Steam keeps on winning
pcgamer.com
From the opinion piece:
Last year, I pointed out how many big publishers came crawlin' back to Steam after trying their own things: EA, Activision, Microsoft. This year, for the first time ever, two Blizzard games released on Steam: Overwatch and Diablo 4.
Epic bought rocket league and promptly tanked it in favor of their stupid fortniteverse. Maybe steam keeps winning because they're not actively screwing over their customers.
Or Pheonix Point, where Epic bought an kickstarter game that was funded under the promise of releasing on Steam, GOG and potentially other stores and promptly made it exclusive - and this was in the early days when their launcher/store was in a much worse state too.
Rocket League is such an easy slam dunk of a game. The mechanics are so good there should be a family of game modes (like Turbo Golf Racing) that surround the core game mode that have spawned entirely new genres of car games by now. Almost no other video game has a core gamefeel as locked in as Rocket League and honestly Epic should be ashamed Rocket League isnt a household name like minecraft by now.
Sadly Valve is guilty of a similar thing. Valve bought Campo Santo and (at least that's the public statement) the developers were free to work on whatever projects and chose HL Alyx instead of that new game after Firewatch. Game development gets cancelled all the time and perhaps the new game just wasn't that good.
There must be more to success than that, because Valve likewise bought Campo Santo, the developer of Firewatch, and now their next game is all but canceled. These companies can't help but focus on their big money makers at the expense of all else.
All I can find about their next game is called "In the Valley of Gods" which looks like it is still being developed. What game was cancelled? Also how is that the same as buying an IP then running it into the ground so their main IP can get a mildly popular game mode that will likely be forgotten about in a couple months? I'm already bored of rocket racing and I only installed it because a friend kept begging me to play fortnite zero build which I also don't enjoy.
It is on indefinite hold. It is still being "developed" in the same way Valve won't confirm or deny the existence or cancelation of Half-Life 2 Episode 3/Half Life 3, but articles I've read previously essentially confirm that no one has been working on it for years.
I'll happily eat my words if the game does come out because Firewatch was a beautiful game that left me wanting more, but Valve's internal development structure doesn't really encourage passion projects.
Could you elaborate?
Not the person you're replying to, but from what I've read before Valve is kind of notorious for this because they do encourage people to work on what they want. The problem with this is that it also means it's hard to get support for your project. For example, in order to get Half-Life: Alyx pushed out, they had to suspend that policy of working only on things that make them happy.
Here's a quote from the wiki article about HL: Alyx's development:
Here's some additional info on how they work from an interview:
Putting a product out requires 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration. The reason so many people make hour long video essays is that they can regurgitate their inspiration directly to a camera while doing little substantive work.
Valve likely has other “1% inspiration” tasks people often choose over the “boring” parts of game development - the bits that don’t excite anyone, and would only be done with the direct promise of a paycheck. Who wants to write up a design document, and go through 8 drafts for feedback?
I think the quote from Jane is pretty telling. Some people at Valve only help out when a project starts "getting pretty cool." It's probably the cause of a lot of inertia in game development over there. Also, just an interesting detail, Jane Ng is from Campo Santo and she stopped working on In the Valley of Gods to work on HL: Alyx.
Idk, they are kinda screwing over the publishers. But that doesn't impact the users buying the game, so they don't care. Which I guess the percentage they take is worth the value they bring, given so many keep selling on steam.
Genuinely curious but how are they screwing over the publishers?
I’m especially curious how that can be true along with the seemingly contradictory conclusion you came to in your last sentence.
Steam gets something to the tune of 30 % as their fee.
30% is industry standard from Apple, Microsoft, Google, Sony, etc.
Steam taking 30% is nothing out of the norm
It's just a pretty ridiculous cut for steam. Steam gets 30% of every transaction.
But I was saying that I suppose the extreme cut of 30% must be worth it since so many developers keep coming back to steam. But that also could just be because they have such a monopoly that users don't want to switch DRMs.
