Thank goodness. Bethesda's launcher was uniquely awful in a number of unpleasant ways. Slow, prone to crashes, bad user communication, not suitable for use on small monitors. The worst of the launcher apps I have used - and there are so many!
I remember when it was in vogue for every game maker to build their own launcher or even full Steam clone - when EA pulled all its new games from Steam to get people to use Origin, when Ubisoft forced uPlay on you no matter how you bought the game, and so on. Now, it seems like we're pulling back from that situation somewhat - a lot of EA games are back on Steam, for example.
I wonder whether the experiment didn't work, or if it worked, but now the goals have changed again?
It's kind of weird how the same companies that can squeeze all possible computational abilities and use every tick that exists to force a computer to show amazing graphics with complex logic behind can't make a simple GUI.
Well, even Steam nowadays is kind of a wrapper for a browser.
Is that really surprising? Even a simple GUI is not that simple these days.
This was reinforced recently when an incredibly good software engineer I knew recently got stuck with a problem. It ended up being a networking problem but his understanding of anything deeper than basic DNS settings was approximately zero. I was actually amazed given I assumed from his other knowledge that he would have a similar understanding of deep network concepts.
I think this happens just as much in companies. Yes, they may have 100s of insanely good graphic programmers who can do crazy low level stuff with shaders on GPUs, but do you know how to build a set of scalable and extendable web services to power a GUI app, with localisation, payment methods, 2FA, etc. I have seen some absolutely insane APIs written by game devs before, basically reinventing the wheel to pull a news feed in.
As a very well known figure in the React community, the creator of Redux and currently working for Facebook on the React core team, he says people often think he's an expert in everything.
It never fails to amuse me when I am playing some sprawling open world tasklist from Ubisoft and something happens that diverts me into the weird world of achievements kept on Uplay. All this highly-optimized 3D work and lovingly-polished 2D menus is suddenly covered up by a collection of React placeholder items doing their "loading data of unknown size" pulse animation at an erratic 3-10fps.
I imagine that it is implemented and maintained entirely by people who are biding their time waiting for an opening on a team where they get to do something they give half a damn about, because it is pretty clear that nobody has put any love into this stuff.
Unverified Rumor, so a healthy grain of salt is required:
A friend at a large GPU maker was mentioning that a lot of "squeezing all possible compute abilities" for games are in the driver, rather than in the game itself. Which is why you'll often see significant performance improvements with driver updates after a game has launched.
It makes sense as it's in the GPU makers' best interest to have the maximum performance, or else they'll be crushed in benchmarks.
My old boss worked on the PC port of Dead Space 3.
He actually did spend significant effort optimising his shaders to get good performance on PC, but an Nvidia driver update would silently replace some of his code with hardware-optimised shaders they'd written themselves (similar to how Windows 95 had a hard-coded fix for Sim City).
This was never advertised publicly, and the only reason he found out was because he debugged the executable and noticed his shaders were never actually being executed.
EDIT: Was rushing, but updated with the exact quote here so people don't need to go digging :)
I believe this is the story OP mentioned [1].
> Windows 95? No problem. Nice new 32 bit API, but it still ran old 16 bit software perfectly. Microsoft obsessed about this, spending a big chunk of change testing every old program they could find with Windows 95. Jon Ross, who wrote the original version of SimCity for Windows 3.x, told me that he accidentally left a bug in SimCity where he read memory that he had just freed. Yep. It worked fine on Windows 3.x, because the memory never went anywhere. Here’s the amazing part: On beta versions of Windows 95, SimCity wasn’t working in testing. Microsoft tracked down the bug and added specific code to Windows 95 that looks for SimCity. If it finds SimCity running, it runs the memory allocator in a special mode that doesn’t free memory right away. That’s the kind of obsession with backward compatibility that made people willing to upgrade to Windows 95.
It is absolutely the case that drivers contain code to fix errors or optimize away mistakes made in top tier games. This is well-known and often can be demonstrated by renaming the game binary or making other changes. Sometimes this happens with the blessing of the game company, and sometimes it doesn't.
Or, sometimes GPU folks will send a team over to help the game studios fix performance issues during their development.
There are some studios who push the envelope and make beautifully optimized games. There are many, many more who ineptly cobble together components and make something that runs well-enough.
So it might actually be a good business strategy to just focus on building a popular game, and outsource optimization to the graphics card companies for free?
The reason that you see drivers release with specific games mentioned is exactly because of this. And also why the driver installer packages are so large. What I can't say is how much of a difference the GPU manufacturers work makes on average. I would have to assume there's a reasonable bump otherwise it wouldn't be worth it.
You get an absolutely massive performance boost by using newer drivers on Halo Infinite. I don't know exactly why, but it never goes above about 36 fps on low settings on older (AMD, 6800xt) drivers, but hits smooth 80+ at 4k on high with the drivers that mention Halo Infinite in the patch notes.
That’s wild. But if they have cases where gains can be that much then it’s very clear why it’s worth it to fix the the stuff that other companies wrote
Yeah - I assume this particular case must be due to an actual bug in the games engine, rather than just poorly optimized shaders etc. I'm curious to know exactly what causes it though.
Modern CPUs are extremely capable superscalar processors. In order to properly feed them, you must design with SIMD in mind. Even then, you can almost never rely on compiler auto-vectorization, and you must use intrinsics yourself. This is necessary even for such simple things as automatically opening doors when you move near them. In other words, many many things that are never even done on the GPU.
Of course, after release, the biggest improvements come from outside the game dev team. The point is not to forget all the improvements very carefully and skillfully baked in before release, just because consumers don't see the delta.
* companies that can squeeze all possible computational abilities … to show amazing graphics with complex logic … can't make a simple GUI.
The wage slaves they've got working on the store and launcher front-ends are probably not the same highly talented designers and others that they have working 80 hours trying to panel-beat a game into a shape that they can get out of the door without too many major patches being needed in the days following release.
>without too many major patches being needed in the days following release.
this is bathesda. There won't be many patches, but not because its bug free, but because its broken and will remain that way. The community will patch it, right?
The question I ask is if Bethesda spent all the time on technical things would they make the amazing games they do? Give me a Bethesda game with bugs over any other smooth game with no heart any day.
Every company has an attention budget to spend from.
hasn't bethesda been limping "the creation engine" which is really gamebryo along for the last 10 years? They are doing technical things, they're just doing them poorly.
The incredible moddability of their RPGs, at least, is in large part to the flexibility of their engine. How many other games have active modding communities 12 years after launch as large as New Vegas'?
Naughty Dog is (big) one that comes to mind immediately. Check out their GDC talks. GDC in general is a good place to find in depth technical talks from devs.
FromSoftware (Dark Souls/Sekiro)
Polyphony Digital (Gran Turismo)
Santa Monica Studio (God of War)
Kojima Productions (Death Stranding)
Larian Studios (Divinity Original Sin)
Playdead (Inside/Limbo)
Studios who choose/have the freedom to release a game "when it's ready", and/or have Sony/Microsoft backing.
One can hope Microsoft's acquisition of Bethesda will change their ways, but having set the release date of Starfield (11/11/22) so far ahead of time doesn't inspire confidence... hopefully they'll have the freedom to push this back if needed.
From the people I've talked to, Epic Games and Riot developers seem to have their shit together as far as being able to scale their backends to millions of players. Improbable too (although they're more of a game services studio), who are the creators of Thanos*
id Software is the one that comes to mind. Even with the Zenimax acquisition and Carmack's departure, they don't seem to have lost their engineering chops. Doom 4 and Doom Eternal are known to run incredibly well.
GUIs are actually a ton of work. They look simple because it's a collection of simple parts, formatted text, buttons, sliders, text input, etc... but if you go through all the various screens and ubique interactions in something like a game hub/store/user/friends etc it ads up to a huge amount of work. Often more than graphics engines
In early Steam days, the store and community pages where handled by using mshtml.dll, with most of that ported to Chromium when they launched Linux and Mac OS versions.
I'm pretty sure the "new" Steam UI (the current one) is fully ported to basically be like an Electron app (I don't think it's literally Electron, but same concept).
Wow, my impression was the opposite. Slow and crashing: Just like every game they made. They have a uniquely high input lag and bugs is kind of their thing in general.
With the rise of the Epic Game Store, I think there's more competition in the launcher/store space and I bet the big publishers got better deals which removed the need for them to invest in the ongoing development and maintenance of their own stores/launchers.
It can't be that cheap to maintain an app like Origin or UPlay and all the associated infrastructure, etc..
The issue with Epic is the pure lack of features (user profiles, reviews[^1], community forums) , and no Mac/Linux support.
^1: I doubt reviews are ever coming since it would mean bad games would get fewer sales; Imagine how many more sales Cyberpunk 2077 has gotten on the Epic store as no potential buyer sees the negative reviews for the game.
