I watched the whole thing and found it interesting despite a bit of dull factor.
A few things interested me above all others:
One is that Gabe Newell speaks alot towards openess. Not just open sourced software, but also collaboration and more. I see a similar future and respect that he seems to put value in that, and have a vision for it. Though as he says, Steam itself isn't open for modding. And their privacy policy says nothing useful beyond telling us they collect data and have loopholes to do whatever they want with it.
He also speaks of useful aspects of their data gathering.
But his wording concerns me a bit...
@ 3:13
Who, ahh, can provide, you know, interesting choices around, ah, monetization, you know, like
the, its less about, you know, pixels per second, and more about micro-transactions and identity.
Well I'm not a fan of the micro-transactions as relates to selling bits and pieces of a game. Sure its a way to make more money. But I'm not enough of a conspicuous consumer to want that fluff in anything outside of a full blown expansion pack. What concerned me in that quote is the identity bit tied to a monetization context. Data mining and the buying and selling of our computing habits are big business. Major firms like rapleaf, axicom, unbound technology, and many others make many millions of dollars collecting and selling this data to credit agencies, employers.... anyone who hires them, for whatever reason, to get data on anyone they want. A massive amount of money provides mass temptation. I don't forsee a scenario where an employer, or credit or insurance agency, will turn me down because of data thats been mined from my machine. But I don't like the whole idea of it. Its a dirty business. It feels creepy to me that people are out there trying to collect data on my habits to sell to someone else. I want no part of it. The potential for Steam to "monetize" this info is great.
Ori monitored Steams activity in Offline Mode and heres what he found....
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showpost.php?p=9214660&postcount=126
ok just to check the argument that it just checks for internet connection and doesn't actually connect I fired up Windows Network Manager and allowed steam to use the internet in offline mode. Within the first minute it connected to 2 separate Servers and uploaded 14 packages while downloading 10 packages. Each of them quite small - but still not whats advertised. And certainly more than just pinging the servers.
Gabe goes on to say...
32:49
We have no reason to believe that Mac user any less software promiscuous than PC users. But maybe that might be naive of us and we'll find out that Mac users don't download software on the internet or something like that.
That was said in the context of collecting user data to help track down system crashes, software bugs, and hardware driver problems. And they were speaking of having six days of Mac users data thus far and analyzing the data this very morning to find that Steam games crash something like 5x more on PC's than on Macs. This is data they collected. That quote speaks to them further analyzing the data to see what sorts of software the users have installed. Deep scans, private info, undisclosed data mining. Not cool. Though I do see the use of it. Just distrust anyone that does something different than what they say.
A solid motivation for selling our data to data mongers...
38:20
Uh thats something that we look at and uh, we just throw money at that problem.
Gabe said that quote above when speaking of the massive amounts of server space required to support Steam. I've been in enough life situations to distrust the "throw money at the problem" solution. Eventually the piper must be paid. What happens when the user base gets so big, and the server cost grow so enormous that the money being tossed isn't enough. Doesn't sound like a reliable, sustainable plan. And from reading Steams support forums, there are already frequent down times where players can't access their games. If data mined from our machines is not already being "monetized", there is increasing potential for it to be in the future.
