Microsoft GamePass was serious competition and they ruined it, for now. They had managed to build a system where there was no reason for folks not to buy in, people got nearly unlimited games and then often paid for DLC and cash shop items for games they didn’t even own. It was converting the average gaming market to an a la cart style cash shop which as much as 2010 me would consider this offensive, today it is often better for gamers without money.
The only other thing that would seriously compete with Steam would be a marketplace that had tradeable games but I think the game makers don’t want this so no developer would sign up for it.
Itch.io exists and it does a fantastic niche gaming distribution job so I don’t see how a new competitor can do better than what is already out there.
Microsoft GamePass was serious competition
It never was. There was no chance that a service like that would be profitable in the gaming world unless the monthly costs become astronomical per user which would automatically lose most subscribers.
The fact that they have made terrible business choices doesn’t mean it is impossible to make good one.
The subscription model is not for driving positive revenue it is to smooth out investor concerns. You have steady revenue streams to reassure that your market is stable so you don’t suffer as hard when you drop a Redfall.
The big issue is massive failure of handling day 1 releases. They made it TOO good of a deal. It probably is a corporate structure issue where the division owning game pass was able to sacrifice a neighboring divisions revenue so they could get good metrics.
In the time Steam has been a thing, Microsoft has been three or four different revisions of how their game system works. I still have titles that try to use Windows Live logins.
Microsoft is brilliant at formulating decent ideas, fumbling it, then struggling to hold it together before they reformulate and start from ground one yet again. They keep hitting the reset and ruining nay decent moment they gain.
Gabe will eventually die and the MBA that takes over will see the quick paycheck.
Still a couple of decades tho
Gabe’s medical Half-Life (not the game) of his atoms decay slower than a normal human being.
Gabe will probably have it own by all of valve employees, so enshitification would be less likely.
Maybe I’m wrong but hey let me have some hope.
Owned by employees (continuously) vs shares given to current employees are two very different concepts.
But yeah, let us have some hope, otherwise it’s GoG or the high seas.
turn it into a coop you say?
Exclusive image of Valve HQ
I personally think he might go with a trust that way it will still stay in the family
Any source for his intentions?
There’s no public knowledge of his intentions. However Gabe speaks on how Valve operates plenty and in general, if the industry is doing one thing, they often explore doing the complete opposite.
Valve’s primary thesis is exceptionally talented people are most productive when they don’t need to think about money, are surrounded by other exceptionally talented people, and there’s minimal people telling those people what to do.
I doubt Gabe would want the soul of Valve to die with him so his succession plan will factor that in.
exceptionally talented people are most productive when they don’t need to think about money, are surrounded by other exceptionally talented people, and there’s minimal people telling those people what to do.
This all immediately goes out the window as soon as they go public
This is covered in the video I linked…
“Valve is not a publicly traded company. Being a publicly traded company adds a bunch of headaches and it [doesn’t] really solve any problems for us… It [would mean] that control around decision making now involved third parties… The whole point of being a privately held company is to eliminate another source of noise in the signal between the consumers and producers of a good.”
Valve are absurdly profitable. What purpose would being public serve? They don’t need to raise extra capital, they don’t have shareholders to provide liquidity to, they don’t need the brand recognition, they don’t need stock for acquisition currency, they don’t need it to attract or retain talent, Gabe doesn’t need an exit strategy when he’s already cash flush to be buying mega yachts.
For every reason companies go public, none of them would benefit Valve.
Exactly - which is why going public is generally not in the interests of any sustainable company or their customers.
It is, however, in the interests of (1) company insiders that want a huge payout, (2) companies that are not sustainable pre-IPO and need to transition their business model or practice and set the IPO as a ticking clock where they fund or fail, and (3) companies and CEOs who borrow cancer’s business model and are dissatisfied by anything except infinite expansion.
None of those benefit the customer and it makes it rational to expect an IPO to destroy what’s good about a company and its products.