The other issue is Epic's buying exclusivity for certain titles on PC - even after they were announced as available on other online stores. These bribes, especially since Epic wasn't involved during development, upset a lot of folks.
Right, they did that even for some crowd funded games.
And for others it has meant that the Linux version was delayed until after the excusivity deal was over (e.g. Metro Exodus) or removed (Rocket League).
it's not (wasn't? I don't know if they still do it) as much as making games exclusives to Epic as making sure they aren't released on Steam; I'm pretty sure Epic's head honcho said something to that effect and a few games which had deals with Epic also released on the Microsoft store
I've had to struggle with Epic just to delete a game at times. And the giant tiles in the library are already a pain to navigate through with a library 1/20th the size of my Steam library. I could live without features if the core functionality was nailed in, but it's just not there.
The only people I know using it as a broad Steam replacement are doing so ideologically: they want a competitor to exist so they use it even if it's worse.
There's not much software that supports Macs, but there's increasingly little on Steam too that runs on a modern version of MacOS too because of Apple's decision to abandon the space.
It's not just the store cut. From what I understand, a big part of the motivation of Origin was also to avoid having to compete, at least in consumer perception with the sales. Battlefield 3 at €80 while it was a year old looked terrible value when Borderlands 2 had dropped to €50 and was regularly 30% off despite being only a couple of months old.
That seems backwards to how the actual customer perception worked out though. I very quickly noted that Origin prices were worse than Steam prices, and avoided it. If that was their intent, they forgot the storefront itself has a perceived value.
Microsoft owns Bethesda, and has transitioned to primarily offering its games via Steam or via the Xbox app. I imagine that Bethesda is doing this to align with Microsoft; existing library through Steam (with potential to add them to the Xbox app if they join get added to GamePass, maybe), future releases through Steam and Xbox.
Occhams razor: Microsoft owns Bethesda, so one would naturally assume they would seek to kill off competition to the windows store, or any poor performers that arent driving the appropriate revenue.
the worst part of the bethesda launcher was it existed as a cudgel for Todd Howard and others to effectively silence dissent during the launch of Fallout 76 in 2018 either by flogging it as an excuse to refuse refunds, or using the platform to outright threadlock and silence user complaints and criticism. the launcher directly contributed to the wholesale review bombing of virtually every bethesda title on Steam and even showed up in the class action lawsuits filed during the fallout 76...well...fallout.
I think, honestly, that Microsoft is feeling pretty happy with how things are working with steam right now - they've probably only got to do a very minimal amount of work to integrate with the platform while internally they have MS Game accounts that tie everything together for any of the tracking needs they have. I'm sure they'd love to convert all of the MS Games users to their own store but they've managed to extract a whole bunch of unexpected business from AoE2 and other titles and they're probably hoping to minimize any damage to the ecosystem.
> Occhams razor: Microsoft owns Bethesda, so one would naturally assume they would seek to kill off competition to the windows store, or any poor performers that arent driving the appropriate revenue.
What I find interesting is that Microsoft and/or Bethesda chose to migrate users to Steam rather than the Microsoft Store or Gamepass. It would have been an opportunity to get more eyeballs looking at Gamepass subscriptions, but also would have been less popular. Or maybe all the legacy stuff being migrated is a burden they don't want?
More than likely Valve has offered better deals to these larger companies to get them back in-house. It's very probable EA, Bethesda, Microsoft, etc. all have gotten more favorable terms now, by proving they were willing to leave Steam and roll their own launcher.
They might have even better deals, but at some point 20% for handling everything and supporting payments with potential of fraud, chargebacks etc. in nearly every country should start look like not horrible deal. Remembering what the retail margins were back in the day when they needed to make and ship physical boxes...
10 people in 4 years don't sound like a lot to setup and run support, distribution, payment integrations for let's say 100+ countries. Which many having unique payment providers.
> I wonder whether the experiment didn't work, or if it worked, but now the goals have changed again?
I think Steam has a big first mover advantage, like a user's default browser or text editor, always on or starting up, while the others were an extra step that users only did when they had to. The recurring sales and frequently updated offerings of games and updates on Steam's home page is also a plus; Origin was static, Epic is minimalistic, Steam is more of a proper website with a load of different angles - sales, recommended games, new / early access games, updates, and jazzy graphics if they have a big sale on. The other launchers are purely functional.
Epic Game Store was the nail in their coffin. They all wanted to have their own Steam and rake in all the revenue directly but didn't want to invest the time and effort to build a platform like Steam. Valve virtually stopped making games to focus only on Steam. I feel like watching EGS hit the market, the difficult road it is to build a true Steam competitor for them, and how long before it will actually be profitable was a reality check for everyone else. Like using AWS over Bare Metal, somethings are worth paying someone else to do for you.
For anyone interested, they used Scaleform which is a middleware a lot of games would use to have flash-based UI. It's technically a discontinued product but even Hitman 3 last year used it.
As crappy as Flash is for security, it was such a good tool for interactive animations.
Here's a list of games that used Scaleform, though it often isn't used as the only UI system. Sometimes it's just main menus or world-space UI elements. Found in a quick Google so I can't guarantee it's totally accurate, but I know many on here are correct.
When I was doing work for Nickelodeon around the iPad 1 days, we just could not get around the fact that flash was an amazing tool for animation and anything else we used would have tradeoffs. Tech-wise, a poor product. As a tool for design-minded people? Unmatched.
Is there a technical reason why Steam is a such a force in the space? People, myself certainly included, often criticize Apple for taking 30% of developer revenue for merely existing in it's walled garden. Right or wrong, they control the ecosystem, so their ability to monopolize and heavily tax the App Store is unsurprising, they're exercising their pricing power as much as they possibly can.
But how is it that on PC, where we have a mostly open field on which anyone can participate freely without a gatekeeper's blessing, Steam managed to consolidate so much of the gaming marketplace that even a titan like Microsoft is throwing the towel and bowing to Steam's cartelish 30%? I get that being the dominant two-sided marketplace of a given space is a strong network effect and moat, and consolidation is certainly convenient for users (I like having all my purchased games on a single account), but intuition tells me Bethesda doesn't need Steam's exposure to sell games or make new arrivals known (their announcement will go viral regardless), similarly to Riot, Mojang, Epic and co not listing on Steam. So I've always found it surprising they were dual listing their games in the first place, but the fact they're now entirely giving up on direct selling is a testament to Steam's might in the gaming industry.
Is Steam's product particularly good and hard to reproduce from the publisher's PoV, even one backed by Microsoft, to the extent it is hard to compete against with something like Microsoft Store? Or is this just another case of being early enough to establish the initial brand and let the self-fulfilling network effect kick in - with the userbase acting like gravity to bring in more users and developers - until it's large enough that sheer force of habit/inertia makes it quasi-"indisruptible"?
Either way, I found it fascinating how Valve turned into Steam, whether it was accidental or not, what a homerun pivot. Seems that is the way of the Internet, being first matters more than just about anything, having the superior product (not claiming there is one for game stores) is irrelevant if you're remotely late, it just won't matter how much cash you pour into a Microsoft Store or a Google+. My gut tells me Microsoft is salivating at the idea of buying out Steam, seems like a perfect fit for the conglomerate if it wasn't for the scrutiny it would bring their way while they are positioning themselves as the good FAAMG.
* Cloud saves all of my games (with a few exceptions when the game developer doesn't enable it for whatever reason, this has only been for a few games so I'm not sure why)
* Family sharing - this is HUGE for me. I can't re-buy every single game for my kids, so the fact that they can just play a game I purchased on their own account when I'm not online is an insane life saver.
* Steam sales- yeah maybe they aren't quite as good as they used to be.. but still, before steam started doing sales I was buying $60 games. Now I generally just wait 6 months and never pay more than $20 for a game, usually even less
* You could argue the indie game world would basically not exist without them. Indie games are basically all I even play on steam- and I buy a lot of games
I could keep going on.. but honestly Steam just works. It's not the prettiest, but that's fine. Steam is like a web 1.0 site that does everything you want it to, and anything since then has been web 2.0 pieces of garbage that try to do all this fancy stuff but are unusable or annoying as hell.
Epic Games Launcher is garbage. Microsoft store is garbage.
So yeah it's weird, I am 100% OK with Valve getting the premium whereas I think it's sickening that apple/android do what they do. They are basically a walled garden. Steam is not, there are infinite ways to distribute a PC game.
Probably the oldest tech company that can really say "we are not evil" and instead are actually helping both the consumer and developers.
I don't game very often, but the way Steam "just works" can't be understated enough.
It's not perfect. I've run into weird bugs occasionally, though they were likely the fault of a specific game.
