Interviews// Valve's Doug Lombardi

SPOnG: So now you're rolling out a bunch of new community features. How's that going?

DL: They may still be in beta, but they are going to be rolling out of beta pretty soon. We've had a pretty good uptake on that. I think about half the people on Steam are participating in the community beta, so at this point it's beta kind of in name only. When you're starting to get into the majority of people using it it's pretty much shipped. [grins]

That's really just an extension of us always just thinking about different things to do. For the last year and a half or so we spent a lot of time – you know, we shipped Mark Healey's game, Ragdoll Kung-Fu - that was our first third-party game – almost two years ago now I think.

So, for the last year and a half or two years now since we launched RagDoll Kung-Fu, we've sort of been focused on building features for developers or publishers, like the free weekends, the gift passes, publisher pages, extending Steam to showcase more titles than just Counter Strike and Half Life, and we feel like we've got a pretty robust set of tools for that audience. Now we're just turning back to gamers and saying 'Let's build some tools for them for while and spend some time building there.'

So, the community features are the first step of things that you'll see pointed in that direction over the next six to 12 months or so.


SPOnG: So, what might come next? Game Domain's out there working on technology that just provides a stub for download, with the rest of the game streamed. Do you think something like that might be viable for you guys further down the line?

DL: I'm not really familiar with what they were doing exactly, but there's a million more things that we want to do, like being able to buy a game for your friend and send it to them, something that seems really really simple, but we haven't done that yet. There's just a million little things like that, that once you – Steam's one of those things that when you deploy a new feature, it sort of spurs ideas for two or three extensions of that feature.

So, the free weekend was an idea that we had that's basically – I don't know if they did that over here in Europe – but in the States, basically, back in the old days the cable companies like HBO used to do those same things where they'd give you HBO for free for a weekend, and they'd put all their best movies on that weekend, and they'd promote 'Special offer if you sign up now!' or whatever. So that was us just taking a page out of their book and applying it to Steam. And once we did that, we said, Wow! Well the guest passes would be cool, what if we could say, 'Hey, if you bought a game then you get a couple of hours of getting your buddy to come and play the game with you'?

So it's sort of like you being able to give someone a free weekend, but I think it's like a couple of hours instead of the whole weekend.