I can imagine a nightmare where they add a monthly subscription for something to get a foot in the door. “Just $1.99 for unlimited cloud saves! Storage isn’t free you’re supporting the devs!”
A lot of people will pay it because “gamers” are, famously, little better than children.
Then it’s downhill from there. More subscriptions. Free service thinned. Popularity gone.
It’s what always happens when that kind of person gets in.
What makes you think that? From what I’ve heard, management is already pretty separated from any of the actual devs at Valve. Orders come down from on high ( they’re not even in the same building) and the rest have to scramble to make it happen with their isolated “flat hierarchy” setup.
That’s why they have been trying to cripple it with other nefarious means under the pretence of “safety”.
You know how it usually is relatively straightforward to create the alternative to something that already exists and make it better, but the network effect is usually the reason why your alternative will fail?
well, with valve you don’t just have the network effect, but also trying to replicate everything steam does is a giant undertaking. you’ll be looking at several years of work (if you can get a couple dozen employees) just to catch up to where steam is now (or like 5 years ago I guess? :D). and then what? you have a fully functional empty store, congratz.
this is why alternative stores usually just narrowly focus on the store aspect. itch, GOG, and those big publisher launchers like ubi connect, are all basically just ways to buy games without getting valve involved. but their narrow focus also allows them to do something different without having to compete with steam.I mean obvs there are things valve should improve that most likely aren’t gonna happen without serious competition, but at the same time I don’t think this is gonna happen unless a benevolent billionaire decides to throw their hat into the ring. sadly, benevolent billionaire is a oxymoron.
According to Epic you can just vibe-code a competitor now ;P
The fall of Epic and Tim are really sad, but at the same time also extremely hilarious to watch. He is so pro AI and yet so completely incapable of using AI to do anything right…
so completely incapable
of using AIto do anything right…Ftfy
Tbh, a lot of people don’t bother with many of Steam’s additional social features. Some people actively hate those features, seeing them as bloat
Even without the social features there’s still so much you’d need to copy (I think the social stuff might even be the easiest stuff to copy and get right (or do better))
No need to copy everything. Just make a good working and faithful to customers service. Not many do use steam link, family share or workshop. But almost everyone want to be able to see game reviews, buy a game, play with friends, have saves in cloud, share Screenshots and customize their profiles.
None of these features are difficult to reproduce. Considering money that Microslop and EGS have, this should be a 7 days job for a decent team.
Bonus points if anyone of these giant companies dips their toes into Linux gaming and local streaming. If 3rd party devs can do it, why not EGS?
Yeah, but there’s always that one feature that you love. For me, it’s the accessibility features that devs can list for their game. Makes my life soooo much easier for filtering out games I can’t play due to motor issues.
If a competitor doesn’t have that, I’m not even going to consider them at this point.
Both GOG and Epic stores are quite full of games. Give developers the chance to sell things, and they’ll take it.
GOG doesn’t have everything since they require DRM-free, but I do most of my indie-game purchases on there. GOG have said in the past that their most-requested feature from developers is “can you make your achievements / social integration just basically exactly the same as Steam, so that it’s easier for us to integrate?”. Means game updates sometimes take longer to arrive, but hey.
Heroic launcher starts faster than Steam, so I’ll grab whatever’s free on Epic that week while waiting for it to load; but fuck giving Tim Sweeney any money obviously. Seems to have quite a variety of stuff, tho.
The problem with displacing a company with established network effects is that simply “just as good” isn’t enough - you need to be much better to start moving people over. And I’m not really clear what “much better than Steam” looks like. They have great Linux support, great workshop integration, regular sales, the forums are well-regulated, and so on.
You can’t compare alternative stores like GOG and Epic directly to Steam though, because of all the additional stuff Steam offers that GOG, Epic, and all those other indie stores can’t replicate.
That’s also why I don’t see those as competition to Steam, and more like enhancements. You can buy you DRM-free game on GOG and enjoy some of the benefits on Steam at the same time.
