Microsoft were already the dominant operating system in computing. Now they’re losing market share due to frequent bad decision making.
All they had to do was keep windows ticking over. But instead they looked to milk more revenue from their customer base in the form of advertising and telemetry data. That’s because shareholders demand ever increasing profits. Enshittification is always the result of a company going public… Never a question of if, only when; as soon as the passion has died in ownership (usually due to sale or change of management), the only drive becomes profit; and the user experience is stripped to accommodate. The same will be true one day for steam, unfortunately.
When Miamoto died, Nintendo just had to stay the course. They were never dominant, but they were ubiquitous and everyone enjoyed their products. Now the new guys don’t even play games, and the switch 2 price point is ridiculous, and they never fixed the issue with the joy con sticks, and prices never drop like they used to. You can’t count on new leadership being capable of continuing success, even when all they have to do is keep things on the exact same course.
Nintendo is gonna keep making the same 5 games with ever-improving graphics until they die. Doesn’t hurt that people are fine paying $80 every few years for the same game.
When steam came out with the orange box and set it up so that if you already had some of the games in the box, you could gift the other copies to people, I knew they were going to win the war.
I hope gaben lives forever, because I’m terrified of how instantly it will turn to shit when he’s not in charge anymore.
The fact that they don’t pull this shit is the reason they have the distribution market cornered.
We have to remember that gamers are not Valve’s primary customers. Game devs are. The market you’re referring to is the market of distributors available to game devs – NOT the market of storefronts available to gamers. In the PC space, the market of distributors is cornered by Valve and it allows them to take a big chunk of each sale from the game devs.
Don’t get me wrong, I love Steam and I think Valve has done some great things for gaming on PC and for gamers in general. That doesn’t change the fact that they are another cost a game dev must pay in order for them to create their goods, in an economic sense. Valve’s got the shelf space and devs don’t have much choice but to rent it out.
I think you are forgetting the other reason Valve cornered the market;
“One thing that we have learned is that piracy is not a pricing issue. It’s a service issue… The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It’s by giving those people a service that’s better than what they’re receiving from the pirates.”
Gabe Newell, CEO Valve - Speaking at the Washington Technology Industry Association’s (WTIA) Tech NW Conference.
Yeah, no I definitely agree they’re good to gamers. I also love how they have a flat structure, and I think Gabe seems like a smart guy. He’s given some interesting talks about economics. They’ve made a great platform for gamers, but it doesn’t quite change that their business model is based on taking a cut of the profit of work done by others. In most other scenarios, it’s easy for us to recognize when companies do this – amazon, Walmart, etc, but in Valves case they have such a great reputation among gamers and a fanbase of their own, I think the escape a good amount of warranted scrutiny (game dev side, not gamer side)
Valve’s fee is more than earned however. Steam as a storefront is highly trusted by users, it has a rock solid reputation that is hard to come by. As a distributor they take a one time fee for each copy sold, then they manage all of the costs from users downloading and downloading again for as long as the platform exists from that one time fee. Meanwhile if a developer were to do that themselves then they pay each time a user wants to download that game.
Sure the developers lose a bit more money than if they sold on another platform. But the higher up front cost to access the larger platform is a very worthwhile trade as can be seen by developers continually coming back.
Maybe. I’m not a game dev, so Im not sure I can say for sure. But it still remains that there isn’t much of a choice for game devs and Valve holds most of the cards. That level of centralization of power isn’t good, earned or otherwise. It’s evident that at least some devs aren’t happy how much of a cut Valve is taking.
Meanwhile if a developer were to do that themselves then they pay each time a user wants to download that game.
I’m not sure this is exactly right. They’d have to buy and maintain their own servers, or rent them from a cloud provider, but it wouldnt necessarily be a charge for every download. But maybe I’m being pedantic – you’re right that it costs some amount of money to store data and keep computers up.
I think probably from a game dev perspective, the issue here is Valve takes far more of a cut than whatever value they add to the experience itself. If you’re a team that just spent years of work on a game, the one-third cut Valve takes is just not proportional considering the amount of dev work, and is therefore considered extractive. Does that make sense?
I’m trying not to cast too much moral judgement here because we live in a capitalist system and corporations are going to seek profit in whatever way possible, and we are all indoctrinated into it, but from a perspective critical to that system, Valve are not good.