You people need to watch the GDC Talk by the spiderweb software indie dev from like half a decade ago. He said, loud and clear, that the 30 cut is great and worth it for what he gets. Sure, lower cut is always nice, but let's not be stupid and say that the devs don't get their money's worth.
Let's not be stupid, and recommend an hour long video without a link (it's here) as an answer to why 30% is a good deal. He says it loud and clear, but also it's hidden somewhere in the hour long talk. Like I said, 30% must be worth it if so many developers are willing to take the cut for the services. But if a big part of what you're getting is the number of users that use your platform, then you're in a bit of a loop. The 30% is worth it because so many people will see your game, and users don't leave steam because it's where all their games are. The users have incentive to stay, because it's nice to keep all your games in one spot. I have over 1,500 games on steam, so for me to leave steam would mean leaving behind thousands of dollars worth of content I paid for already. So how can another service enter the arena and have any viability? 30% might be fair, but it might also be too high. What if it doesn't matter if it's too high because they get more sales on Steam? It's a complicated topic, but I'm just saying that 30% of each and every sale is a pretty big cut, even if it has become standard (a standard set by steam).
Apple also takes 30% (or did it change to 15%? Definitely used to, tho). So does Google, Amazon app store, Samsung Galaxy store (just to name some in the mobile industry). And guess ehat, even GOG takes 30%.
I would argue that, compared to other services that also take 30%, and taking them as a baseline for what they offer on top of "buy download play" model, Steam is still very generous as it offers cloud saves, achievements, workshop, community forum, chat, streaming, offline mode, and tons of little stuff that make your life easier.
That's different
No, it's not
The 30% were introduced by Nintendo for cartridges iirc. So I would not say valve set that standard.
It's funny that back in 2009 Gabe Newell was talking about the focus on the customer, and making the DRM be above all useful and do things that benefit customers instead of just benefitting the developer/publisher.....and here we are today where people really don't give a shit about the revenue split, but the fact that Steam is an extremely convenient and useful platform that does a lot of legwork for the end users that people don't even think about anymore.
Epic is trying to wave a banner of revolution, where we the end users just want our shit to work and run nicely. Obligatory mention of Linux here as well, where it seems Valve is truly trying to foster an ecosystem that benefits customers as opposed to fucking them over. That's in lieu of the Polygon hit-piece https://www.polygon.com/2017/5/16/15622366/valve-gabe-newell-sales-origin-destructive where they point out the scummy things Valve has done.....but if you take Valve away you're left with a barren landscape of shitty publishers that actively treat customers awful with none of the good things Valve does.
Such a weak article. One of the arguments is that valve is awful because... people talk about steam sales, thus giving them free marketing.
Personally, I just don't want to have to use 6 different game stores/launchers and I'm happy with steam. Just having game pass also is enough to illustrate how much of a pain it would be, since I've bought a bunch of games and have later noticed I could have tried them for free on the Xbox app.
Man, you weren't kidding. Their strongest argument was that valve can run steam for essentially free, which is just fucking ridiculous. Valve defined content service in the 21st century, they paved the way for streaming and netflix. How anyone that is arguing in good faith can think reliably serving data thats 10x-100x larger than a Netflix stream is 'basically free' is unbelievable.
Also, it is not "pulling out all the stops" to drag out an international business court case if that case took eighteen months. I've seen international filings where you havent even gotten a hearing date after 18 months, what in the hell is the author smoking...