However, it's miles ahead of other game launchers I've dealt with. I'm a casual gamer, so if I end up fighting the game launcher and update mechanism for more than a few minutes, I'm just going to give up and do something else. Steam has come as close as I've seen to streamlining that experience for me.
Along the idea of streamlining and reducing the mental overhead of actually playing a game - it's great to have my entire library in one place. I refused to use any of the other launchers because I don't want to have to hunt down accounts in 5 years when I get a taste for nostalgia from a game that I don't own on Steam.
Untitled Goose Game got me back into piracy after 15 years of abstinence because of the anti-Steam launch. I would have gladly paid were it on Steam.
I did have some problems with some games that claimed to support Linux but wouldn't run on latest 64bit Ubuntu or take issue with whichever graphics drivers I was using, but yeah, generally Steam games would simply work whereas the rest either wouldn't or would require layers of indirection like WINE and a lot of fiddling.
Completely. I remember consoles supposedly being "just works", but then the PS3 required a 20 minute updates whenever I turned it on. I stopped playing as many games during that period.
Without Steam I would probably not PC game.
> but then the PS3 required a 20 minute updates whenever I turned it on
I have the same experience with Steam. After not using for a few days, it begins downloading hundreds of megabytes of updates and has to restart itself before you can do anything with it.
The 'it just works' part is something that i really struggled with and it tainted my view of stream for good. I absolutely hated when it forced an update download and wouldn't let you do anything about it. tryin to pay a game and then bring forced to wait an hour or something (my internet used to be bad)... was infuriating and ruined many gaming sessions.
I never got a fondness for stream as a result and avoid it whenever possible.
On that note, i was really surprised to find out that epic let's you start plenty of your games without having to open the client. That's a killer feature for me. Family sharing is too.
To add to all the things you mention that just work, it's also a social network - a lot of games make it easy to setup multiplayer games with Steam friends. For these games, you don't have to go through the work of linking with friends' game accounts for every game you play.
Family sharing is a step in the right direction but in the old days with CD:s, you could buy it once and play multiplayer games together with your family and friends. Now you need separate accounts for everyone and a copy of each.
In Sweden we pay a tax on each harddrive and other storage media to cover this sharing. It's alled Private sharing tax. It's distributed between creators by some organisation. Steam and other online stores prevents this law from working as intended. This has put me off Steam from the beginning already.
I believe Steam got so big because they were first to deliver what everyone wanted, buy games without having to wait until release in your country. In Sweden we often had to wait half a year or more before the games showed up. I did not buy games on Steam for years because of the sharing aspects. I wanted to be able to share the good games with my kids or friends. On steam you don't own the games, you only rent them for a one time fee. Steam can take them down at any time.
The tax you refer to is for backing up purchased content on external hdd and such only. You seem to misread the law to cover piracy (sharing with friends).
> Privatkopieringsersättning är en lagstadgad kompensation för det inkomstbortfall som kopiering för privat bruk av musik, film och tv från en laglig förlaga medför för kulturskapare med upphovsrätt i de kopierade verken. Ersättningen betalas av tillverkare eller importörer av sådana lagringsmedier som är "särskilt ägnade för" privatkopiering,[1] som tomma CD, DVD, externa hårddiskar, USB-minnen och mp3-spelare.
The thing I like the most about Steam, and this outmatches everything else, is the regional price localization. 60 USD is not worth the same around the world, and Steam compensates for it.
This is the thing Australians hate. We don't get a straight $ for $ conversion. As a general rule we get charged more for the same digital download because of regional pricing.
A reasonable price has to be found by buying steam keys from [HumbleBundle/GreenManGaming/etc].
I don't play the latest anymore. I will wait a year or two and get it on sale. I get a patched, solid game with well known reviews and the community wiki already filled out(so valuable in many modern games!), for much cheaper AND with that much cheaper price I don't have to worry so much about being gouged because my digital download has to travel further...
Australians are incredible wealthy. In my experience (I lived in Aus for 5 years) Australians have no idea just how wealthy they are compared to other, even Western, nations.
You are probably right. I don't know enough to compare country citizen wealth.
But while your point is relevant to the marketing person, it is irrelevant to me as a consumer.
As per most humans of course, I never feel like I have enough. Like many, I have a mortgage and so am required to work until the day I die to keep a roof over my family's head. Not a glamourous roof, but ours.
So when I have friends overseas getting the same digital files as I am for less money, I feel ripped off.
For physical items in Australia you could argue the large distances for transport explain the cost/convenience difference.
But on the internet where the cost of information transport is negligible, a minimum 20% mark up is too blatant for the exact same convenience.
I think it's worth adding that Steam's (more recent) refund policy is also a big deal. Even if you don't need it, knowing that it's there can influence buying decisions because it feels more like you can "try before you buy" (although this actually involves paying before you get to try and then putting yourself in a situation where Steam could refuse to give you your money back).
After using Steam almost exclusively for years, picking up a Nintendo Switch was jarring because there's pretty much no way to walk back from a purchase even if you have only played it for a few seconds (or just downloaded it). This also goes with games perpetually sitting at AAA release day price points, release dates often being unclear or promoted more than the actual release and sales affecting your wishlist being undercommunicated in comparison to Steam.
Steam simply lures you back in by sending you that e-mail that the game you wishlisted five years ago is currently on sale at a 90% discount.
All of these points seem to exist for the iOS App Store (apart from the Steam sales, but there are other advantages as well).
I think the takeaway is that on Windows there is a choice, and people (users and developers) actively choose Steam, whereas on iOS there just is not that choice. The market cannot exercise a preference.
For me the big difference is that using steam is a choice whereas using the app store is required. Developers use steam largely because they want to, not because they have to.
There are a million ways to distribute an APK so I'm not sure where that parallel came from. I'm anti steam until they add decent support. I've dealt with marketplace issues too many times.
There is huge difference. Google makes it's harder and more user-hostile to install APKs from 3rd-party sources. They also create vendor lock-in ecosystem where half of Android features are only available when using Google Play Services that might not work unless you use Google Play.
On other hand Steam is just a software that works across multiple OS.
Marketplace is the one area where support is a negative; they can't be returning items to people because of accidental purchases, upsetting the seller which is likely just another regular gamer/steam user.
You forgot that Apple's App store hast the best, and incidently only, reviews for iOS Apps. For the same reason it also features the 'best' search for consumers using Apple devices.
Apple store is also annoyingly assuming you speak the language of the country where you live in. It doesn't allow you to choose "English" for example, if you are accessing it from Germany..
Biggest piece of the puzzle is there is no alternative. You are 100% forced to use the app store.
No one forces you to use steam. There is generally always another way to buy a PC game, and if a developer chose to put it only on steam.. well, then that's the developer's fault and not steam's fault (I get that steam is mostly a monopoly on PC, so that's not entirely fair to say, but still.. the developer can always just throw their game on GOG or itch.io etc easy enough).
So Apple's entire store is built upon forcing you to go put your product there, offering no alternatives, and then taking a large cut. Not to mention almost the entire mobile market is a hot piece of trash creating apps/games that are only there to suck up your money in microtransactions/ads or whatever. And Apple encourages that because they want the cut of all the bullshit money they pull out of people.
Steam doesn't do that. Sure you can find some little garbage people put on there, but that's few and far between and not the norm- I pretty much never see that on my daily use.
Steam still operates in a way that provides a great platform for people who love to make games and people who love to play games.
Any comparison to the mobile market of ios/android is entirely disengenious.
For most games most of the time, buying and launching a game via Steam is less hassle than pirating it. It's not the DRM or the price that most people really, really hate about buying games. It's that lots of DRM made the game absolute shit to try to play.
Code wheels, flipping to a particular page of a printed manual to search for the fourth word on the eighth line, putting a CD in a drive to play a game fully installed to your internal drives, rootkits in your games to keep you from copying them, tricks in the disk formats to make it impossible to make a backup, and other industry asshattery made it easier in many cases to pirate a game than to play one you'd actually bought. Valve came onto the scene with a service that would collect your money rather than sending your CC info to every little indie game web page, let you download things on the new higher speed connections, not have a limited number of times to download and install, and will do tech support for the launcher. Then they added features for developers like achievements tracked outside the games, friends lists that work across games and game studios, network saves, and more. First mover advantage can't be discounted here, but making the experience of buying and maintaining your game catalog user friendly was the big selling point.
Steam's value proposition is a single place to conveniently manage all my games, and it works very well as such. It's unobtrusive, comprehensive, manages installs, pre-requisites and updates nicely for me and then gets the heck out of the way.
No publisher-oriented launcher has such proposition. In fact, I put forward that no publisher-made launcher has value proposition of any kind for the consumer - why do I need Uplay, Origins, Bethesda launcher, any of them, let alone all of them? What purpose do they serve, other than an annoying mandatory layer? Why do I need Battle.net for the one game I play on there?
