via Kotaku and Steam Review, i was pointed to The Day Steam Stopped, a post on the Online Gaming Zeitgeist which tracked what happened to game users when Steam's servers went down following a storm in the Seattle area last December.
Steam is the distribution platform that Valve software use to distribute and to authenticate Half-Life and Half-Life 2, amongst other games: without access to the Steam servers, there is very little the owner of a legitimately purchased copy of HL2 can actually do. They certainly can't play online multiplayer, which is one of the major selling features of the HL franchise.
One of the interesting questions for digital game ditribution systems is the question of demand management - ie, to what extent can game users be treated as commodity purchasers, and have their purchasing efficiently managed? In this respect, the outage of the Steam servers, as a result of massive power failures in the area where the servers are housed, presents us with some useful data about gamer activities, and game use management.
This is a graph of daily usage stats for the most popular first-person shooter (FPS) games on servers tracked by GameSpy's stats tracker, polled on an hourly basis. the tpo two lines are Half-Life (HL1) and Half-Life2 (HL2); these are far and away the most popular online FPS games on the market. the bottom three lines are for Battlefield 2 (BF2), its sequel Battlefield 2142 (BF2142) and Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory (W:ET). The big dip in the two HL lines corresponds to the Steam server outage - and the conclusion is obvious. I'll quote from Online Gaming Zeitgeist again:[T]he fact that Steam wasn’t working didn’t immediately reflect on the number of players online on other games. That is, Steam users didn’t switch to another online game - either because they don’t have them installed or didn’t want to - and simply opted to wait for the system to be back.How elastic is gamer demand? Not very, if this example is a good guide.
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