Well… Not to take away any points from Valve because it’s still a big chunk of infrastructure, but this made me pause… I think steam content is arguably easier to serve than something like Netflix. Netflix has to deal with encoding content and it’s important for streams to not buffer, so it has to consistently stream data at a decent rate (if steam hiccups it sucks, but it’s not a problem where you’re interrupted mid game, at least). Games can be a lot bigger than videos, but I’m not sure how much that matters for this. Storage is relatively cheap and Netflix will probably have multiple copies of each video in different codecs and bitrates which might make it more equivalent storage wise? Per hour of entertainment my guess is that Netflix actually has to send more data over the network than steam on average. There’s plenty of smaller games, and people can often spend hundreds of hours in a single game. If somebody rewatches a show they’ll stream it again, but if they replay a game they might still have a copy downloaded…
I don’t know any of the actual details, but I’m curious now how they actually compare! I’d guess Netflix probably has twice as many active users as steam, and I’d guess Netflix uses more bandwidth per user than steam (I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if it was 10x as much… I think people could easily stream 50gb per day, and I maaaaybe download that much from steam in a couple of weeks on average). Would be curious how it actually works out!
This isn’t to say steam is free to host, it obviously isn’t, I just think Netflix might be harder. I’m a tiny bit worried about Steam’s back catalog long term, eventually it may not be deemed profitable to keep hosting old games “for free”. Like eventually if nobody is buying a game anymore, but people keep downloading it, it couuuuld technically cost steam more to host than they made off of it, and maintaining storage long term costs money too (though hopefully this keeps getting less expensive over time). The margins for Valve are super high, though, so hopefully it doesn’t matter!
That article thinks people aren't smart enough to realize that Valve is a corporation like other ones, but it's one that strives for the "win-win" scenarios, where other corporations strive for the "win-lose" (AKA profit above all).
People don't mind if a corporation makes money, as long as they do it ethically (products that are priced fairly, not harmful to their customers, works well, and last a long time), and also takes care of their customers, treating them with respect.
But that article doesn't seem to realize that, it tends to write that all off as just some kind of psyop by Valve on their customer base to 'pull the wool over their eyes' while they fuck them over.
having a company that is not actively trying to exploit us is surprisingly refreshing.
This article didn't research the VR bits...Gabe has said multiple times, even recently, that they are working steadily on VR and it's hardware. Their next headset even has a codename, Deckard.
Also, I don't think most people realize Valve doesn't have much of an internal structure. It more resembles a community of people working together because they want to.
Oh god, I just realized... Imagine if they brought Portal back, but in VR like they did Half-Life.
We'd get so many videos of people falling over in their living room
If they fix the bullshit joystick switch on the goddamn index controllers I will throat every valve employee that made it happen.
Open up for gaben
Funded by the cash cow steam store, they just kinda do what they will in the mean time.
It's rare that I wholeheartedly back a billion dollar company, but I do with Valve. Until Gabe is no longer CEO and their business model changes to something more nefarious, I will stick with them for years to come. No battle.net, No epic, just Steam.
Valve has done scummy things even recently but the scummy things they've done have never personally affected me negatively so I don't care.
Source for the scummies?
Replacing csgo with counterstrike 2 so its broken launch could be covered up with a decade of positive reviews for a different game and guaranteeing people won't be able to play the previous after an indefinite amount of time was pretty scummy, for one.
CS2 is fine and it feels like CSGO, except the nades were updated. If you want to go nostalgic you can go play the other CS games.
I understand preserving a game is important, but this isn't a single-player game, this is a game that they have to continuously host and manage, which costs money. Valve wanted to update the game, and they probably didn't want to have 2 games fighting each other. You can be mad at their strategy, but CSGO was a free multiplayer game (yes yes it was $15 or $20 dollars years ago), and they decided to change it into an updated free multiplayer game.
If you want to call them scummy because they slightly changed a game you paid for, go for it. Never buy another Valve product and go exclusively GOG.
Having said all that, I would be on your side if and only if we were talking about a single-player game that does not need to be managed 24/7.
People would be way more up in arms had it been a completely new game where none of the inventory transfers over. Recent reviews are still "mostly positive" and traditional CSGO is still available, just unsupported. I dislike it myself that practice with bots and a friend currently no longer works in CS2 but enabling csgo_legacy wan't that much of a deal for me.