Given the lack of positive value proposition, even seemingly minor annoyances are perceived as massive friction. For example, I find Microsoft's offers infuriating - I cannot understand their subscription tiers or services at all, they all have meaningless generic Xbox names that change every 6 months to a different meaningless set of Xbox names, and completely mangle what one can expect as a PC owner, or Xbox owner, or both. I have no idea which Xbox-named offering or app does what and how they relate. It's like IBM naming everything "Watson". I inadvertently committed to a multi-month months subscription thinking one of the games I wanted is available on the cloud, only to discover I was completely mistaken - and it took me a WHILE to confirm that to my satisfaction. I don't know if they are confusing out of ineptitude or intentionally.
Geforce Now, on the other hand, has a meaningful value proposition to me: it lets me play games on the cloud, on any of my devices, and when away from home. That has benefits and value to me that I can clearly understand. It's seamless, it provides clear value to ME, the consumer, and then gets out of the way.
Same with GoG - it lets me download games DRM free onto my machine and save them for the upcoming apocalypse.
I own Mirror's Edge on EA Origin. I bought it shortly after release. I still have the box with the CD key. I can still download and install the game. However, I can't launch the game because I've exceeded the install limit of five copies. I need to run the deauthenticator utility on the computers I installed the game on, but that's not possible because those hard drives were wiped years ago.
I generally trust Valve to treat me fairly, but EA, Ubisoft, Konami and Bethesda (ZeniMax) have not earned that same trust.
It's exactly what I did last time I couldn't play a game I bought on Steam because of third party DRM issues; though that time it was with Ubisoft and their new uplay that wasn't compatible with the game (and I don't think I had my uplay account information anyway)
My Steam copy of the original Crysis has the same issue. Not necessarily Steam's fault, but other publishers can always stack their own DRM on top of the Steam DRM. And yep, EA published Crysis.
I think you're underselling things a fair amount. Steam was first - but lots of first to market products under invest in R&D and end up playing catch-up feature wise... Valve has consistently shown they're willing to experiment with new feature and do-dads to make sure their platform remains competitive. Given all the revenue they draw out of Steam I think that's only fair - but a lot of companies in their position would cut their workforce and milk that cow until their founder could IPO and exit with a big wad of money.
The features you listed on the API side have almost all come in before competitors have tried to offer similar features - it's seriously impressive.
I am not underselling them at all, or mean my comment that way. However, as the first entry, they have had the longest time to refine all the aspects of their offering. The core of which i think is Users, Games, and API.
Indeed, the prevelance of Steam API is such that competing game markets have to make their own replacement Steam.dll, so that the gamedevs dont have to change anything.
Also Valve was a game company first, and i believe developed the first of these technologies for Half-life 2.
- Valve used Half-life 2 to bootsrap Steam (HL2 install disc came with steam)
- Use Steam to provide online services to HL2
- Then the users of HL2 become Steam users (or the sosial network of Steam, as we say today)
- Expose API to other game companies, which brings more Games, and Users
- Add features and keep ahead of competition
- Alot of the features also come from the fact that Valve develops games, and makes the features for themself first, and then exposes them to everybody through Steam API
I think the user base and market demographics are why no one really complains on the publisher side. There's no other digital store on earth with more whale-like clientele.
> Is there a technical reason why Steam is a such a force in the space? \
I'm not much of a gamer - but my five kids are, and I can see the difference. It starts with being multiplatform. Buy once, run on PC, Mac, Linux. Steam's promise isn't cheap subscriptions, or trendy titles. I can buy games with confidence and know they will run - even if school requires a Mac next year or the only machine around is Dad's Linux laptop.
Steam also does a much better job of exposing new titles and player feedback. Shopping Steam is a better experience - even if it isn't as pretty. You know what you are getting when you buy, and the return policy seems fair enough.
It ends with simply working better. For example, last night I loaded up Steam and some PC games from a XBox Live Ultimate subscription. The Steam games worked. None of XBox games would even launch... on a brand new Lenovo gaming machine on Windows 11. Eventually the Xbox app volunteered to fix the messed up installation and ended up leaving 130GB of disk filled with old, inaccessible downloads.
Epic's store shows some promise, but there's a lot of rough edges where it installs some other studio's installer which installs the game. But, the free game thing is pretty nice.
> I can buy games with confidence and know they will run - even if school requires a Mac next year or the only machine around is Dad's Linux laptop.
This hasn't been my experience. Plenty of Steam games have fallen by the wayside as operating systems evolve. GOG is slipping in this regard as well, but began as a way to buy and run older games. It also provides some nice pressure for Steam and its publishers to compete and reduce DRM.
Then there is Mac dropping 32 bit support, to which Steam seems to have thrown up their hands.
> Then there is Mac dropping 32 bit support, to which Steam seems to have thrown up their hands.
Steam's copy on a 32-bit title is much better than GOG. It's big, it's in red, it's clear that this title is limited because its 32-bit.
On GOG, you have a small line of text at the bottom of the Mac system requirements. That's way too small a warning (try to find it on this page: https://www.gog.com/game/darwinia)!
It's not just small, it's actually contradictory! It says minimum macOS version is 10.15 but then says that the game is 32-bit so it won't run on macOS 10.15 or higher.
They bootstrapped Steam by forcing it on CS players, and many of us oldschool players boycotted it by playing on old servers for months. I was probably one of the last of those to give in and install Steam because I feared what would happen if they were successful. They were successful beyond anything I thought possible at the time, yet they've justified none of my fears.
It's probably wishful thinking, but I like to think Steam is such a force because Valve have earned and kept the trust of many (initially very skeptical) gamers over the course of _decades_ at this point. I'd rewind the clock to the Before Steam times if I could, but short of that--if I have to pick my poison and choose _some_ platform--it's Steam with zero hesitation.
Technically? I dunno, maybe? It works better than most software, but that's mostly because the bar is so low. But yeah, technically, their launcher is better, sure. Lower-resource-using, cleaner-UI, more effective than any other I've seen.
But the real thing is... I've been a Steam user since I needed to go legit with HL1 to play NS1 on public servers, over 20 years ago. Valve has never screwed me over in that time. Never. They treat me like a valued customer, like they like my business. I mean, not like I'm a VIP. Just like they actually like their users, and want them happy.
I guess the lock-in of my over-600-game library doesn't hurt. But the reason that number keeps climbing (that's an average of 30 games a year!) is because Valve keeps redeeming my trust, better than literally any other business I've dealt with, ever. I've abandoned my accounts with other services because the $20 or $200 of games wasn't worth the hassle of dealing with companies that were obviously actively trying to fuck me short-term and damn the long-term.
Praise be to St Gaben. The crazy part is, I actually mean it.
That Steam was a first-mover is basically irrelevant. PC gamers are a particularly demanding audience and they will abandon your product in a heartbeat if a vastly superior one comes along. For instance, TeamSpeak and to a lesser extent Ventrilo and Mumble more or less dominated voice chat for many years. Then Discord came along and those older products became irrelevant practically overnight.
Valve uses its 30% cut extremely effectively by continuing to invest in the happiness and convenience of its customers and, just as importantly, its developers. For instance the profits of smaller developers dramatically increased after the new discovery/search features landed, enabling exactly the kind of people who would love your game to find it easily. Contrast that with every other store where it's basically impossible to find anything but the most mainstream top sellers.
Maybe Epic could afford to actually make the Epic Games Store a useful product if they took a higher cut of sales?
Steam game libraries routinely become worth hundreds or thousands of dollars as you spend more money to acquire digital goods. You can't move those to a different account, sell the entire account safely, or activate the titles you already own on a new platform. Nobody would spend all that money on repurchasing all their games just because the EA launcher is more shiny.
The lock-in cost is real and literal. It's far easier to migrate to a different voice comms system (which is free, usually), since you only have to convince your existing social network to create an account on the new thing.
Why would users need to re-purchase everything just to adopt a different store launcher as their primary platform? GOG Galaxy for instance interfaces with most existing stores and friend networks. As long as you're buying games on PC, you're not really locked into much of anything.
That said, buying certain games can lock you into using Windows. So there's that. But it's far better than buying games on modern consoles, which force you to use some special-snowflake hardware just to access the game you bought.
It's impossible to completely prevent all classes of lock-in, but it can be minimized. I would argue that my personal lock-in is minimized, across the axes I care about, by buying everything from Steam and GOG. No hard Windows dependency, no silly hardware dependency, and I'll almost certainly still have access to my games in 40 years.
First mover is a strong part of Valve's position: they have almost two decades of not failing their users under their belt, very few other digital content purchase platforms have a similar backlog. iTMS appeared a little earlier, but the rebrandings haven't exactly been helpful in terms of perceived seniority and it didn't really start with a wide audience, because non-pirated access to hl2 was much less of a rarity than non-pirated filling of ipods.