From a gamer perspective theyre a fucking godsend lmaooo
As a cloud engineer - renting any distribution servers from a cloud provider will result in a dev paying for every download. You pay based on the bandwidth you consume in the cloud (I.e., you pay per Gb delivered) as opposed to your pipeline like you do when you run your own private servers. You also pay storage costs per month. You’d have to maintain that “forever” as well, because people would want to uninstall, then re-install later.
I get your argument, and I’m not discounting it, but I do suspect that for smaller devs the price they’re paying to Valve is well earned on Valve’s side (and the fact that so many devs choose to use it would seem to bear this out). We should also consider that steam is essentially built-in DRM to games.
For larger customers, they likely have this infrastructure and get annoyed at the costs. They still go to Steam though because it increases their reach as a type of marketing strategy, so they still likely find the cut worth while. If Steam was more hostile to users, then people would actively look for alternatives (I.e., the Gogs of the world), and the publishers would have to target more storefronts.
So yes, Steam’s primary customers are publishers, but I’m not sure they’re really getting the raw end of the deal here :)
This right here. So much space and energy being used to bitch about Steam that could be used for, oh, I dunno… Sony. Microsoft. Nintendo. Giant players that have held tacit monopolies for years and literally engage in anticompetitive behavior on a regular basis.
If I had room for one more conspiracy theory, I could point to a handful of companies that probably would not be above paying people to bitch about Steam…
Slobbering fanbois like you are what drive me to bitch about steam. Steam is ok but the more people circle-jerk all over themselves about how amazing it is the more I hate it and them. It’s a service that lets you download an executable wrapped up in an application which feels like they took the worst possible parts of every generation of computing in the last 20 years. Its ridiculous to fanboi a downloader.
I bitch about steam because it has issues. I don’t bitch about the others because they have issues severe enough I just don’t use them whereas steam is running anytime my laptop is running
Steam doesn’t really have a market cornered? They aren’t stopping you from buying from elsewhere. They even let you add non-steam games to your library.
Playstation would as there are no other way of installing software without modding
However you like. Download it straight from the publisher, buy it on cdrom, buy it on gog, epic or any other platform. There’s no enforced monopoly for PC games, and the only one who could enforce one is Microsoft.
He’s asking how to register your non-Steam game with Steam such that you can re-download it from Steam later, which obviously can’t happen because of copyright law. It was a disingenuous question.
I’m almost certain this is how I got the first witcher on steam, using the key that was in the box with the physical game. So at some point at least using outside keys was supported.
In principle, copyright law doesn’t stop there being a system that lets you redeem the same key from Steam, Epic and Gog as long as it’s the same person behind all three acounts. There’s already a degree of precedent for this - when a publisher generates Steam keys to sell at other retailers (whether they’re codes-in-a-box at a physical shop or an online retailer like Humble Bundle), they don’t have to pay Valve a fee, but the keys can be redeemed on Steam and work just like if you’d bought the game from the Steam store where Valve would take a 30% cut. Valve probably don’t think it’s in their interest to make libraries transferrable/sharable between Steam and not-Steam, but if they change their mind, and the competitors that they’re building the transfer/sharing system with also thought it was in their interests (which is unlikely to happen at the same time), there’s nothing stopping them building it.
Isthereanydeal.com tracks prices and histories of most PC games. You can always check there to find the best current price and compare to what is being shown. If Steam was showing me something different I would know thanks to this.
Unless that site is secretly run by a shell corp owned by Gaben which tracks you and presents you the same price as you’d see on Steam. The conspiracy goes all the way to the top!
there are several websites that track the prices of all steam games, and it’s not steam that sets the prices, it’s the publisher. the price you see is the same price everyone in your region sees, no matter who they are. on top of that, family sharing means only one person needs the game anyway as long as it’s not one you’re playing together, so if they did do this then people would find out very quickly.
And then I see people complaining about Steam having so much of the market cornered. They 👏 don’t 👏 pull 👏 shit 👏 like 👏 this
👏 yet
What do you think will happen when Gaben our Lord dies?
You think their successor will be as merciful and follow Gabens vision? Or be blinded by the huge amount of money Steam makes?
Both. Steam is already the market leader in its industry. You just keep doing what you’re doing and you win.
Microsoft were already the dominant operating system in computing. Now they’re losing market share due to frequent bad decision making.
