Jason Holtman is director of business development at Valve, and is instrumental in the direction of Steam, building publisher and developer relationships and working on signing and marketing games across the platform.
Steam has recently faced strong criticism from such PC industry names as Gearbox's Randy Pitchford, who called Steam a "conflict of interest" for Valve the developer. We talked to Holtman about Steam's position as a prospective "brand" for PC gaming, Valve's position as a service provider and potential conflicts between the two, as well as developers' needs on the platform and the company's use of metrics to plan Steam's direction.
To what extent is Steam an exercise in creating a brand for PC gaming?
I wouldn't say that it is a strong branding exercise. The core of Steam started as a way to service games. Steam rose out of the need to service CounterStrike. We had this runaway multiplayer hit on our hands, we have lots of customers who want to stay together and we had to build a service that wouldn't break when it handed players a new update, so one of the defining differences or strengths of Steam is not just that it is a place to go buy games. It is relatively easy to set up a place on the internet where you can go buy something. With Steam, you get a lot more. You get things like your friends are there, you have auto-updating, you have anti-cheat technology, you have matchmaking technology.
A good example of this is sometimes we find that when people go out and buy their retail discs, they come back onto our forums and will ask if they can convert their game. They will be like, ‘I wish I could make this the Steam version. How do I make this the Steam version?’ And that is the sign of something that is not a store but a destination where customers want to be. What we strive to do at Valve is make Steam a place where customers want to go. They want to be there, they like the service, they like having their friends there.
Are you looking to increase the idea of Steam as a community?
Adding features to Steam is somewhere we often surprise ourselves, and we try to listen to the community developers and what they want, plus we can watch what people are doing. We don't have a grand plan. I couldn't tell you in two years, you know, that it will be this size or that this feature is coming out but we very much know that our customers like community features. They like being together, they like having their homepage on Steam where their avatar is, and it definitely follows that we would try to do more in that space.
However, I think that one of the really interesting things about this new connected world that we live in, and the social aspect that's emerging from this, is that things don't have to be replacements for each other. I don't think that people say, ‘I'm a Facebook guy, and that's it.’
So, a Steam customer, who has a Steam community page is also, I'm sure, going to have a Facebook page. They're probably going to have some other social network pages. And I think the trick is not to worry that that's staked out, and that's me. I think the trick is to make sure that people like what they're doing on each space individually.
I don't think it's just about presence or face. It's that I'm logging onto this part of my computer because it does something for me. It entertains me. And if you don't have that, I don't think people are going to do it. People aren't going to do it just to have a presence. People are going to it because there's something interesting to do.
In turn, what is it that you've found developers want from Steam?
What developers mainly want is to get as close as possible to their customers. That's really the overarching mantra I think of when we think of the services that we're building. It's a way for the developer to go and watch what customers and users are doing and to have a really close iteration cycle. In the old days it would take you a few weeks or months to get a patch together, and the experimentation costs of that were super high, plus the uptake was super risky because you maybe had to put that patch out on a file download site. Now with auto-patching again, you can do something as simple as ship a hat. In Team Fortress 2 we shipped hats and saw people liked that, and developers can do things like that themselves. They can say, ‘I wonder what would happen if I changed the way that gun worked,’ or ‘I wonder what would happen if I put stairs there.’
Developers are finding that the faster they can do that, the better their games get. And the better they're making not only the game they have now, but the game they're going to make in their future.
Do you feel that there's a difference between Valve the developer and Valve the service provider?
No, I don't think so at all. I think the strength of the platform comes a lot through content. And having a platform that is made by people who are making games makes the platform better. All the features that we're offering developers are things that were built because of CounterStrike, because of Team Fortress 2, because of Left 4 Dead. And those all make the platform a stronger place. If you were somebody thinking about putting a game on a platform, you would want it in a place where the CounterStrike players are, the Left 4 Dead players — the Modern Warfare 2 players.
I think saying, ‘Oh, a platform holder should be this agnostic thing like a disembodied publisher or distributor’ doesn't look at the actual strength of connectivity. The strength of it is that the content is there. It would be like people saying, ‘There's no way I'm ever going to publish an Xbox 360 game, because Microsoft has Halo.’
That would be absurd. The strength of 360 is the Halo players, and they help build Xbox Live. Those features are partially there because of Halo. The Xbox 360 is stronger because of things like Halo.