And as long as Valve does not burn that trust (there have been a few hickups in the very first years, but quickly forgotten), their lead can only grow. You can't throw money at the problem of potential customers wondering what the chances are that the service will still be around in five years. I'd even say that throwing money would only increase doubt: the more money invested, the higher the threshold of success required to be considered worthwhile of continuing.
It is older by a few years, but it is not a two-sided marketplace, it's Blizzard's (+ Activision's) DRM.
FWIW, I did not mean that Steam is necessarily the literal first game marketplace, but to my (limited) knowledge it was the first one that got large enough to become the "default" option.
To be fair Steam wasn't either, in the beginning, which also ruins my argument wrt the iTMS quite a bit: even the Orange Box was still a retail product to most (it's even in the name!) that just happened to be consumed through Steam. Not much different from how iPod users had to use the client app for CDs bought in retail (or far more likely: mp3 from the Napster substitute du jour)
For some reason none of Steam's competitors are willing to match their features.
The Microsoft store was obviously not designed by the Xbox division and was hostile to gamers wanting to enable modding or customize the installation.
Likely because Microsoft wanted a locked down app store to sell their Surface devices to schools and business.
Steam does things like converting Ps4 and Nintendo Switch controller input to Xbox 360 input, offering forums where people discuss patches and mods, and other features Epic seems uninterested in offering for whatever reason.
The xbox app has improved a lot, but even now its kind of garbage. It's been terrible, slow, buggy, bad explore interface, and just sort of bad for literally years. And instead of updating itself, it wants me to launch the microsoft store to update the xbox app, and then the microsoft store bugs me to update the "microsoft tips" app or the "Microsoft people" app or "MSN Weather" stuff I've never used or want on my computer. Oh you updated the xbox app but you didn't update the xbox identity provider, go back to microsoft store or otherwise you can't get into the game because apparently they didn't think to include xbox identity providing into the xbox app.
steam sits in my tray. it asks me to hit the update button when there's an update, and then it updates itself and I don't need to go somewhere or else or get hassled to find out why the heck there's an update to "Your Phone" app that I didn't know was on this computer and why microsoft thinks I should install it.
at least they've managed to get the windows store app itself to run a little better than the last few years. It was as guilty as any app of being a slow unstable POS.
steam just kinds of win by default by not being a massive pile of shit.
For one: game developers might have extraordinary knowledge on their requisite game engines and shader programming but tend to loathe the type of logistical work required to deliver those games. Issues like managing and serving updates, DRM, and social features.
Steamworks SDK was one of the very first companies to offer that functionality pre-baked into their offering "free" of charge when companies chose to list on Steam. After a while, it became the default over time.
For many game companies, what usually happens is that initial investment is easy to go along with for the start when spinning up their game store (Origin, Bethesda.net) but eventually hard to maintain as it's hard to commit developers to maintain platforms.
I think part of the reason is that Steam is pretty utilitarian, not selfish. Valve is actually pretty much a force for good and haven't tried to use any very dark patterns to make more money. Steam is nice and its developers care to make a program that works well.
They don't need dark patterns, they're already making a boatload of money indeed. If the trend continues, that means more paid consultants working on open source Linux desktop libraries [1]. Win-win in my book.
It actually feels good that the 30% cut Steam takes out of my purchases partly goes to improve my Linux desktop experience. Better for me as a user than if they were taking a smaller cut and focusing on Windows only.
1: Valve has been sponsoring work on Wine, Wayland, KDE, mesa gfx drivers, dxvk, and others.
For all that the Linux community tried, and god did we try, we didn't make real gaming on Linux progress until Valve started throwing developers are the projects. You can easily attribute real gaming (I love free civ as much as the next person, but it's not the same) coming to Linux Desktops.
Obviously kidding, Valve's efforts will IMO greatly expand Linux's target audience which is laudable. Seems to me that limitation was one of the main pullbacks for Linux adoption, especially in non-developer circles. Requiring dual-booting just for games on the Windows partition is not a convenient band-aid, and Stallman's solution never was one at all.
People understand that Microsoft Games Pass and Epic Games Store are only a good deal because they NEED to undercut Valve to compete with Valve. Yet if they were in a position of power, how much do people trust Tencent or Microsoft to not use their vertical integration to monopolize the market and extract higher rents than Valve ever did? Why does Apple deserve any credit for building a store you were FORCED to use with asinine submission policies? How much can publicly held companies be trusted to value long term customer loyalty over short term profits?
Valve is just simply the only company you CAN trust, and that's their massive competitive advantage and something Microsoft and Apple and Google with their trillions of dollars can't buy. When they make a decision that makes people upset, the CEO will directly talk with customers on sites like Reddit. They've been a force against the imposition of heavyweight DRM. They've voluntarily introduced liberal policies like family sharing and offline play that other companies refused to implement. Valve is an honest company in an industry full of conmen operating at a loss.
For me, it's that my 20 year old account has games I bought 20 years ago. I can trust that anything I purchase from Steam will be around for a long time. No other company has demonstrated that kind of reliability, except maybe Apple.
Plus, I think Steam is a superior product.
That being said, I also try to buy on GoG as much as possible, since I really prefer to have DRM-free games and I want some competition in the market.
I have an Xbox Game Pass subscription, but will never buy anything from the Microsoft store because their products are bundled into encrypted archives (so no modding/changing games). Plus, it has a nasty habit of leaving 40+GB binaries on my system that can't be deleted from within Windows.
> I can trust that anything I purchase from Steam will be around for a long time.
Unless the publisher pulls it or pushes an update cutting music because of license deals expiring. Or gets a stealthy replacement with a worse remaster. Or your OS drops 32 bit / x86 support.
I believe GP was referring to the fact Steam itself is 32-bit only, with the singular exception of MacOS (last I checked, if this has recently changed, I apologize).
So even if your game is 64-bit, you still need 32-bit libraries and OS support to run the DRM. Sucks when either your OS doesn't support 32 bit (MacOS, OpenBSD), you don't want to add 32 bit multilib, or you're doing funky emulation on a non-x86 machine where you can only effectively emulate x86_64 (see: ppc64le).
These are all niche situations (the last one almost facetiously so), but the point stands. I really wish valve would release a 64 bit client on Windows and Linux :/
That's not true. I have a game that was pulled by the publisher (legal issues, don't know the details). But everyone who bought it can still download it and play it. Pulling it in this case just means no one can buy it anymore.
It was actually shocking to me when I found out that stuff I bought on other online stores wasn't available anymore for whatever reason. For this reason I still buy stuff on steam but I don't have enough trust to buy anything in another store.
I still have every game I purchased; even ones that have long been pulled from the store.
The music cutting issue is valid. However, it can be overcome by leaving the game downloaded and turning off updates for it. Plus, the game will always be available, which was my point.
But the flip side to that is Steam also automatically moves games up a tier. So a base game bought at launch might get automatically updated to a special addition which includes all the DLC and/or texture pack updates.
> Or your OS drops 32 bit / x86 support.
I can still download the game, which is all steam promises. From there, I can make it work via VM.
One huge difference people often forget: Steam gives you (essentially) unlimited keys to sell elsewhere. Steam still pays for the infrastructure and everything, but they get a 0% cut because someone bought the game on GreenManGaming and then added that key to steam.
Just imagine, alternative app stores, you keep almost all the convenience of the apple one, for free.
You can also give keys away, but if you do that too much, they do apparently limit you ;)
Another thing: The store app is not a disaster. Compare it with Windows, Epic… Those are all horrible apps that mostly behave like browsers, but then differ in some ways (in addition to the often bad performance). Hell, for a long time, the back button did not work in the Epic store. Steam managed to have their store not be a disaster pretty much since its existence.
And Windows/Epic are not even the worst examples.
I remember when Origin started, they had no language setting and forced you into whatever GeoIP decided. I don’t even remember what my issue with UPlay was, but the experience was bad enough that I would never again play a game that uses it.
Steam had the distinct advantage of being first, and they've built a rich storefront with tons of useful features. Forums, reviews, discovery queues, recommendations based on your purchases, bundles, curators, account security (steamguard), etc. Valve also built a development ecosystem with integrated (optional) DRM, achievements, leaderboards, stats, multiplayer, voice chat, controller support with full remapping and such, just a ton of stuff.
As a consumer, Steam is a much better platform than any of the alternatives. I prefer to buy games on Steam, all things being equal.
As a dev studio, Steam takes 30% and Epic takes 12% (7% if you use Unreal engine).
I've also had dozens of games I own stop being sold on Steam - but I'm still able to download, install, and play them YEARS later. To me, that's good stewardship.
At least in some circles Steam gets bonus points for Linux support and actively contributing to various related open source projects, such as Wine and various GPU drivers and tools.
