Steam rising as collective intelligence opens up the PC platform

Valve is seen by many, both gamers and industry analysts alike, to be the most innovative company currently in the games industry. This is chiefly because they understand the idea of web 2.0 – a community dictated by a shared intelligence. Even the company employees work using a shared intelligence, just read the employee handbook! But a discussion of that is for another blog entry.

Valve's first web 2.0 innovation came with the idea of a digital delivery service. When Valve went public with its video game digital distribution service, Steam, in 2004, digital delivery seemed inconceivable for such large things as video games. According to games journalism site Kotaku, the concept of a product being unlocked digitally andretained digitally was a foreign one to the consumer, and at the time the demand for such a product meant that the traffic going through the distribution service overloaded and people were unable to play the game. Suffice to say, people weren’t happy with Steam to begin. Over time, people have realized the ease at which this distribution works. It was far better than buying from the real life retailer.

Valve understood the idea that breaking down the barriers between customer and developer with this flagship service led to fierce consumer loyalty, a lowering of price, and an infinite number of products being sold. The weirdest part of this is the innovation came as a result of illegal activity on the part of the disillusioned consumer, sick of the high video game prices. In a way, Steam single-handedly saved a dying PC games industry. Publishers were willing to give up on developing for the PC, as it was deemed too easy to illegally download games. Valve saw this phenomenon of people sharing and digitally obtaining copied files that went together to make a game on torrent sites, and decided itself to create a platform that charged consumers to digitally deliver the game straight from the publisher, thus making it legal while retaining the easy delivery online. No longer would PC gamers have to wander down to the local PC store to buy a bulky box to get a game which was twice the price, mostly to cover the costs of making the box, the cost of having it on a console, and to cover the profits of the retailer. The collective intelligence of the internet informed Valve's decision to embark down this road of digital delivery, and they've never looked back.

Suriowecki refers to Collective Intelligence as a developer effectively using user data provided to them from the user to improve their product. This is a guiding principle in how Valve conducts its business and is perhaps best exemplified in how Valve has increasingly outsourced both quality control and prominence of games across the service.

Two case studies -- the flawed Steam Greenlight system, and the recent Steam Tags, show how the user en masse can be a better arbiter for what sells than Valve or publishers themselves. Fundamentally, this is changing the way the games industry conducts its business. The digital revolution is causing publishers and developers to reevaluate their distribution and the products they sell based upon real-time user data.

Valve’s acceptance of indie games became an increasingly lengthy process with the amount of developers submitting their games and the testing as to quality and suitability for sale on Steam. As a way to mitigate the amount of developers submitting and possibly rid this bottleneck, Valve outsourced its sorting of indie games to the user in a system they called Steam Greenlight, asking them to vote on which games they’d like to see on the Steam platform. Additionally, developers could pitch ideas to the ‘Greenlight’ system, and if they were without publisher, Valve insisted that they must undergo the Steam Greenlight. While the submission pool shrunk due to user input, the floodgates flew open as to at what stage a game could be successfully greenlighted. Valve did not put restrictions on developers submitting, so there was everything from joke game ideas almost being greenlighted to developers swiftly shortcutting the system in favour of getting a publisher onside.  Valve eventually put a $100 fee in place to deter all the troll game ideas, but this complicated things further, as some game developers can’t afford to throw $100 away on a game that may not be successfully voted through by the crowd. Acknowledging the limits of collective intelligence, and perhaps that Valve needs to be involved in some way in the choosing, founder Gabe Newell has since said they are looking to abandon the Greenlight system.

A recent innovation in Valve’s crowdsourcing came from the decision to let game float the game's popularity and relevance to keywords with a system called Steam Tags. Users could tag a game with any genre or word, and based upon the number of people tagging a game with the same word or phrase, it would begin to show up under that particular tag. The more people tagging, the more prominent the game would be. For example, Dota 2 is listed as being first under the “Action” tag, and as a result when the user types “Action” into the Steam search Dota 2 will appear first. 

This is an innovative way for the user to decide what should have prominence in a word cloud and how a search should be aggregated. By letting shared intelligence choose how to order games under certain tags, it takes the power away from publishers artificially paying money to promote their game on Steam and putting it in the hands of the gamers themselves to decide which games are worth playing, and what genres and search terms are most fitting. But, as with Steam Greenlight, crowdsourcing this kind of quality control comes with drawbacks. Gone Home, an indie game that launched to critical acclaim for its narrative elements last year has been labelled by the wider internet community as the condescending “Walking Simulator” tag (Gone Home is an exploration game) or the downright offensive “Cis scum” for having a story that touches upon LGBT themes. Call of Duty: Ghosts has “dog” as its most popular tag, despite being an action game that has very few levels with dogs in it, or “9 year old online daycare” as another tag for the game, in an attempt to discredit the online players of this first-person shooter as young and immature. These tags are unhelpful to a user’s search and range from mildly annoying to offensive, and while Valve has implemented a feature within Steam Tags to report offensive tags, this still doesn’t get rid of the large number of misleading or silly tags being applied to group these games together.

Valve is one of the few game publishing platforms that continually innovates, with everything from being the first to use digital delivery as a means of purchasing games to crowdsourcing the grouping of games in Steam’s store. With the kerfuffle surrounding Xbox One’s initially clumsy approach to digital content management and competitor game publisher EA’s Origin (seen by many gamers as a sour knock-off of the Steam platform), I believe Valve will continue to lead the way in the web 2.0 space for many years to come.

While at times the idea of trying to crowdsource crucial elements of the platform may not work in anyone’s favour, more often than not the wisdom of the crowds have it right in terms of placing value on a product. And if the Steam Charts are anything to go by, there are plenty of people who adhere to an open platform for content delivery.