Steam To Begin Hosting Game Mods

Valve made a brief announcement on Friday that they will be allowing the download of user-created game mods directly from Steam. "Once installed, these MODs will appear in your 'My Games' list and will receive automatic updates just like other games on Steam. Also, these MODs now take advantage of Steamworks, which provides stat tracking and tighter integration with the Steam community." Mods will be available for five different games to start, and more in the future.

Double-edged sword

[winphreak]

I can see the benefit of free hosting to this, but I also sense it'll be a while before all the mods take advantage of this new system.
I'd like to think that Garry's Mod 10 counts as the first MOD to try this approach, and as long as I've been playing, it seemed to work pretty well.

About time

[JimBoBz]

It's about bloody time. When i bought Half-Life 2 i assumed that the popular MODs would make it on to Steam. I hardly play any of my Steam games anymore however being able to install and play MOD without having to search them out is just the ticket for a casual gamer like me...

Re:Steam is a good example

[syntek]

Actually no, that's not true. If you save your account credentials (by going to file>settings and un-checking "Don't save account credentials on this computer" you can login under offline mode and launch and game. You just would not have access to the Steam community. The only thing the Steam Community is used for is friends, stat tracking and server finding in Valve games. Other games like CoD4 don't use the Steam Community for server finding and you could still /connect in console on your CS to connect to a server. For finding a server for CS or Valve game, there are tons of websites that track that. Also, as far as I know Valve doesn't make a practice of spying on your game usage and probably doesn't really care except to get other companies to sign on. "We have x amount of users playing x amount of hours per week on game x, you should sign up with us as more people buy games via Steam then they do by going into their local Wal-Mart or GameStop for PC Gaming." The only downfall(and it's not really a downfall) is VAC(Valve Anti-Cheat). Once you're banned, your banned for life (the current policy) and have to jump through a million hoops to reverse that. Although they were instances of False Positives, but the accounts affected by that were reversed. Also Internet Cafe's or Lans use a different version of Valve so if someone somehow put hacks on a computer and all users who logged in on that computer were VAC banned, then it's a different story. Overall though, it's great that I can buy/download/install a game in less then 3 hours (CoD4 took 2 hours from buying to playing) and have the game for life and play from any computer in the world. Considering Steam was also running a special the weekend I purchased CoD4 I got it cheaper then if I had purchased it from the store. Also no waiting in lines (which if you go to wal-mart you'll likely wait in line for at least an hour, if they have it, and most GameStops and EB Games selection of PC games is quite pathetic) So yes, Steam is the superior way to purchase PC Games (consider they have Most big titles, GTA, CoD, Crysis, Raindbow6, etc etc.)

Re:Steam is a good example

[V!NCENT]

"If the owner dissapears or goes bankrupt, you'll be unable to use your purchased content"

Simply not true. Valve has tested in-house patches for when they go bankrupt. They will work with the retail dvd's you purchased in a RL shop. I don't know if this works with backup game content (option in Steam to back up the map of your games) through Steam.

Steam Saved Games

[Robmonster]

I remember reading a while ago that Steam was going to also act as a repository for saved games, so you could in effect backup your saves automatically.

Did this ever get implemented? I cannot find anything about it on the Steam pages.