Sure, thats needed for Steam Deck these days, but other vendors basically not support Linux at all, let alone contribute back!
At two ends of the spectrum, there are monopolies and then there is fragmentation. It feels like, hypothetically, massive consolidations of power/monopolies can be broken up with regulation, and that would be better for competition. But if in practice consumers only ever go back to the storefront/service that is functionally superior and that most people use, would it make enough of a difference in the long run? If there was finally enough regulation to allow alternative app stores on iOS, what exactly would motivate enough consumers to care about the new alternatives? (Knowing that timed exclusives on PC tend to generate considerable pushback.)
There is no option to force consumers to use the other products with regulation. They will only be driven by the competence/exclusives/network effects of other platforms. Maybe the end outcomes of having multiple options will simply be a partial result of how competent the other development teams are in comparison to the larger and objectively better platforms, in spite of the fact that consolidation is considered bad in principle. It seems to be getting harder and harder for even large entities like Bethesda to create successful alternatives in spite of all the resources they have.
The blowback that multiple companies have gotten for choosing to release games as Epic Game Store exclusives and Discord becoming gradually ubiquitous are what I would consider examples of this phenomenon. Average people simply want to use the larger, better platforms, and they aren't convinced to move when alternatives exist.
Because of the sheer size of platforms like these, success might just be defined in terms of momentum and ubiquity by now. You would be up against convincing a subset of millions and millions of people that you can deliver a functionally superior platform, and if their friends decide not to move, then they would have good reason not to move also. Developer cuts tend to be criticized, but I would think that most users of Steam wouldn't even be aware of such issues since they stay local to the development side and don't impact their experience, and so they keep using Steam anyway.
Really simply? Because it's worth it. Nobody's "bowing to" Steam, they could sell off their own website for free, if they wanted. But Steam offers enough of a marketplace, enough tooling, and enough promotion that it's worth it to sell there.
It's what I want for the Apple App store, too. Don't charge any less, just make it worth it.
Oh yeah, from the consumer's point of view, fair. I'm talking about why _developers_ choose Steam. Valve makes it worthwhile for developers to fork out that 30%. Consumers, ultimately, have to go where the game is.
My wording was probably dramatic there, it's just I don't think a Microsoft subsidiary would lightly take the decision to forgo 20-30% (TIL it's tiered) of their revenue to a third party when they have capabilities to handle such services internally. Building platforms is kind of Microsoft's business, so to me migrating Bethesda to Steam is their acknowledgment that a competing platform has won that space. Seemingly deservedly so beyond network effects and user lock-in.
Oh, I don't think they do take it lightly! Building platforms _badly_ is kind of Microsoft's specialty, unfortunately. They have lock-in on the Xbox, but any kind of Steam-esque competitor for the PC has always been a miserable experience that nobody ever wanted to use.
That said, I did forget until now that GamePass exists - Microsoft isn't really challenging Steam anymore, they're doing kind of an end-run around them with their games subscription service, and it frankly kinda rocks. But for those who still want to outright purchase games, they still sell on Steam, because, again, Valve have made it worthwhile to pay the 30% to at least get the userbase and marketing bump.
Next to all the other good points, Steam has managed not to f up in all these years. If you go deep, their launcher has an insane number of features - trading, backgrounds and picture frames, drops, profile levels and a lot more - but their basic MVP user experience was never cluttered by it. You can right now log into your account from years ago and start playing with very few clicks; if you don't care about all that stuff, it doesn't bother you. The also never really enraged a majority of their users (like digg, for example) and they were the first to adopt a reasonable return policy (it was partly forced, but it's still not standard).
They simply started out well and managed not to loose their lead.
In addition to everything people already said, another important part: Valve is a private company, so they don't need to answer to nagging institutional shareholders. I guarantee if they weren't, Steam would have been corrupted long ago.
It's not Apple charging 30% itself that is problematic it's that no other option is allowed and they then force things like 30% cuts or policies of what apps are allowed with that. Other launchers/stores (or none at all) on PC succeed but that doesn't mean there can't be a popular option that still takes a 30% cut. A most popular option also does not mean that option has sole discretion on what is allowed to be installed on PCs, just what is allowed on that store.
It's frustrating how no other launchers have even a fraction is the useful features Steam has. How come I can't buy games as gifts for my friends on other stores??? It's free money and network effects and a very easy implementation. Steam is winning because nobody is even trying. The only other good one is itch.io, but you won't find AAA games on it of course.
I have always wondered the same thing; Microsoft is one of the very few companies that is capable enough to resist Valve's dominance. I think all it boiled down to was that in this case Microsoft, by some miracle, actually managed to catch an accurate picture of the wants and needs of their consumers and realised backing down on their Xbox store can easily drive them away. They saw how the general trend of game launchers has mostly only served in making lives more difficult for gamers and decided they'd rather keep the status quo as it is comfortable to them for the time being.
It's great that Microsoft can see the effectiveness of Steam. Now if only they would apply Valve's philosophies to Windows. Steam won and continues to win because it adds features that people want, and removes anti-features that people don't want. That second part is key.
I was late to edit the mistake but I learned there are known tiers, so FWIW a Bethesda would at most be paying 20% (>$50M), if not less with a private deal.
Of course they also pay nowhere near 20% since they also do a significant amount of sales — often around 30% — via Steam keys sold on third party sites (Humble, GMG, Fanatical, etc.) which Valve forgoes all commission on. My guess is most large publishers are paying Valve in the order of 13-15%
Steam does the online marketplace right. They have reviews that aren't entirely faked or bought and paid for. They have meta critic scores on the page. Their tags are generally accurate, if something is listed as an RTS it has an RTS feel, games tend to not be tagged with popular tags that don't fit. Their guides and forums tend to have helpful information that can be easily found. Workshop makes modding as easy as click a button. The store also stays out of the way when you want it too, there aren't adds to buy more games all over your library, they don't try and charge you for faster pipes or backup space.
From the dev side they also make it easy to have a game on steam and still sell it elsewhere. Steam keys are free to generate, so you can sell for any price or anywhere, but it keeps users stuck to the steam platform.
Steam has also never not let me play a game just because some service is down. Yes it locks you out after an extended period offline, but I'm not crashing out of a game because I lost internet for a second or some DRM server crashed.
I could totally see Microsoft trying to buy Steam in the near future. Not only are they having Bethesda do pro-Steam moves like this and generally supporting Steam, but they have a personal relationship with Valve, as Microsoft is where Gabe Newell started his career. However Valve is still a private company and I can't imagine Gaben will want to give up his money faucet.
Valve was started as a reaction to Microsoft. Back when they were game devs it was pretty much "Gabe and co want to develop their own games without corporate meddling". I can't see Valve selling until the early people are near retirement, and I'm sure they've had offers.
I really hope that Microsoft is not allowed to gobble up any more gaming-related companies. At some point anti-trust regulators need to start giving a shit again.
Microsofts xbox app and gamepass is rapidly rising, it takes the next step, pay like you pay for netflix, get a bunch of modern popular games. I haven't really bought anything on steam for a while, mostly because I have a stack of games on gamepass I want to play but really there is more than I have time for.
Others said it here but it's really the features. Steam Link works perfectly to your TV or tablet. They support nearly every gamepad you may want to use, I use PS4 gamepads and never had an issue. They also had the early mover advantage. I don't really see a good alternative other than perhaps the cloud gaming, and that's if you prefer a subscription and don't have a gaming machine. Which has its appeal in the age of not being able to get hardware at a fair price.
If I were in the market for a PC gaming rig today, I'd either use Xbox Cloud Gaming or buy a gaming laptop. As someone that always maintained a desktop gaming PC for 40 years.
The truth is nobody really made a good effort to compete with them early on. Epic seems to be the only one making a serious effort at this point.
Also services like steam are naturally sticky/monopolistic because there's a network effect with the games. Consumers don't want to have multiple services that do the same thing, so if you have a handful of games on steam, may as well use it for all.
There really needs to be protocols for ownership etc, such that the UI is decoupled from the ownership aspect. otherwise network effect makes it monopoly-esque. It's a principle that promotes greater competition across many types of businesses
> Is there a technical reason why Steam is a such a force in the space?
It just works and doesn't get in the way. In all my time using Steam, I've never had a case when it wasn't maxing out my bandwidth during a download. The only friction I can remember is with Half Life 2, which required you to use Steam to decode the files installed with your physical DVD and that took ages. But that was the first real game ever shipped on the platform. On the dev side, Steam seems pretty easy to integrate.
to be fair, even on stores without the 'cartelish' 30%, prices don't seem any lower, so it's not as if how much the storefront takes has any difference for the consumer. Personally I'd say it's a combination of first mover advantage, good (enough) product/service and the fact that a collection of game is rather 'sticky', sine you can't move it to another storefront
Steam offers a lot of services around the core store. Achievements, save file cloud sync, a modest social network, DRM. All that stuff creates lock-in.