I like what Valve does and I sound like a fanboy sometimes because they just keep doing great stuff… But I don’t fucking trust them long term. I hope they prove me wrong, of course! I also don’t really trust anybody else.
Maybe there's a disproportionately high amount of linux users on lemmy, cause I keep seeing it come up in the comments. But I would use Epic if they had linux support. Heck some games like satisfactory I have access to on both cause I paid for it twice lol
https://github.com/Heroic-Games-Launcher/HeroicGamesLauncher
Works like a charm.
can confirm!
For reference I do have it installed.. i think.. The one that runs overwatch/blizzard games, haven't played or launched it in about a year though. As apart from fortnite, which I just dont play because of lockout, satisfactory is the only one I have on there i care about. Plus I can share the epic login with my less fortunate windows friends... dont tell anyone I said that though haha
Call me whatever, but Valve does so much for Linux gaming that when I do buy games I make sure to get them through Steam. Between Proton and the Steam Deck it seems like Valve is doing a lot of the heavy lifting. Linux gaming is in a great place right now and Valve deserves a lot of credit.
They also have Steam Input which is incredible. The customization and control you have over your experience is insane.
Epic Games on the other hand can't even be bothered to support Linux properly. Valve earns their cut.
🤡
Why is it so hard for companies to build a game launcher that doesn't suck? Is it just a lowest bidder situation?
I think it's just priorities, those other companies weren't interested in making a launcher, they were interested in tying their customers into their eco system.
Steam started out like that in appearance at least, nobody really wanted it and it was kind of forced on you if you wanted to play HL2 but since Valve seemed to understand the value in a platform like steam and actually work at making it good it became pretty good.
At this point it's actually kind of hard to fully appreciate how much work has gone into steam. Not just the basic stuff like chat and forums and a store with a functioning search, or the banal stuff like inventories and trading cards and points I still don't understand, but also the stuff most people don't see like all the stuff for developers launching a game on steam and managing sales and keys and betas. Not to mention all the experiments they've done along the way to try and figure out what the best way forward is.
Steam is kind of a huge undertaking and unless a company is really invested in competing with it they're simply not going to be able to.
Data, they were also interested in that sweet, sweet, data harvesting. Previously only Valve was grabbing all that via Steam.
If your goal was only to make a good launcher, it would be easy. If your goal is a lot of DRM shenanigans as if we were still in 1998, it’s really hard.
IMO my favorite launcher to use out of all is probably Battle.net, even over Steam. This is probably mostly because Steam is terrible unresponsive and its startup is still kinda ass (I just tested the start and noticed its 3 fucking loading screens: Verifying installtion, Logging in and finally loading the page. All as separate windows).
Wow. Ive never heard someone say something positive about battle net
Yeah I agree. I don't play Blizzard Activision games for other reasons, but the battle.net launcher was by far the best.
I don't get why, when PC gamers spend thousands to get a quick, smooth machine, that they put up with the shitfest that is Valve. I mean, it's 2023 why is the UI still a website? Why is it that I can't stop the news from popping up? And it's so damn unresponsive and laggy.
well, I don't think battle.net is the worst launcher
They won me over permanently when they instituted a refund policy.
Not just a refund policy but a refund policy where you can just say 'yeah this shit sucks yo'
You're not wrong. 💯
I rarely am. I'm a very wise man.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_that_I_know_nothing
I know this quote, for I am very intelligent. Also handsome.
And exceedingly humble.
You forgot to mention modest. :p
Could you be the humblest person in the world?
It is very possible.
It took the australian government to do it, but at least they did it in the best possible way after being forced to, instead of throwing a tantrum and having people need to talk to a support person.
What I'm wondering: is this going to happen to the many streaming services as well? They're many and expensive. Are they going to consolidate in a few or are they going to lower their prices so that they don't continue to lose users?
