Valve "played capitalism so well they broke it" and now Steam can't be replaced

bhouston

Once you have a sufficient good solution that you like, you will not switch to another sufficient good solution unless you are highly motivated to switch. It can not be just 5% better or 10% better, it needs to be meaningfully better so that you are motivated to undergo the switching cost. Part of that switching cost is your purchased game library only works with the platforms you purchased it from. A fact that currently greatly benefits mostly Steam on desktop platforms. So I do expect that a court case in the future will be Epic Games suing Steam in order to have "game portability" between game platforms.

add-sub-mul-div

It's not cool that they successfully made themselves a rent seeker on PC game installation because gamers below a certain age didn't want to learn how to click on setup.exe. We needlessly gifted them a closed platform where it had previously been open in a way that Playstation (for example) is not.

cheschire

Well as a linux gamer, I'm ok with this. Nobody has been more successful at getting linux to be a first class gaming platform.

a15971

They are currently a very benevolent monopolist: they don't seriously compete with publishers that use their platform. They only occassionally produce a great Half-Life or DOTA game as a some sort of "halo effect" demo to encourage the industry to move forward (e.g. to show how VR is done right with Half-Life Alyx). Avoiding releasing Half-Life 3 might have been good for their neutral role. They are like a TSMC of game distributors, who explicitly promised not to compete with their customers. They remain one-stop shop for games. The gamers don't have to weigh down their systems with a bunch of different bloated game stores, each "needing" several GB of memory occupied at all times and adding minutes to machine startup. Not to mention conflicts between a bunch of different anti-cheat and anti-piracy technologies on the same machine. And stores with bad UX (e.g. that make you suffer additional wait screens or naggings; Steam is as unobstructive as it gets). Compare that to Netflix: at the begining, it was a "one stop shop" for movies, it had a lot of classic movies and TV for reasonable price. When the concept was proven, the production houses revoked the license for content. Competition came to the sector and each movie production house set up their own subscription based streaming service. You need to keep paying a whole bunch of services if you want to be able to keep up with all popular TV production or watch classic movies. So, the competition would in theory be great. But even if stores didn't have subscriptions, the gamers don't want to fill their personal data, check privacy settings, configure, troubleshoot, debloat, ... a different app store for each game. When people have a slice of time to play, they don't want to deal with all of these. I'm sure that when Valve forgets what keeps them successful and start becoming a Netflix, the Steam store will get replaced.

ManBeardPc

Steam created a platform that works for developers, gamers and the platform itself. It is managed well. They pushed Linux gaming. They are not perfect and monopolies are dangerous but currently they are beneficial for the gaming community as a whole. They have not won capitalism they just have a consistent product that they didn’t enshitify to squeeze out ever short term earnings they can. I only fear that at some point someone greedy takes over and ruins it. Epic failed to create a proper alternative even with a good example and many many years of time to iterate on it.

superkuh

Wow. What propaganda. People use Steam because Valve isn't evil. It's as simple as that. Epic is evil. They're at the bleeding edge of in-game gambling with microtransactions. And they actively compete with their customers. Epic has even used their position with the Epic engine to clone a business customer's game and release it for free in their walled garden. As a gamer Epic stole the game Rocket League from me after I purchased the native linux version from the company Psyonix. Then Epic bought Psyonix and said there'd be no changes to Rocket League. 6 months later and no linux or mac clients people bought could play the game. Epic just buys game companies and puts their games behind it's app store and/or gives them away for free to try to lock people into their app store. They're abusive and exploitive and they constantly lie and make things worse for every game they buy. People don't like that kind of behavior from Epic so they chose not to use their products and app store. This is just crybullying from Epic.

intrikate

It's not even about wanting other stores to fail, which I don't. That's an unproductive line of thinking for anyone, I believe. My Steam account is old enough to drink. I've had it for some two-thirds of my life, not even adult life but life entirely. All of my games are already there. It's like if a friend invited you to come play video games in 1989 but he doesn't have the cool NES games you want to play, they're all back at my place. What, we're gonna play Clu Clu Land all day? Give me a break. Even if I was to switch to Epic, outside of the supposed altruism of "We take less of a cut from developers!" what is the benefit for me as a gamer, or as a consumer? The Epic Games Store has very few games I can't get elsewhere, even on console, and the experience compared to Steam is just lackluster. It just is. Valve has had a lot of time to iterate on it, and Steam was absolutely despised for the first several years of its life, but the experience of using the two platforms could not be more different. Beyond that, if I do switch, I still need to have Steam installed because all like seven million of my games are already on Steam, and they can't be moved.