> Seems that is the way of the Internet, being first matters more than just about anything
It does help, but not because of the internet. From memory they were the first digital game shop. They basically invented the market for shops for digital content. Apple would copy it some years later with the iPhone app store.
Every now and then I like to mention the rules were a lot different on PC many years ago. Back then, the developer got the 30% and the publisher (similar to Steam) received the full 70%.
As a matter of principle, I think digital delivery platforms benefit from competition, and we should not be locked down into a single monopolistic, stagnating platform.
As a selfish consumer though, I hugely wish we just had Steam and Netflix:
The Origins and Uplays and Battle.nets of the world exist solely to make my life difficult, refusing to play my game when I want it due to obscure update required or forgotten password or old email account (especially when they are an overlay on top of Steam), and have zero repeat zero positively zero benefit to myself as a consumer. It is blatantly anti-consumer, and not made with customer view in mind.
(Gog.com gets a pass because it allows me to JUST download the game, with no launcher and crap, so essentially going into opposite direction from all publisher-owned platforms and provides a unique value proposition)
Same for Netflix. It's fine. It's good. It's great! Over the last 5 years, proliferation of Disneys, Amazons, HBOs, Hulus, CBS All Access, Paramount Ultra Plus Exclusive Diamond Platinum... the whatEVERs, all they do is make me have to guess which service is content I want to play on. All they are, at any level, is "we want more money for less consumer convenience, and we think we can get away with it due to exclusive content lock-in we refuse to license to the convenient platform".
I understand I'm supposed to vote with my money, but with exclusive lock-in that's difficult. My kid wants their Octonauts and their Stinky & Dirties, dammit :D
I use Netflix and Disney. They are mostly pretty equivalent functionality with different shows. But Disney+ seems to be a faceslappingly appalling waste of large Disney franchises.
Mostly I am screaming for canon watchlists. Whether it is in release order, or universe-timeline order, or "makes most sense watched this way" order. Or all of them as options.
So many friggin' Marvel movies and TV shows and yet I have to google some random page to find the order I should watch them in?!?
Same for Star Wars!
Come on Disney, kids keep growing through teenagerdom into adulthood all the time. Why not make it easy to hook them to watch your stuff?
>So many friggin' Marvel movies and TV shows and yet I have to google some random page to find the order I should watch them in?!?
It's definitely there for the Marvel movies. I'm watching them in release order. If you go to the Marvel screen on Disney Plus, you'll see lists for "Cinematic Universe Phase One," "Cinematic Universe Phase Two," etc. They also have one for timeline order.
>I think digital delivery platforms benefit from competition, and we should not be locked down into a single monopolistic, stagnating platform.
I agree with this in principle but I think it's only necessarily true when production and distribution are separated from each other. As it stands now, I don't see much actual competition or innovation in any of the streaming services, but rather the contrary: the experience is worse now than it was 10 years ago. The only thing we have is a never ending arms race of new stuff to watch being kept exclusive (which you mention) while the UIs move backwards and prices creep up.
What we have now is akin to the studio system and I don't see why it shouldn't be broken up in the same manner.
> [the competing platforms] have zero repeat zero positively zero benefit to myself as a consumer.
The reason Steam and Netflix are so good and continue to exist in such a good state is exactly because of the competition. However, because of exclusivity, licensing, ownership, et cetera, that also means you eventually may want to deal with said competition.
>>The reason Steam and Netflix are so good and continue to exist in such a good state is exactly because of the competition.
I don't believe in this case that is demonstrably true. What has improved for me as a consumer with either platform since competition came - other then less content?
In particular with Steam, I don't believe there has been a single improvement relevant to me. Uplay, ea origin, battle.net are purely net negatives to me, in their own right and in their impact on steam.
Steam's refund policy used to be abysmal until Origin added no-hassle refunds. Within about 6 months Steam changed to the policy they have now.
Big Picture Mode only came about because they tried developing Steam Machines to compete with Microsoft potentially locking everything into the app store.
I don't think UPlay and Battle.net have caused any changes though, lol. Their only attempts at competition have been game exclusivity.
> Steam's refund policy used to be abysmal until Origin added no-hassle refunds
Didn't the refund policy come after they lost a court case in Australia [0]. Sure they could have made it country-specific but that would a) have been an incredibly bad look and b) promptet similar lawsuits in other countries with a semblance of consumer protection laws and c) probably doesn't actually lose tham that much money as it also means that people are less reluctant to purchase.
As a user, Steam and Netflix both provided more value to me prior to credible competition. Netflix used to be one €9.99 subscription to watch basically everything, Steam was the one stop shop to manage all my games. Basically all the features I care about on either were already well established before their competitors came around.
On the other hand, my Steam account now represents a very expensive point of failure should it somehow get hacked or Valve decides to robo ban me.
But Netflix wasn't profitable at a €9.99 subscription, and therefore that was never sustainable. Look at how Netflix continues to raises prices just this year already.
It might be a better business _for the the business owners_ with less licensing fees due to less third party content and higher prices, but that's not the same as being better for the users.
There are two distinct problems: content and content access.
Games, tv shows, films, these are the content we want. Netflix, HBO go, Hulu, steam, battle.net, these are content access systems.
What consumers want is legal access to all content they desire with competing offerings for the way in which they access the content. Competition drives quality, innovation, consumer value.
The problem is that we have a system today where the content access systems have monopoly control over subsets of the content. So there's no competition around the access system- if you want that content, it comes bundled inside that content access system. You have no choice if you want the content, so why would anyone invest in making theirs the best?
I imagine this probably means the eventual death of Battle.net as well. Honestly though, it's time. Battle.net was incredible back in the day, but now it's just another annoying launcher that segments my friends lists.
Battle.net is probably the only launcher that is quite as reliable and high quality as Steam. One example is that you can start playing WoW way before the download or install is complete. Downside is that they have been really pushing for upsells in the recent years.
All other launchers are garbage. Origin doesn’t even render text properly on my 4k screen, and pretty much all of them forgets my login each week.
It would be nice if it wasn't such a struggle on Linux.
I remember getting their games to run with lutris and it worked fine but then one day their client updated and i never managed to log in again.
The population of Battle.net is WAY bigger than the tiny fraction of players using Bethesda launcher. Hard to know from the outside but it's probably like 95%+ Steam even on their newest games. NexusMods, the largest Bethesda modding host rarely mentions the launcher even if mods are compatible.
Battle.net on the other hand predates Steam and they made some of the most significant PC-only games of all time.
Having said that, I think you might be right for a different reason. Blizzard will likely eat a massive amount of humble pie post-2021 and Steam releases would seem like a reasonable gesture of to restoring community goodwill.
Battle.net The Launcher doesn't pre-date Steam; it was released in the early 2010s. Previously, before Steam, Battle.net was a lot more nebulous, and would naturally have had less user lock-in. Games were individually distributed, and battle.net was more-so just an infrastructure-level system Blizzard used to coordinate online games, chat, etc. Even, IIRC, unified profiles weren't a thing until the early 2010s and the desktop app was launched; WoW was different from Starcraft, which was different from Diablo.
That is to say, yeah Battle.net today has far more users than the Bethesda launcher, but it still predominately suffers from the "users don't want to be here, its just where the games are at" issue that the Bethesda & Rockstar launchers suffer from.
I think it's likely that the Xbox acquisition will result in a sunset of Battle.net as well. It'll probably resemble a long-term plan like: deeper Battle.net/Xbox account integration to share purchases and social state, release of all titles on Steam & Xbox stores, forced migration of Battle.net accounts to Xbox accounts, deprecation of the Battle.net launcher; 2 years minimum, probably closer to 3.
For context, battle.net the service has existed since 1996. Back in the day it was just used for the multiplayer component of games like Diablo and Warcraft. I think it's still meaningful to point this out because even if it wasn't a launcher like it is today, it was still a social media/communications platform which is a meaningful part of why people use certain launcher platforms/stores.
Yep! In fact, a few years ago Blizzard tried to sunset the Battle.net brand and rename the launcher to just Blizzard Launcher or something, and they eventually gave up on that because the community was really attached to the Battle.net name. For many gamers Battle.net was one of the first online experiences.
Of course, battle.net 1.0 wasn't continuous with battle.net 2.0 which launched with starcraft and eventually subsumed wow and d3 accounts. If you had some account on battle.net for brood war, it died with the move to remastered.
There's a lot more to Battle.net than most launchers. For one, it's really deeply integrated into like every Blizzard game's chat and friends system. It'd be hard to imagine Blizzard retooling World of Warcraft's chat to accept messages from Steam users, but at present players in WoW and say Heroes of the Storm can chat with each other inside the games.