No. They're repeating cable history. The great bundling has already begun. Hulu and Disney are being rolled together. You're going to have fewer options moving forward. You'll have to buy the netflix-hulu-disney-peacock-hbo-starz bundle or the other one with all the rest. Then they can keep cranking up the price because it's all or nothing. Prices will go up until too many people choose the "nothing" option, then they'll start doing a "build your own package" to let you drop half and save 10% just because you want one of the services.
Yo ho yo ho a repeat of history for me.
I see it’s not your first rodeo…
It will just keep getting worse until some new "disruptor" enters the marketplace. That one will be great for a while, then collapse into a new archipelago of shitty cash grabs.
I'm just wondering what the next big thing will be... Maybe some kind of local macro-kiosks that have mechanical DRM units that store all the data so they don't have to negotiate with the non-open ISPs. You could probably even include impulse sales of physical merchandise and consumables while people browse for the media they want.
The unpopular ones like Paramount+ and Peacock will probably lower their prices, rely on ads, realize they can't keep the lights on with their lower prices, and probably sell to Amazon or Disney someday. The larger ones will consolidate the popular content and continue raising their prices and inserting more ads. The previous prices were just a loss-leader to get people to sign up.
It's going back to cable once they consolidate.
I'll be honest, star trek is keeping my wallet open to paramount. All their other stuff meh..
Do you like all the trek? I thought Lower Decks and Discovery both started great but kind of fell off. I heard Picard was good.
I couldn't get into voyager but I'll go back and watch it all eventually. Lower decks was great. I found out about it watching SNW and was like wtf is this shit?! But after I went back and watched lower decks I got it and it was fun.
If you're lucky, your subscription will be rolled into Max, should the merger talks conclude.
We all know this isn't happening
HBO and Disney are already delisting some shows and selling the rights for the more successful ones to buy and add it to their catalog.
If they lose users, they'll increase the prices for everyone else. Then they'll lose even more and increase prices even more.
Makes sense Santa would holiday somewhere sunny.
Pretty sure Gabe lives in New Zealand now. Unless I'm remembering incorrectly, he just got stuck there during COVID and then never left once restrictions were eased.
By the way, that sun is the ozone hole.
Yeah, there was some fuss recently about him getting ordered to attend as a witness at some trial in the US instead of video conferencing as is the norm since covid.
Count this comment as irrelevant if you will, but I think one of the biggest missed opportunities of EGS is mod support. They have this world-class game engine, and they do so little with it. Maybe it is because of Unreal Tournament 4 failing to take off. Maybe they think just hamfisting a bunch of this modding stuff into Fortnite is all they need, but still I feel like the EGS version of the steam workshop is an open goal. Hell, with the money they're saving from pawning off Bandcamp you can even buy off mod.io to get support for virtually no work at all. Like why hasn't this happened yet?
do not give them good ideas. I need steam to have all games since it is the only one with any good linux support. it does not matter if EGS have free games if i can not play them.
True, UT4 was supposed to all about user-modding.
We did it boiz.
Pat yourselves on the back if you never used an alternative.
This is a weird mentality. Competition in the space is good, even if the current "default" thing is really good.
Competition is good....when the competition is actually competitive.
But what has happened is games on are steam .... which installs the launcher + game.
So it's not a win at all. It's actually a loss for us. If steam was to force "yeah you can publish the game on steam, but you cannot use your launcher"
The key is to use an alternative that's actually good, and most of these companies were never going to make an alternative that was good, just one that was exploitative.
Most of my purchases the last few years have been gog. The only game service where you actually own the game afterwards.
Fanboys and monopolies, name a better combination.
Cheese and a cheese slicer.
You missed an opportunity to say "coffee and biscuits" and I've never been more disappointed 😔
I failed myself 😓
Sorry you got swindled into buying games on a bunch of different launchers.
I've not been "swindled" into anything, I've never paid for shit twice and I get most of my games DRM free on GOG. I use Epic exclusively for their free games.