parlortricks

All I read in that article was another bunch of whinging from EPIC again. If they want to displace Steam, than they are going to have to put in 110% effort to at least make the same thing Steam is, or better. So far they haven't tried hard enough and failed miserably. Saying you can replace Steam with a quick bit of vibe coding really misses the point in what Steam covers. Here's a few things Steam does: - Digital store - Cloud features for saving, achievements etc.. - Multiplayer and social tools. Discussions, guides etc.. - User workshop for mods, which is just amazing for the games that support it fully - Streaming and remote play - Library sharing with the family - Offline access - Mobile access - Steamworks for developers - Proton for Linux, just fantastic, and how I use the ecosystem today There are probably more things I have missed, but I don't know of any other platform that does the above? If Tim and his team spent as much time on making their platform better than on whinging they might have something to compete with. He could have had another draw card with UT4 but he killed that, for his cash cow Fortnite. He put all his eggs in one basket and realises he doesn't have enough for an omelette now. I would love another competitor and I think that is GOG, if they can keep up the momentum and stick to their difference, encouraging studios to release DRM free games. I use both platforms and I am happy with both. They are probably right though, why would I move to another platform, when my whole library is already with Steam. I am not going to waste that money to use another platform, and I don't need or want the fragmentation that currently exists for streaming content. There is probably room for another successfull platform, Steam really does need proper competition to keep them on their toes. dunno how to bullet list...

SockThief

The biggest moat of Steam is not being greedy assholes. GOG is doing fine. itch.io is good enough. Epic is just crap and it shows.

unpopularopp

On the other hand every single time everyone is glazing over the unregulated gambling market created by Valve which is available to everyone regardless of their age and location. The whole empire is running on the Steamweb API and Valve could shut it down any single day if they want but they don't because... we know the answer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skin_gambling

thayne

> "Even if an alternative were objectively better, by whatever metric you care about, it would still be of no interest to Steam users," I don't think that's necessarily true. If there was a launcher that was at least as good as steam in every aspect, and also had access to more games it would stand a chance of competing. Especially if its store also had lower prices.

joshheitzman

Steam can absolutely be replaced. There's lots that could be improved in the process of sifting through tens of thousands of games to find the ones I want to play. I have Epic's store installed on my gaming PC as I still play Fortnite. It has none of the things I want improved over the Steam experience. Literally none. Put up or shut up Epic. I'm unemployed so you can hire me to do it for you, but I'll bet you'd rather just whine about it.

2001zhaozhao

The criticism is right in a vacuum, but suppose that Epic Games got their way and successfully replaced Steam. Then what? We'd just end up with a new corporate landlord over PC gaming, albeit one that is also a private company and maybe charges lower fees, but has somewhat less proven reputation than Steam to not make future greedy changes to needlessly screw over users.

jongjong

The same could be said about any social media or content hosting and discovery platform.

darth_avocado

Okay, if steam is holding gaming back, why hasn’t an alternative emerged? Apparently Valve maintains healthy margins after taking a 30% cut. What’s stopping other companies from taking a smaller cut and passing the benefits to consumers. Gamers are notoriously complaining about high costs of games, I’m sure that’s a viable strategy? Valve also allows non exclusive distribution on PC. Games don’t have to launch on steam exclusively. Why do others not capitalize on that? Seems like it’s mostly a “grapes are sour” argument pointing to valve and saying they’re not greedy enough to allow us to profit.

stonyrubbish

A lot of it is just how good the Steam launcher is. I hope the companies understand this. The only reason I use Steam over GOG or Epic or any alternative is because the launcher just works. It's fast. The Epic launcher, when I was forced to use it to play Borderlands 3, felt excruciating to use. GOG Galaxy is the same.

the_hoser

I think that, realistically, the first step to real competition to Steam in the PC digital storefront space is the inevitable IPO of Valve software. It's only a matter of time.

orwin

Steam can absolutely be replaced if they fuck up. The thing is, they don't. Even GOG (which is my prefered platform for oldies) and itch.io (which is my prefered platform for indies), which are smaller and thus have less bloat and should iterate quicker didn't manage to install interesting feature Steam has added over the years. Remote play especially, as someone who bought in ~2019 128GB or RAM and a titan RTX (yeah, bad investment at the time, though i'm happy now when i see the cost) for his server and want to play on another computer, on a different room, was the best thing that ever happened to me. And of course as a primary 4X multiplayer gamer, the "join game" button on steam profile is something every platform should look to implement (once they have a correct mod workshop equivalent).

zamalek

> "Even if an alternative were objectively better, by whatever metric you care about, it would still be of no interest to Steam users," Ritchie says, The metrics to win over Steam gamers aren't hard - and it could be done with another well-funded and like-minded CEO. The problem is that the metrics that Steam wins with are for users, not board members, not C-suite, not investors, not shareholders. Valve is no saint, but they are pretty damned close to as close as a capitalist can get. You couldn't get a competitor financed.

giancarlostoro

The issue is all the "replacements" are very studio specific. If they really were smart, they'd pull together resources, launch a new company under the competing studios support, and give themselves better pricing for games sold. They'd get more into their pockets, and a small cut to keep the new platform sustainable.