Fucking Steam

[Erkki]

One of Steams main functions is keeping games up to date. Then why are third party games not kept up to date? When patches come out for the regular versions, but the steam version doesn't get those (at least not at the same time), doesn't that kind of defeat the purpose...

[Nachimir]

Their third party support does seem kind of shaky; I know of one retail game in development that's listed as a mod despite the developers telling Valve repeatedly it's not, and until recently its release date was always listed as the next day.

[Jake]

Its entirely the responsibility of 3rd party developers and publishers to support that stuff, as it should be. Also, a lot of that inline patching stuff is surely related to Valve developing Steam, Steamworks, and the Source Engine, all of which are built very well to work harmoniously in tandem.

I wouldn't expect third party developers to build that sort of streaming patch support into their games, but if you as a developer update your game and the folks from Steam hear about it, they do contact you to try and get ahold of it. There's nothing forcing the developer/publisher's hand there in any way, though, so I can hardly see why you'd blame Steam. If they started putting stringent requirements on how Steam games were patched and maintained, 3rd party developers would either force them to go back on their word, or walk.

One reason PC development remains viable is that it isn't plastered in weeks or months of extra development time to make sure your game works as part of a unified "experience," as has always been the case on consoles and is increasing in complexity as time goes by (with only some systems also scaling up their spuport and API infrastructure along with their requirements). I don't know if that's a good or bad thing -- there is a TON to be said in favor of the cleanliness of the 360 and XBLA user experiences, which are pretty much an amazing anomaly in the world of games -- but unless the enforcer of that standard is really willing to front the effort and code to create that sort of situation to a huge degree (as in, to a degree that it actually makes it easier and quicker on your project to use that sort of system than to not use it), I don't think PC developers would ever get on board.