I remember Steam’s launch and understand completely.
I hated Steam for a long time because of Half-life 2.
I mean… It was a gamble. Internet was still young. Speeds weren’t keeping up with game sizes outside a few major cities. I was mailed a few large files because it was quicker than downloading them. Not to mention the desire for physical copies over a digital thing you can lose with a bad hard drive was at an all time high.
Then people realized the internet wasn’t just nerd shit, ISPs slowly ramped up their DL speeds and suddenly the thing people mocked for not being feasible is doing well because of how convenient it became.
Gabe even admits he had doubts for awhile.
I wonder where gaming would be if he had listened to the doubters. There’s no denying valve has had a major impact on modern gaming
Someone would’ve picked up the model. The execution? Doubt it.
Yes, someone would have. Eventually.
But valve did it early.
It’s easy to fill a niche once it’s formed. Not so easy to do before, or as it’s forming. Or predict if one will form.
I’m not saying valve or Gabe had some kind of foresight or wisdom, I still think it was a gamble. It just happens to be a gamble that worked.
It’s literally the risk taking behaviour to foster innovation that economists supposedly talk about.
I’d probably have a PS5 and complaing about how Sony has me by the booba
I hated it in the early days because I wanted to own physical media for my games, etc., and I just didn’t trust an online games library that could vanish in a business deal or bankruptcy. Little did I know that CDs and DVDs have a shelf life. I learned to love Steam over the years.
Now I hate subscriptions-for-everything and love Steam even more for only charging me once to buy a game.
My colleague (late 40s) is still like that. Buys only GoG or I guess physical, although it’s mostly codes nowadays anyway? I mean good for him but he misses out on like 80% of games.
I don’t think Steam will ever die but I hope it won’t fall into enshittification at some point.
As long as Valve remains a private company, and Gabe remains in charge, I don’t see them getting too shitty.
But if they go public? Forget about it.
This is my fear. Gabe won’t last forever, and I don’t know anyone else who has a customer centric approach as he does. Maybe that guy from Costco who threatened to kill someone over the hot dog price.
As a patient gamer, I only buy older games on sale under ten bucks. I don’t replay games too often, so if I lose access it’s a big whatever.
Steam came before it’s time, while we were still on dialup. Once high-bandwidth internet became common then it made sense, as did many other cloud-computing and cloud-storage ideas.
Sadly, it still has problems, especially when end users can’t get along with the customer-facing staff and lose access to their licenses. There’s also the problem that has revealed itself with other game clients, when games shut down, when distro-clients go out of business (I still hold a grudge with Stardock / Gamestop) and when governments seize cloud storage without consideration for the end-users (as happened with MegaUpload). When Newell dies or retires, then we only can wait to see what becomes of Steam and our libraries and what company is going to attempt to buy (and exploit) all that responsibility.
It’s going to be trading Robert Baratheon for Joffrey.
I used the old Stardock/Impulse/GameStop game platform as well! I’d mostly switched to GoG (and Steam) by the time it shut down, but there are certainly some games that were lost to the platform shutting down.
I don’t think I even signed up for Steam until 2010 or so. Certainly it was pretty clear that Steam had “won” by the time I made an account
I was one of them. But I mean, back then most people either didn’t have Internet or at least didn’t have broadband. I had dial-up until like a month after it released.
To be fair when Steam first dropped, the idea of digital distribution was hopelessly naive and everything similar to it (like GameTap) was shut down pretty quickly.
Everything that tries to be “like Steam” also fails hard.
So there was a time when I was laughing at Steam with the rest of them.
You forced it on people by demanding it for a must-have game… which came on discs. To some extent, even now, fuck you.
Other comments talk about great sale prices, which is often an anticompetitive practice called “dumping.”
I’d be less blunt if people could admit it’s a monopoly. ‘Oh I never even consider other stores.’ Uh-huh. ‘I mean there’s competitors, but they hardly matter. Even billion-dollar companies can’t make theirs relevant.’ You don’t say. ‘Valve can even afford to let devs sell keys wherever, and the customers still get their ecosystem!’ Yeah, wow. We have a word for that. ‘How dare you.’
I think most ppl agree that it’s a monopoly, it’s just that they are a monopoly not because of anticompetitive practices but because everyone else sucks. steam does give a lot of value to small game devs cause it makes it easy for ppl to find your game (but I’m not sure if that’s worth the 30% revenue cut). if there was a better platform that took less revenue then devs would simply use that instead.
I don’t agree that being the best at a thing is a monopoly. Being the literal only thing is a monopoly.
No monopoly has ever been literally the only thing.
SiriusXM is that kind of monopoly right fucking now. They are the only provider of satellite radio and have no direct competition after XM and Sirius were allowed to merge.
Wow, hopefully we’ll invent some competing way to listen to music in a car.
But y’know what, sure, my absolute was overreaching.
Yours still was too.
Standard Oil never had all the oil. AT&T never had all the phone lines. The worst, most blatantly illegal monopolies had competitors. They were still monopolies. What the word almost always means, does not require 100.0% market share. Shit gets weird well before that.
AT&T did have all the phone lines in a given area. They still do. Just like cable. The market isn’t always as broad as the entire world, the entire country, or even an entire state. Comcast has a monopoly in many places by being the only provider of cable service in a lot of places, just as AT&T was the only provider of phone service to a lot of places.
And if a single house in the county has DirecTV, it doesn’t count. Right?