Thinking about it Epic might have the closest shot what with their whole Fortnite and UE stuff offering a lot of the backbone that Steam offers, but even they bungled it so hard they had to bribe devs for temporary exclusivity.
but also trying to replicate everything steam does is a giant undertaking
I don’t even use that many features of steam, so I don’t think replicating them all is required. Probably starting at the top few and prioritising by usage/request would be enough. Attracting devs and the up-front costs for not just dev but infra is probably the most prohibitive thing.
You might not use that many features, but you can’t know what other users and developers might need. For some, the built in multiplayer and voice system might be a make or break feature, and for others it might be remote play together.
With how many users, developers, and features there are, it’s not enough to start replicating a couple features and promising more later. When is the last time you bought into a promise and weren’t disappointed? If you want to be serious competition, you better give it your all.I can’t know, of course, but it is possible to start in one area to an MVP to a good chunk of people and add features by requested priority. Trying to do all of it all at once so feels like the wrong approach (with 20 years of software engineering and some project management experience)
I don’t see it happening. Before Steam, the only way PC games were being sold were GameStop (barely), computer stores and retailers. I don’t think anybody wants to go back to that or maybe they do just for nostalgic sakes but PC gaming has largely taken off from the physical media days.
God forbid the freaking Saudis start pitching offers for Valve. Or Tencent. Or Epic Games.
All that needs to happen is just one gullible person to allow it to happen, just one, within Valve when Gabe is gone.
Steam is to convenient. I’ve stopped with trying to get games for cheap anywhere else. Because it’s too simple to have them inside our steam library. Updates and Saves files are synced too with steam.
As long as they do what they have been doing, this deal will just go on. And they know it.
Let’s hope the plans after Gabe’s passing (if he is indeed a mortal human) is the same.
Shocking, that when a company’s real purpose and focus is to make a product for customers, as opposed to making money for the investors, it is better for the customers…
Gabe dying is the major thing I fear in my life… It’s the last compamy I know about that’s not getting enshitiffied.
Ehh, I’m a big fan of valve but their hands are not perfectly clean. They do run the gambling machine for a shitfuck ton of money, even putting aside the rest of steam.
Now ofc, that whole “the rest of steam” part is still there and is obviously their main income, I recognize. And MOST importantly, fuck Sweeny and that dogshit other place. I just think we do give valve maybe not enough discredit sometimes?
The major thing? Not global thermonuclear war? Not global warming leading to massive political and economic instability? Not democratic backsliding?
I like my PC games as much as the next guy, but let’s be reasonable: It’s just a luxury good.
Honestly am not too worried about what you’ve mentioned.
Those things will upset my life so radically, that there’s no point in worrying about that, plus I have a lot of first world privlidge buffer before it realistically affects my life. I’m not saying that it wouldn’t suck, but I don’t care. A lot of things will go to absolute life-changing shit for everyone around me if it also affects me.
Steam getting majorly enshitified will affect the major thing in my life, that I rely on to be able to handle the rest and retain at least some of my sanity, while changing nothing about the rest of my circumstances. It’s something I interact with daily.
Yes, I am reasonable, this is the thing I worry about the most, but I do recognize that it’s a privilige.
Alright, fair enough. Totally understandable position, now that I get the full picture. Sorry if I was a bit blunt.
No worries! It made me honestly consider my opinions in broader, more real sense, and they still hold, so you did give me food for thought. So no offence taken.
Someone: “I just had the worst day”
DdCno: “Oh, the Worst day? Did you get diagnosed with cancer? Did you get hit by a bus and suffer full body paralysis? Did you lose your home and entire family in a fire? I don’t understand figures of speech!”
I’m a rather literal person who tends to overthink things. Can’t help it.
We have GOG too
I love GOG but I am concerned about their lack of transparency regarding AI slop.
At least you know they can never enshitify what you have already bought and downloaded.
Eh…
Care to elaborate?