All they had to do was keep windows ticking over. But instead they looked to milk more revenue from their customer base in the form of advertising and telemetry data. That’s because shareholders demand ever increasing profits. Enshittification is always the result of a company going public… Never a question of if, only when; as soon as the passion has died in ownership (usually due to sale or change of management), the only drive becomes profit; and the user experience is stripped to accommodate. The same will be true one day for steam, unfortunately.
When Miamoto died, Nintendo just had to stay the course. They were never dominant, but they were ubiquitous and everyone enjoyed their products. Now the new guys don’t even play games, and the switch 2 price point is ridiculous, and they never fixed the issue with the joy con sticks, and prices never drop like they used to. You can’t count on new leadership being capable of continuing success, even when all they have to do is keep things on the exact same course.
Nintendo is gonna keep making the same 5 games with ever-improving graphics until they die. Doesn’t hurt that people are fine paying $80 every few years for the same game.
When steam came out with the orange box and set it up so that if you already had some of the games in the box, you could gift the other copies to people, I knew they were going to win the war.
I hope gaben lives forever, because I’m terrified of how instantly it will turn to shit when he’s not in charge anymore.
The fact that they don’t pull this shit is the reason they have the distribution market cornered.
We have to remember that gamers are not Valve’s primary customers. Game devs are. The market you’re referring to is the market of distributors available to game devs – NOT the market of storefronts available to gamers. In the PC space, the market of distributors is cornered by Valve and it allows them to take a big chunk of each sale from the game devs.
Don’t get me wrong, I love Steam and I think Valve has done some great things for gaming on PC and for gamers in general. That doesn’t change the fact that they are another cost a game dev must pay in order for them to create their goods, in an economic sense. Valve’s got the shelf space and devs don’t have much choice but to rent it out.
I think you are forgetting the other reason Valve cornered the market;
“One thing that we have learned is that piracy is not a pricing issue. It’s a service issue… The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It’s by giving those people a service that’s better than what they’re receiving from the pirates.”
Gabe Newell, CEO Valve - Speaking at the Washington Technology Industry Association’s (WTIA) Tech NW Conference.
Yeah, no I definitely agree they’re good to gamers. I also love how they have a flat structure, and I think Gabe seems like a smart guy. He’s given some interesting talks about economics. They’ve made a great platform for gamers, but it doesn’t quite change that their business model is based on taking a cut of the profit of work done by others. In most other scenarios, it’s easy for us to recognize when companies do this – amazon, Walmart, etc, but in Valves case they have such a great reputation among gamers and a fanbase of their own, I think the escape a good amount of warranted scrutiny (game dev side, not gamer side)
“Is based on taking a cut of the product of work done by others.”
That seems like a fair trade off for game developers in turn getting to use the platform who’s work was done by… Valve.
I understand why people make this argument but it’s really undercutting the value that Valve provides developers who utilize steam for distribution.
Valve’s fee is more than earned however. Steam as a storefront is highly trusted by users, it has a rock solid reputation that is hard to come by. As a distributor they take a one time fee for each copy sold, then they manage all of the costs from users downloading and downloading again for as long as the platform exists from that one time fee. Meanwhile if a developer were to do that themselves then they pay each time a user wants to download that game.
Sure the developers lose a bit more money than if they sold on another platform. But the higher up front cost to access the larger platform is a very worthwhile trade as can be seen by developers continually coming back.
Maybe. I’m not a game dev, so Im not sure I can say for sure. But it still remains that there isn’t much of a choice for game devs and Valve holds most of the cards. That level of centralization of power isn’t good, earned or otherwise. It’s evident that at least some devs aren’t happy how much of a cut Valve is taking.
I’m not sure this is exactly right. They’d have to buy and maintain their own servers, or rent them from a cloud provider, but it wouldnt necessarily be a charge for every download. But maybe I’m being pedantic – you’re right that it costs some amount of money to store data and keep computers up.
I think probably from a game dev perspective, the issue here is Valve takes far more of a cut than whatever value they add to the experience itself. If you’re a team that just spent years of work on a game, the one-third cut Valve takes is just not proportional considering the amount of dev work, and is therefore considered extractive. Does that make sense?