AT&T tended to have abundant small competitors, even since the 19th century. They just kept suing them out of existence or buying them.
All of which is really missing the fucking point - absolute monopoly is rare and weird. Most monopolies have competitors. They’re still monopolies. They command overwhelming market share, which lets them single-handedly shape the market. Having that power is what makes them a monopoly - abusing that power would make them a trust.
there are thousands of government-granted monopolies where they are literally the only thing
This, I mean… Epic tried and had a storefront so terrible they had to bribe developers into making their games exclusive. Something that never fucking worked for any game that wasn’t Kingdom Hearts; Only resulting in the games bombing because they released on a constantly malfunctioning storefront that constantly got bad publicity.
And Origin was literally ran by EA, so… yeah…
GOG is the only real competitor Steam has, and most people’s opinion of it is “This is nerd shit”, which is a take even I agree with because the only games it really has are older than dirt, meaning I’m the only one who gives a shit about them.
I think most ppl agree that it’s a monopoly
Steam is a monopoly surely, but it’s a rare case, or maybe the only case, where it became a monopoly both because it is actually a good service that is not enshittified, and because the competitors kept shooting themselves in the foot.
I guess that’s what you get when you don’t have any obligation to shareholders.
Netflix was also a preferable monopoly, because this warring fiefdom bullshit is not competition. You wanna watch a show? Fuck you, $20/mo and another password to lose.
We broke up movie theaters for that shit.
Netflix was always bound to the shareholders desires, Valve was never and as far as Gabe and his successor are concerned, it won’t. This and Valve’s unique hierarchy are big factors into why they haven’t enshittified.
Netflix didn’t do anything wrong. They got fucked over by everyone they licensed from deciding they’d steal Netflix’s business model, and then they would be the biggest fish in the pond. All of them. At the same time.
Steam is a monopoly, it’s just not cartoonishly evil and the bar for a good company is super low these days.
The problem is everyone who tries to do what Steam does does it incompetently so it’s not viable.
GOG Galaxy is the closest I’ve seen to a viable competitor though and I respect the work they put into making older games run on newer hardware.
The big thing with steam is that it had, what was, at the time, a leading developer, valve, behind it. So it was a no brainer to manage your valve games.
As other games were added to the service it just became convenient to pick them up on steam.
Now, I consider a game “not released on PC” unless it’s on steam.
So what? That’s called survivorship-bias. He can only say that because he got excessively lucky against all odds. Lottery-winners shouldn’t exist either 😉
You think Valve is what it is because of luck?
That’s the dumbest thing I’ve read on here for a while.
Every great business idea needs luck too. You just never hear of other incredibly great ideas that just had none. You can’t just calculate success and have it guaranteed. You need money (for marketing at least), a great or even mediocre idea and luck. And be it just the luck of doing it at the right time.
You can write the best book the world ever saw, but it’s worth nothing if you don’t get lucky the right person (with influence/reach) reads it at the right time and happens to like it. Otherwise you would have to persistently throw money at it for an indeterminate time. And the longer that is the less profit is ever to be made. See epic games…
But if you think luck is irrelevant, suit yourself.
Pretty much, I mean I’ve seen amazing things the mainstream will never touch or know about… ultimately they made no money and the creators of them are either bitter or dead.
And I’ve seen absolute shit become a global phenomenon
Luck is sadly a necessary survival skill
Oh and there’s Alone In The Dark which just defies any explanation I have because it had one good game that aged horribly, and people are still trying and failing to reboot it.
We all have, i guess. Pearls slowly withering in the vast ocean of stuff. You can swap luck with money though. But not always. That’s mostly when “absolute shit” becomes the global phenomenon. Just throw enough money at it until some success may show.
Oh yeah the effing reboots and remasters and endless sequels. Nobody dares to do new stuff coz they fear for their investment.
I still don’t feel it’s a valid game distribution platform. It’s a DRM platform, that’s all.
Nope, DRM is optional. You can install some games (Rayman Origins, for instance), copy the directory to a new computer with no Steam and run the exe. Steam also has Steam Input, but no one says it’s just a gamepad driver.
It’s only a little bit more DRM than GOG. It doesn’t automatically adds a DRM layer to all games. There are tons of games that you can backup by simply copying their folders. Even if the DRM layer is added, it’s very light, can be cracked easily and does not add any measurable overhead.
Steamworks is probably a major thing that makes the games rely on Steam client (and it’s not technically a DRM). But that’s up to developers to make the game work without client if they want, and the functionality often adds a lot of value. This makes the client a part of the product you get, and its value will degrade if you break the client. Some examples of such valuable functionality are overlay and steam input.
Its not that steam is good, its just that everyone else so extremly dumb and incompetent. And GOG only has a very limited catalogue
Ok so all of a sudden Gabe is everywhere giving quotable quotes. Is this damage control after the bazillion dollar fleet of yachts news, is he about to retire, is it just because of the HL2 anniversary, or…?
If you read this article you would know that these are quotes from the Half Life 20 year anniversary documentary released a few weeks ago.
Also it’s not damage control for the yachts, he’s literally sitting in a yacht when he says this quote lmao
To be fair, the only people criticising his yachts are some smartasses over Lemmy and Reddit thinking they’re on a moral high ground by doing so, when everyone else doesn’t care
Yeah, I don’t like billionaires but Gabe runs a pretty good and unique company.
I hate PCGamer so nah I’m good.
Ok, but feel free to continue sharing your stupid takes
Will do, thanks.
No problem 👌
