14 DAY TRIAL // Valve has announced that it has overhauled its Steam digital distribution service, specifically the actual program used by its community to download, manage and browse for games, in order to allow a better, faster and smoother download experience.
Valve's Steam service is still the king of the digital distribution market on the PC, with millions of gamers using it, while the platform is proving to be a hit both with large scale publishers but also with independent developers who make the service a great proving ground for indie projects.
Now, Valve has announced that an overhaul of the Steam client has been released, which is going to improve both the relationship of the service with gamers, as well as with its publishing partners by offering a smoother experience.
"The new content system is designed to do two things: deliver better download rates in more places around the world, and also to simply streamline the publishing process on Steam, ultimately making it possible to ship more games than we would have been able to with the old system," Valve said.
The bandwidth gate has been extended, making Steam now better suited to handling spikes in demand when big releases are made or during sales, while all the content is now being sent through the HTTP protocol, making it simpler to manage.
The game update system has also been overhauled, as the Steam client won't be forced to download the updated files once more, just the portions that are different from the existing data.
"Another way that the new content system improves the bandwidth picture is by requiring each user to download less data. With the Steam content system that’s been in place for a few years now, if an individual file on disk were modified by a game update, your client had to download the whole file. That can be painful when the file in question is really large. The new system supports delivering only the differences between the old and new files, meaning game updates will be much smaller overall."
On the publisher side, the new Steam will make it even easier for companies to release new titles and manage them with updates or downloadable content.
Plenty of new features are set to be released for the improved Steam service, including download scheduling, bandwidth throttling or prioritizing which games get downloaded first, while Steam will be able to download updates to a game while players are enjoying the experience, and apply the patch after they exit the title.
Valve also mentions that Dota 2, its upcoming strategy title, will be delivered through the new system, so fans should certainly get excited about the new and improved Steam.