stabilizing the system.

 

Let's take a look at the size of the market for Steam and its recent performance next time.

 

 

※ This is from Kyunghyang Games column by 泥中蟠龍 since September 2013.

(http://www.khgames.co.kr)

 

Translation by Kim Ki-hui