Game Service Providers
Posted on March 22, 2002 @ 16:25 in General
It seems that Valve Software is trying to bring ASP (Application Service Provision) to the games market, with their Steam project, reported on by Slashdot, Shacknews and Gamespy.
ASP basically is a return to the concept of mainframe/terminal computing, where your applications run on a remote system and you access them through a relatively simple terminal. The sort of new thing with ASP is that you access it over the Internet instead of some proprietary network and that you don't own the remote system, but that you simple rent space and time on it from an Application Service Provider, which supposedly saves you money. John Dvorak recently ranted against the supposed benefits of software rental in a PC Magazine column.
Valve's Steam project delivers your software, keeps it updated and allows you to play multi-player games online. With the slight difference that game software will run locally, this sounds like ASP... and much like Microsoft's .NET initiative. Apparantly you can also use the network to keep the game you bought on CD in a shop current and the Shacknews article seems to imply that even narrowband users can use the system. I'm a bit sceptical about the whole deal, but like in many areas, it might be the games industry driving innovation here, so it's going to be interesting to see how this will work out.
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