Eh…
Isn’t this the same with steam?
Devs have an option to put DRM on. If the game doesn’t have DRM on steam, you van do the same thing, if it has DRM, then it isn’t available on GoG anyway.
At least that is how I understood it.
True, and I use it whenever I can, but GoG is (as far as I know, maybe they contribute) not working on making sure games run on Linux (Proton), or increasing the Linux market share.
Proton is open source, you don’t need to use steam to benefit from it.
Tbh I have no idea what the current situation of Proton is. I thougjt it’s FOSS, but most of the development is/was done by Valve employees, so people paid for their work, that they made open source, instead of hoping for volunteers.
Please correct me if I’m wrong, but I assumed the situation is still the same - most of Proton development is done by people with Valve’s resources, and the general public contribution is small-ish --i.e people who do GE-Proton, or other runtimes.
But the core is work paid for by Valve. Of course, ot might live on wirhoute Valve support, it is a FOSS project, but what I understood, currently, the majority of development time is on Valve payroll.
Huh. What an unexpectedly damning indictment of the extraction-oriented enshittification market aka capitalism
It’s not, really. Steam runs under capitalism. They’re just a super outlier in that they’re a billion dollar company that doesn’t have shareholders. They’re basically the wet dream that conservatives are trying to sell you but that just fails 99.9% of the time due to greed.
They’re basically the wet dream that conservatives are trying to sell you but that just fails 99.9% of the time due to greed.
I wonder what is the driving force for capitalism…
Is it the Singular pursiut of profit to enrich oneself?
Is there another wird for that?
Could that be the very motivation the system is build upon?
So the whole system doesnt Work how it is promoted, but is just a facade to keep the status quo and that means the rich stay rich and the poor stay barely not revolting.
So of course No Steam doesnt run under capitalism it crawls under capitalism. It works despite of capitalism.
Comrade Gaben’s yacht is the people’s yacht, apparently.
The Point
Whoosh
Your Head
The support and research vessel https://aftermath.site/gabe-newell-steam-valve-yacht/
You’re confused. Steam is an American company and America is (you may have noticed) a capitalist nation.
The point is that you can participate and thrive in capitalism without doing every resource extracting enshittification strategy in the book, which seems to be just Business 101 these days.
Is Steam perfect? Probably not. But most other major players in this space seem to leap at every chance to charge people more while worsening their product and then we get thought pieces wondering how Steam remains popular by virtue of not actively making things worse.
The point is that you can participate and thrive in capitalism without doing every resource extracting enshittification strategy in the book
The point is, that’s still capitalism.
When someone asserts ‘capitalism is intrinsically awful because it’s inseparable from x y and z’ they cannot then praise a successful company doing capitalism without x y or z. You’re supposed to experience this thing called cognitive dissonance. Contradictory ideas should not fit in your brain.
Didn’t say it wasn’t still Capitalism. But there is still nuance between one company doing everything it can to squeeze alout as much ‘potential profit’ possible at the expense of their products and the consumers v one that maintains the quality of product and service a the expense of ‘potential profit’.
Whatever Ism you prefer still requires people to set and maintain a standard. The lack of standards and accountability is how you get the race to the bottom.
You didn’t but the person they replied to did.
So of course No Steam doesnt run under capitalism
So you would disagree that the driving Factor of capitalism is Profit?
Because that is all i said factually. I said in a tone you dont like, but nonetheless.
What other economic system do you imagine Valve is operating under?
So of course No Steam doesnt run under capitalism it crawls under capitalism. It works despite of capitalism.
I really don’t know what you’re trying to say here. These terms are not mutually exclusive.
To be honest to explain this to you is like explaining a fish what is Air or a blind Person the color yellow, so no worries.
Yeah I didn’t think so.
Capitalism SLAMMED by Steam Store market analysis. “Eat my shorts, jabronies” capitalism was heard saying in response.