I'm just sick of hearing Gabe's personal blowjob brigade pretending that monopolies and capitalism don't apply when it's a product they personally enjoy.
Monopoly isn't bad (or illegal) if it doesn't exploit and/or abuse it's market position, which Steam doesn't.
Monopolies are always bad. They give too much power to the people who do not deserve it. Even if the one in charge looks benevolent.
Tell me, what do you think would happen if Gabe died tomorrow?
Also it depends what's driving that attitude... if it's an ethos from Gabe then great but he won't be around forever... what happens when he dies/retires?
Many companies have started with great ethics that went out of the window when the founders moved on, and Steam is in a fantastic position to enshitify if it wanted to.
That's a lot or what-ifs. If a lot of companies enshittify, that doesn't mean all do. Especially when Valve is not publicly traded (sure, "for now"). It has a lot of credibility, especially compared to other launchers (EA, Ubi, Bethesda, Battle.net). And while there is GOG which is a great launcher aswell especially by selling games without DRM, it's one in a million.
By your logic, we shouldn't trust any company because they can all enshittify.
If you replaced "company" with "monopoly" in your last sentence, I agree.
Doesn't even have to be a monopoly, I have zero loyalty to any business beyond the product they give me. Trust is for people, not for some nebulous corporate entity who wants my money.
Monopolies are bad. Period. End of story.
You probably identify as leftist yet here you are shilling for corporate capitalism the moment you like the product.
I don't identify as neither, I do no follow politics, nor do I care about some left right bullshit.
But yeah, if a product is good, I do recommend it if there is discussion. Your regular Joe is not gonna build his own home printer, he goes to the store and either buys an HP, or a Brother. They don't know how to pirate games, they go to a launcher and buy it there.
You have to understand that not everyone has the freedom to choose, because they simply don't have time or don't give a fuck, and settle for something that someone recommends.
But it does abuse its market position. By setting very high developer/publisher fees and forcing everyone to pay them. Don't forget that from Steam perspective, developers and publisher are their consumers, not you. Their business is similar to supermarkets. Supermarkets don't sell stuff to you, they provide selling and logistics services to produce manufacturers.
But those fees are counteracted by large user base, which is large due to the fact the platform is great and provides it's users good features that aren't elsewhere. A s large user base means large buying power, which directly translates to higher sales and thus higher profits.
If a supermarket gives the customers a nice place to stay, and provides extra features others don't, the extra cost for having your store in there (in Steam terms higher commissions, although I personally think it's adequate, but I digress) is offset by having bigger profit overall.
That doesn't mean Steam doesn't abuse its power. Because they sure do.
How? By being a good company? Look at the Google Play Store lawsuit, and why were they sued, any why they lost. Steam is not abusing it's position. And if you think they do, gimme an example or two please.
Steam has several lawsuits and class actions over their head:
The competition kind of shot itself in the foot
Competition for the sake of competition isn't intrinsically a good thing.
Seems to me, most of the people complaining about Steam are greedy devs who want to make more money off of their products.
For me, as a user, that's not my concern. For me, as a user, it's more important that I can play games without having to download different launchers just to make someone else richer.
GOG is probably the only legitimate competitor with Steam. They provide value to customers instead of just themselves or greedy devs.
A nice thing about GOG is that you can choose whether or not you use their launcher. You can use GOG Galaxy, and it will download game updates and sync saves. or you can just not use it; and just launch the games directly. Or you can put shortcuts to the gog games into steam and launch them from there. Or you can launch your steam games from galaxy if you like. ... I appreciate that kind of stuff a lot, because although I think Steam does a good job, I'm very wary of lock-in and companies becoming too powerful.
(And of course, for real indie games, itch.io is the place to go.)
FTFY
Also, the only truly bad competition is subsidized competition. As long as it's not surviving on some kind of grant or funding, instead of its actual market value, then it's always a good thing as it keeps competitors on their toes.
