The Ant Nest

Playing it again recently, I found it quite remarkable how easily I found myself first enjoying Zombie Horde. Normally the process of getting to the point where I’m playing a new mod is:

1. hear about mod from somewhere
2. seek out more info about mod
3. decide to download mod
4. wait for download to complete
5. remember to install mod
6. remember to load up mod rather than going straight into my normal game
7. hope I can find a server with a good ping

At every step along the way, there’s big potential to lose me as a ‘customer’. I’ve gone and looked at webpages for mods and not got round to downloading them. I’ve installed mods and forgotten to ever load them up and then when I do, my version is out of date. Et cetera.

Compare to how I ended up playing Zombie Horde: I’d loaded up Counter-Strike and was about to join a server and start playing as normal when I saw a server with “zombie” in the title. Curiosity lead me by the nose and it only took me a double-click (which I’d have done anyway to join a different server) and I was playing.

Wow. What a big difference that is. What a massive impact that must have on the size of their playerbase.

Zombie Horde is an exceptional case - not every mod design can be created as a customisation of Counter-Strike’s gameplay - but certainly every mod can benefit from anything that can be done to alleviate any of the above steps.

It demonstrates the immense advantages of Steam, not just for Valve, but their modding community too. Valve regularly highlights mods on their News Updates, which appear automatically as part of the program (helping step 1 above). There are lists of mods within the Steam client that will take me direct to the mod’s website (step 2) and screenshots and info within Steam itself to help with step 3. Steam’s server browser can let me look at servers for different games before committing to what I want to play - so step 6 above is made irrelevant.

Let’s hope Epic, id and other companies with strong content creating communities pick up on Valve’s excellent lead in this respect. Meanwhile, here’s a couple of suggestions for improving matters:

• Dystopia were refused Steam distribution. That’s fair enough, because providing free bandwidth to dozens of mods with regular updates is a big expenditure. But aren’t there other ways of simplifying the process of download and install? Could the Steam client link directly to an installer download provided by the mod team itself? And then remember that I’ve done that download and leave a reminder for me to install it, in the Steam Games list? At the moment, it only links to the mod’s website. There’s little provision for helping steps 4 and 5.
• Mods are one thing, but maps for existing mods also fall under much the same set of rules. Despite this supposed broadband age we live in, most players won’t wait to download a new map, they’ll just choose a different server. Hence half the popularity of basic maps - not only are they easy to learn, they only take a minute or two to download.

  What about a “Steam Map Center”? It could help me find 3rd party websites where I can download the map I need right now, faster than from the server. It could keep a record for me of maps I have needed to download in the past, so I can do it later when I’m not playing. It could recommend new maps to me based on what is most popular on other servers or what my favourite servers have added to their circulation.

  This would really help Valve’s mapping community, which takes the strain off Valve itself to keep providing the steady stream of high quality new content needed to keep and grow a game’s community. But what incentive is there to spend weeks making a high quality map that’s 13 megabytes of download, when people will more readily play something thrown together in a day that’s less than a megabyte of download?