I’m trying not to cast too much moral judgement here because we live in a capitalist system and corporations are going to seek profit in whatever way possible, and we are all indoctrinated into it, but from a perspective critical to that system, Valve are not good.
From a gamer perspective theyre a fucking godsend lmaooo
As a cloud engineer - renting any distribution servers from a cloud provider will result in a dev paying for every download. You pay based on the bandwidth you consume in the cloud (I.e., you pay per Gb delivered) as opposed to your pipeline like you do when you run your own private servers. You also pay storage costs per month. You’d have to maintain that “forever” as well, because people would want to uninstall, then re-install later.
I get your argument, and I’m not discounting it, but I do suspect that for smaller devs the price they’re paying to Valve is well earned on Valve’s side (and the fact that so many devs choose to use it would seem to bear this out). We should also consider that steam is essentially built-in DRM to games.
For larger customers, they likely have this infrastructure and get annoyed at the costs. They still go to Steam though because it increases their reach as a type of marketing strategy, so they still likely find the cut worth while. If Steam was more hostile to users, then people would actively look for alternatives (I.e., the Gogs of the world), and the publishers would have to target more storefronts.
So yes, Steam’s primary customers are publishers, but I’m not sure they’re really getting the raw end of the deal here :)
This right here. So much space and energy being used to bitch about Steam that could be used for, oh, I dunno… Sony. Microsoft. Nintendo. Giant players that have held tacit monopolies for years and literally engage in anticompetitive behavior on a regular basis.
If I had room for one more conspiracy theory, I could point to a handful of companies that probably would not be above paying people to bitch about Steam…
(points up ^^^)
Slobbering fanbois like you are what drive me to bitch about steam. Steam is ok but the more people circle-jerk all over themselves about how amazing it is the more I hate it and them. It’s a service that lets you download an executable wrapped up in an application which feels like they took the worst possible parts of every generation of computing in the last 20 years. Its ridiculous to fanboi a downloader.
I bitch about steam because it has issues. I don’t bitch about the others because they have issues severe enough I just don’t use them whereas steam is running anytime my laptop is running
Steam doesn’t really have a market cornered? They aren’t stopping you from buying from elsewhere. They even let you add non-steam games to your library.
Playstation would as there are no other way of installing software without modding
How do I install my non steam games?
However you like. Download it straight from the publisher, buy it on cdrom, buy it on gog, epic or any other platform. There’s no enforced monopoly for PC games, and the only one who could enforce one is Microsoft.
In the library list on the left scroll down until you find “+ non steam game”
He’s asking how to register your non-Steam game with Steam such that you can re-download it from Steam later, which obviously can’t happen because of copyright law. It was a disingenuous question.
I’m almost certain this is how I got the first witcher on steam, using the key that was in the box with the physical game. So at some point at least using outside keys was supported.
In principle, copyright law doesn’t stop there being a system that lets you redeem the same key from Steam, Epic and Gog as long as it’s the same person behind all three acounts. There’s already a degree of precedent for this - when a publisher generates Steam keys to sell at other retailers (whether they’re codes-in-a-box at a physical shop or an online retailer like Humble Bundle), they don’t have to pay Valve a fee, but the keys can be redeemed on Steam and work just like if you’d bought the game from the Steam store where Valve would take a 30% cut. Valve probably don’t think it’s in their interest to make libraries transferrable/sharable between Steam and not-Steam, but if they change their mind, and the competitors that they’re building the transfer/sharing system with also thought it was in their interests (which is unlikely to happen at the same time), there’s nothing stopping them building it.
since we’re asking bad faith questions, allow me a bad faith answer.
through the fucking launcher for that non-Steam game, you absolute knob.
That you know of
Isthereanydeal.com tracks prices and histories of most PC games. You can always check there to find the best current price and compare to what is being shown. If Steam was showing me something different I would know thanks to this.
Unless that site is secretly run by a shell corp owned by Gaben which tracks you and presents you the same price as you’d see on Steam. The conspiracy goes all the way to the top!
...
/s, obviously.
Plus family accounts kinda negate any use for such pricing schemes.
there are several websites that track the prices of all steam games, and it’s not steam that sets the prices, it’s the publisher. the price you see is the same price everyone in your region sees, no matter who they are. on top of that, family sharing means only one person needs the game anyway as long as it’s not one you’re playing together, so if they did do this then people would find out very quickly.