That is looks like it's supposed to point out something negative.
Convenience is always something to consider as a customer in literally any product. It's most often the main driver between competitors and can make or brake a product.
So, yeah. Using another launcher that has 10% of the features and not a single upside while being incredibly inconvenient has not worked out. Fuck origin, uplay, and the likes.
Listen. Some of us have our life savings in our Steam library. If competition ever drives Steam bankrupt, we go down with the ship! We take Steam's health personally and very seriously. Your mumbo jumbo about competition doesn't factor into it.
That's why you buy from GOG.
No one wants Steam bankrupt, they just want more than one videogame vendor on PC to be viable.
"Mumbo jumbo about competition" I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or are just legitimately a braindead moron.
There are exceptions to the notion that competition is good. If we attempt to map out all the exceptions, we will be left with mumbo jumbo. Economic libertarianism is the true death of the brain. Some monopolies are good and any threat to the monopoly is a threat to the consumer.
As I've said elsewhere in this thread, the only bad competition is one that gets subsidized in order to survive. If they are operating on their own profit margins then they are definitionally "good competition."
No, zero monopolies are good. If you can even name one that you personally believe to somehow be good then I can explain why you're wrong.
At no point in time has a natural diversification of product sources has been bad for the consumer. The only exceptions to this relate back to point #1, the subsidized or otherwise "assisted" business model.
Tell me, does your childhood home have a lot of lead paint on the walls? We aren't trying to take down Steam FFS, just provide alternatives that force them to stay competitive by giving better service to the consumer.
The fact that you think a second source for videogames is somehow going to threaten you personally just shows how much of a zombie you are. Gabe isn't your lord and savior, he's just another rich guy who has a monopoly on his corner of the market. Grow the fuck up.
Ya because so far it doesn't seem to impact the consumer so it works for me lol. Valve has always had great sales too. If they jacked up prices YoY, and did evil things, then I'd welcome competition. But all I see at this point is lousy extra software to install a single game or two. Annoying. Fragmented. Just just media streaming.
GOG > itch.io > Steam > whale poo > everything else
For Linux, it's Steam and then anything that works with Bottles, Lutris or Heroic.
Blizzard had a legit decent platform for a while there. Real fall from grace.
Let's start a pool to predict how many years/months until Steam enshitifies. It WILL happen. It's just a matter of when.
Of course, but I'm not expecting that to happen until Gabe dies or retires. Until then I think Steam will be number 1.
For what reason? They have no shareholders .
Gabe won't live forever and usually someone new wants to put their vision up, and make their changes and feel special and then bam.
Mess.
So many missed opportunities for da profitz
Hopefully not soon, but probably once Gabe is gone if i had to guess.
If steam goes public, might as well start packing the bug out bag because shit is going to go south real quick.
Probably but that doesn't mean that I have to buy games on inferior platform now.
Now Epic games are next, hopefully.
I don't mind things being slightly spread out, even. What is like most though is if there were regulations that you cannot have exclusivity deals. Beyond a publisher not bothering to publish on store XYZ, there should never be a way a store is inherently excluded.
As in, fuck Epic.
I hope epic game store burns in hell, personally.
The power of a monopoly
HAHA
I know everyone loves Valve, but it feels super weird to be celebrating a monopoly so much and so ferociously. (I know Steam isn't a technical monopoly. We don't need to have that discussion)
Gaben is old, and he's gonna retire. It'll likely be a lot sooner than anyone here is comfortable with. When Valve gets sold, or even when gaben isn't in total control anymore, things are going to start changing, and there isn't going to be a healthy, diverse marketplace to soften that.
There is a very good chance that the PC platform will be a really horrible place because of the lack of consumer choice in which they can purchase and play games.
Steams biggest competition isn't another launcher, it's piracy. Gabe is wise enough to know that, if the next guy to take over is a chode they'll learn the hard way.