They just need to continue to put out a product/service that makes customers feel like they are the priority as opposed to enterprise customers. Very few regular people focused companies these days. Another example would be Costco, which people also love despite being public, which makes them a super unicorn.
It’s very rare these days for companies to put focus on regular people for money instead of knowing they can abuse them due to lack og options regular folk have. And the bar is so low that it is enough to have people content.
Customers don’t even need to be the priority anymore. A business that isn’t actively hostile to their customers is probably enough at this point.
Yeah, like Crucial deciding it isn’t worth it to sell to consumers anymore, since they make more selling to enterprise customers buying millions to billions in bulk.
Do they realize that what they really said was: having shareholders destroys businesses.
Private companies have shareholders as well.
That’s a new one for me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shareholder
Both public companies and private corporation have shareholders.
But only for companies participating in the equity ownership, right? I’m not fully versed with that, so need to ask here. I don’t know how this works with Gabe and Valve. I think the important detail here is, that Valve is not publicly traded and can decide who buys shares from their company and could reject any money. I don’t think this is possible with publicly traded companies, right?
i think in private corporations only a very limited amount of shareholders can have shares
If they are shareholders, they hold at least one share. Every one of them. There’s no limit on number of shareholders or shares held. But those shares are not publicly traded.
There are limits on shareholders in private companies.
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/5/500-shareholder-threshold.asp
Looks like the number is 2000, but that excludes employees. It used to be 500.
That’s only a (USA) reporting limit. A private company can still have more than 2000 shareholders, but it must then publicly report its finances like a public company would.
Fair… but why would any private company do that without going public? Do any?
Yeah, often times if a company needs a loan then they open up a stake.
Ownership of companies via shares is only for LLCs (which is a possibility but in practice uncommon) and Corporations and both Sole Proprietorships and Partnerships do not have shares.
That said, it is indeed possible for a company to have ownership by shares and not be publicly traded (i.e. not in the stock market) so for example a corporation with no traded shares would be a private corporation.~
This is what I found out for the US by searching for “types of companies” and “LLC shares”.
The countries I lived in and owned companies in Europe have similar things but with different names (for example what a Partnership in the US is roughly what’s called a “Society by quotas” in Portugal and is actually the most common kind of company).
In my experience people that never had their own registered business don’t usually know any of this because they have no need to look into it.
Anyone who isn’t head deep in Capitalism understands that, yeah.
Lol, this is an unironically awesome takeaway.
shareholders in public companies dont care about the health of the business
I was thinking around the same, more specifically that what they’re saying is that “in the long run companies managed to produce value for shareholders actually produce less value that companies managed to produce value for a single private owner”.
This is actually pretty consistent with what we see in many industries with both kinds of companies and a pretty daming indictment of publicly traded companies as a mechanism for increasing value creation.
Note the exception to the rule is Private equity looking for a place to unload debt and need a fall guy
The full quote in the context of the article makes it even worse:
“As long as Valve is independent and not a publicly traded company, they probably have a certain ambition, but not an extraordinary ambition,” Rosier says. “So I think they can still decide to make some decisions that are player-first, and that helps, right? To get the goodwill from the players.”
So, customers like using a product that focuses on the customers to create profits, rather than extracting profits by abusing the customer? How unambitious… /s
and that helps, right? To get the goodwill from the players
It helps?! It HELPS?!! That’s the fuckin customer base right there, that’s engagement, customer retention, customer satisfaction and THE top reason for sales.
“It helps” pffftt… it does not help, it’s the ENTIRE PRODUCT
The industry is unwilling to cope with this fact
This is what is endemic in our current shareholder first sustem, it’s not about profits, it’s about leveraging the stock, products, customers, image and every other tool at their disposal to manage the value that the shareholders control so they can game the stock market as they see fit. Everything else is secondary.
Pretty sure epic will. They got their super intelligence to help them lol
The government could pass a law (GASP!!!) requiring license agreements to be transferable. But capitalists aren’t actually interested in free markets, are they?