I'd also be winning if I could force all my competitors to match my prices despite my fees being higher than theirs.
What's forcing a publisher to sell for the same price on Epic or GOG than on Steam? They could always just not sell there (on Steam), or do a different edition of the game for each platform so they're independent tax units, or immediately run a coupon system for the other platform.
Mind you, that's the choice of the publisher. Not the platform. Someone else already corrected me that epic is doing something like this but that's based on the store not the publisher.
Plus, there's something to be said about a central store. For all we decry monopolies, most people have serious issues in their lives. Just got one random example, the recent free days I've heard consistent screaming and banging from my neighbor's flat. Turns out her eldest daughter is there, and her ex is using the children's against her, which in turn has caused the one that was already mentally unwell to become violent and aggressive without provocation being caught in the middle of all of that (and he keeps the children support money which draws out the legal process as she cannot hire a good lawyer).
Anyhow, point being: in such a situation, having one less tiny worry on your mind (like which of 1500 stores is safe or not) is quite good. The less extra shit to think about, the better. Android has other stores too but there's real value as a user not having to hunt down which place to get which app from. Mich like for physical goods Amazon got so big because having it all in one central place and for delivery is, well, quite convenient. Got real issues to worry about, no time to worry about small shit.
It of course feeds into a terminal monopoly, sure. But I cannot fault users who don't have the brain space for such issues for not investing into their choices of an immediate solution is easily available: just buying on steam.
(Plus, real value in something like Steam Link, modding, discussions, guides and reviews)
Steam's anti-competitive price rules
They can trivially get around that, as I've said. Plus there's always the option to avoid the anticompetitive place, like companies avoid selling through Amazon.
They literally cannot. If they offer a game at a lower price than Steam on other storefronts, Valve delists the game from Steam, which publishers cannot afford to since it's the de facto leader of the industry, and forfeiting Steam sales means forfeiting a huge chunk of sales. Listing "they could just not sell on Steam" as a "trivial" way to get around Steam's monopoly is so willfully moronic on so many levels that I don't think I need to explain to you why that would be a bad idea.
As for "doing a different edition of the game for each platform", that's also a no-go. The content parity clause extends to DLC as well, and the link provided above by the other user includes multiple examples of games that were forced to match Steam's price on other storefronts despite not being compatible. One such example:
Having a central store is nice and all, but I should not be forced to pay my games on GOG, Epic or whatever the same price that Valve charges on Steam. That doesn't benefit me in the slightest. Heck, if anyone else other than Valve was forcing their competitors to match their prices, the outcry from the gaming community would be huge, and justifiably so. But since it's Steam, nobody cares and "having a central store" is used as a smoke screen to cover their shitty monopolistic anti-consumer practices.
EDIT: My god, the Steam fanboys in this thread are insane. You can like the storefront and still criticize its anti-consumer practices. Your Lord and Saviour Gaben won't knock on your door to kiss you, no matter what you do.
Isn't.... This what a monopoly is?
Why are we celebrating that?
No? You can still buy these publisher's games from them if you prefer and, as far as I'm aware, steam doesn't have any stipulations that state once you sell on their platform that you can't do so on others. In fact, that's what these publisher's tried to do. They thought they could easily build their own competing storefronts and reap the money. And, as the article says, they're now crawling back. Turns out, Valve is pretty good at content delivery while remaining relatively consumer friendly.
More people should look up what a monopoly is before hosing everything with that label.
Remind me, which store is paying publishers for exclusivity?
Valve has objectively done far more good in the gaming space than any other company so I would say yes, their achievements are worth celebrating even if it is monopolistic. They've proven to be trustworthy for the time being, unlike other companies.
It's not a monopoly in the way that valve has does bad things to keep it that way, just that every other try has so far failed. Nothing has been close to as good as steam, and probably never will. GOG is good but they're not directly competing in the same way.
Yup, gog and steam are my 2 preferred platforms. Same_but_different.gif