We are overdue for a digital bill of rights written by people that understand computers and the Internet aren’t magic.
i just dont see that happening. the venn overlap of the people who understand computers and who politic/wtite bills is too small
The freedom to buy competitors to shut them down and stifle innovation and competition. The freedom to grow exponentially and buy politicians. The freedom to literally get away with murder.
That’s the “free market” billionaires refer to, when they sarcastically use the term.
Did anyone see the prices for electronics? I’m looking in the low hundreds. Where did they go? I know we put them down here somewhere last modem. Sound cards were in that $30 bin over there! Where’s all the stuff?
I remain baffled at how few studios sell their games directly on their own site.
The practical barriers are virtually nonexistent, so I’m assuming there’s some form of capitalist fuckery going on behind the scenes that makes it financially unviable?
there’s some form of capitalist fuckery going on behind the scenes that makes it financially unviable?
Uhh. It’s that Steam is an effective monopoly?
They hold all the attention, all the recommendations, so if you aren’t on Steam you are practically invisible.
There are a few major games that only self publish. Starsector is one, of the top of my head. Hence it is practically invisible to most.
Ok but publishing yourself doesn’t block you from also listing on Steam, or does it?
It determines the price. If you “self-publish” on a web shop or something with DRM free downloads, you have to price it the same as on Steam, otherwise Steam may delist you. So devs can’t get around the 30% fee by offering a discount on their store.
And… practically, if the storefronts are the same price, most will just buy on Steam.
There can be other complications related to scammers, but that’s not Valve’s fault. Supporting both also takes more dev effort.
Rimworld took this route, at least for some time. It started only self published via the Ludeon Store yet ended up mostly on Steam because that’s where all the attention and mods went. I have the game bought both places, oddly enough.
Common misconception. You only have to price-match when selling Steam keys on another platform. If you sell a non-Steam copy of the game, you can price it however you want
also it didn’t particularly make sense on its own terms. Even if I am committed to pricing the same as on Steam, I still get to keep that extra 30% on the sales that I do make.
And it’s not as though the sum total of marketing you do for a game is stick it up on Steam and wait for the recommendations to pour in. But still most game promos and ads I see include a Steam link rather than one to the studio’s store.
There’s over 100,000 games on Steam now, so the notion that you’re relying them to market your game for you is highly suspect.
There are practical barriers still tho. You’ll have to either maintain or outsource maintaining:
- hosting infrastructure
- CDN
- Security (both frontend and backend)
- DRM (either serial numbering or yet another hosted verification services)
- user accounts and data handling
- payment processing
And that’s for a basic game, if you want feature parity with steam, add on top:
- version control and access (playtests, betas)
- version control for other platforms (Mac, Linux)
- hosting for savefile sync, achievements
- hosting for UGC (mods, screenshots, configs, recording)
- hosting and infrastructure for user livestreaming
- CDN for mods
- review (automated or manual) for mods or UGC
- legal protection and compliance against UGC
- multiplayer service infrastructure
- automated/manual moderation of game servers/lobbies
- anticheat system
- hosting for newsfeed (update announcements, news)
- and so on, you get the point…
By the time you implement the basic stuff and half of the extras, might as well pay the 30% commission and just focus on what you wanted to do: make games. Instead of having to cosplay as a sysadmin or orchestrate 15 different providers
The things on that list are all technically true but at the same time not really that big a deal? Certainly they’re all solved problems already. Making a good video game in the first place is harder than any of those things.
Yup, that’s my whole point. It leeches time and resources that might amount to more than what valve takes as commission
My steam account is 22 years old. I probably have 400+ games on there. I do believe in GOG and try to buy games there where I can, but if I have a choice between the major platforms, I will pretty much always choose steam. I bought a bunch of games on Xbox Live and my PS3 back in the 2000s that I no longer have access to. There’s a certain subset of gamers for whom Steam will always be the platform of choice.