I'm curious as to that one. As launchers go it's excellent, so I'm not sure if they want to get rid of it or expand it out to support more things - after all Microsoft, who can't even get app updates to work correctly in their own windows store on their own game launcher, just bought it along with a bunch of other stuff. I guess I should be annoyed that more non-blizzard stuff will end up on it, but boy oh boy has that particular ship sailed.
Why would this have anything to do with Battle.net? There are not insignificant portions of the playerbase fully bought into that ecosystem (like... every World of Warcraft player, for a start.) The Launcher itself has been around for almost 10 years; the network has been around for twice that. Bethesda's launcher on the other hand was always an afterthought.
Thank you. I already have a "launcher" for my programs. It's called my computer's operating system. I don't understand why I should need to run a program just to have it run another program.
The Microsoft Store on Windows exists. They just aren't going to start letting you download full games without paying, so the Store still ends up mediating licensing, which publishers aren't too keen on.
But the Microsoft Store is pretty bad; ie. I still cannot install games to my second ntfs hard drive due to some weird error, so I don't use it.
So how are you going to buy games if you've killed all the launchers. No Steam, no Epic, no GOG Galaxy. Are you going to download everything over http from your browser?
The same way you installed that launcher: by downloading it and running it.
For the record, I have no issue with Steam's launcher because it basically works (although it gets slammed on big releases, which is an issue) and it doesn't force you into a nonexistent social network.
They can exist for purchasing and managing the games. But it's ridiculous that if you log in to Steam and launch a game from there, you're then prompted to register and log in in some other crappy needy launcher that provides absolutely no value to the user.
Technically, GOG lets you download installers via https, but I agree that it's a pain point vs a game launcher where you can, with minimal effort, queue up multiple downloads/ installs.
I think in an ideal world the program you run to download and launch the games and the service selling and providing those games would be entirely separate.
I don't know about that. The fact that they released a bunch of EA games on Steam (most notably recent Battlefield games) made me think they're about to sunset Origin. But that was a couple years ago at this point so who knows
The annoying part with Steam is, almost every time I start it, it is downloading a few hundred MB large update.
This makes absolutely no sense to me.
* first of all they could reduce the patch size
* second, what need is there to update a launcher this often, why not pull the required info from some online database
This thing is wasting internet traffic without any apparent good reason.
You probably open it pretty infrequently (or you're on the beta branch), because I open it daily and updates happen once a month if ever.
It'd be the same if you were to open Chrome once a month and it wasn't autoupdating itself in the background. Steam doesn't have an autoupdate background process like Chrome does.
Microsoft has been happy-ish to have their games on Steam for a while now. They probably would've gone all-in on the Xbox store if the windows store (backend) wasn't so shitty.
The Xbox app is a masterclass in how not to design a user interface, it is clunky, the menus don't go anywhere, they mixed terminology (some places have "Add friend" others have "Follow friend"), users with multiple screens will find their game launching on the non-principal one, language is tied to the OS so if you want your games in English but your Windows is in French you have to change the OS-level language.
I don't work at Microsoft, but if I had to guess there are several teams working on individual components and they lack a clear leader that enforce a global vision so it falls apart at integration time.
I had an Xbox game pass trial. When it expired it closed the game I was playing. No message. When I tried to reopen the game nothing happened. None of my games worked. But most importantly, it never told me why. Nowhere in the interface does it communicate “your trial ended” or “hey resubscribe to game pass” or “you can’t play games anymore” instead everything just stops working with no explanation. I was midway through contacting support when I pieced together that maybe the trial ended, and confirmed that on their website. That information isn’t available in the desktop app.
(This was over a year ago, hopefully it’s fixed now?)
Probably not. I was waiting for my gamepass subscription to expire last week so I could renew using the Xbox Live Gold upgrade. I was constantly notified that my subscription was expiring soon, but never actually got a notice when it actually expired. All of my games still looked playable until I tried actually playing them.
It's just so bad. When games install and you can actually play, which is a miracle, adding friends is like navigating a maze. I think we spent 20 minutes last time trying to get each other to show up and finding what you have to press/accept to actually befriend someone.
Not to mention that it basically kills modding if you don't also want to crack the game yourself/get a pre-cracked version from somewhere.
All day long most of us are interacting with products from brands that we like while oblivious to the fact that these brands are owned by ones we make fun of or even despise. I don’t thing anyone gets this big without realizing your shareholders prefer dividends over you stoking your ego by making sure everyone knows the money is going in your pocket, even if that means less money comes in.
I don’t think I’ve had Hennessy ever in my life, but they own my favorite Scotch and some friends’ favorite scotch. They don’t go bragging about it, they just collect the checks.
Forgetting that Bethesda is owned by Microsoft is easier to do if it’s not on XBox.
Literally how is the windows store so bad! Sometimes I'm not signed in and don't want to be signed in (setting up a new machine for someone else). The flows are just horrible.
On the mac the store makes things, in general, easier. On windows its comedy. I wonder how many folks like myself now just instinctively avoid it.
I can't think of a single non-developer application by Microsoft which isn't absolute garbage. Skype (after the Microsoft "upgrade"), Teams, Windows Store, the Xbox apps... It's incredible that they are unable to produce a properly working application for their own operating system.
Steam is a real value add, enough that I use it for non-steam games.
Not only with proton or the controller db, but save-game sync, multiplayer invites, their server browser, and everything being tied to my login.
Even managing my game library on steam is pleasant! And the social features they have are.. actually pretty useful. Having a friends list of people who I game with is nice, as is the ability to have low friction conversations.
Another huge factor is the built in steam discussion forums. Any problems or questions with the game? There’s a dedicated forum for every game, easy to access. Sure lots of games have their own forum or subreddit, but smaller indie games sometimes don’t.
I’ve even gone to the steam discussion forums for games that are on Steam but I own elsewhere.
> They provide no benefit that couldn't be done a better way
This is like the famous Dropbox comment
"For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem"
It's not. Complaining about something that only exists to strategically hedge against a competitior's dominance but just gets in the way at the user level is not the same as the infamous Dropbox quote.
I've used the file verification and repair feature many times. It's also a convenient place to enumerate the games I have access to so I can download them on a new PC.
Just because it has some useful features doesn't invalidate the fact that the only reason it exists to the management that's in charge of it is as a hedge against Valve. They don't care if it's a net win for their users or not until it gets so bad that people stop buying their games.
I think there's plenty of room for pessimism when it comes to the games industry. But Valve has (when not occasionally making games which, let's face it, isn't very often these days) become a business dedicated to the business to selling games. It offers a platform that has provided several innovations for usability to consumers ahead of competitors (it isn't continuously playing catchup - they're proactively investing) and it provides a relatively low barrier to entry for publishing a game in a pretty visible manner. I'm not certain if you ever lived with Gamestop and EBGames as your main source of purchasing games but it was pretty much impossible for small devs to get noticed that way - so small devs ended up posting their games on the internet (which was quite a strong limitation in terms of size) or trying to get on various ShareWare/Demo disks that'd circulate with magazines.
I'm sure this isn't the absolute best timeline, but it sure beats a land where Origin and UPlay successfully beatup Steam and we're all forced back onto walled gardens. And it seems sustainable, the second largest platform (IMO) out there is GOG which is owned and operated by CD Projekt Red - it seems like game studios see a lot of utility from owning a mostly open platform like this.
How does any of that support or deny my assertion that these per publisher launchers that you're forced to use regardless of where you bought the game only exist because large publishers hedging against their competitors?
And what would that "other way" be? Let me guess, another launcher, or simply no launcher, no updates, no "cloud" saves, etc.
Downloading games off Steam is easier than pirating them. If that's not progress, I don't know what is. Definitely not the same with movies and music which tells me they don't want it to be that easy.
> Definitely not the same with movies and music which tells me they don't want it to be that easy.
It actually is, it's just called "streaming" instead of downloading*.
For a very long time, Netflix was the go-to place for any movies, and piracy was on the decline. Now all the old media companies (who have even bigger god complexes than game studios) are doing the exact same thing everyone in this thread is discussing with alternate launchers, and creating their own streaming services. And piracy is suddenly back on the rise. Only time will tell whether this will play out the same way as the OP, or whether the flexibility afforded by inherently streamable format will allow them to succeed in splintering where game studios failed.
*Two notes on this:
1) it's a benefit afforded by having a much more linear data format
2) despite what HN commenters may believe, it's only a small percentage of users that care about owning content rather than being able to conveniently access it)
> For a very long time, Netflix was the go-to place for any movies, and piracy was on the decline.
In the US, maybe? Because here in Europe Netflix or any other streaming service has never been the go-to place for _any_ movie. You get to watch what they offer today, but if you want a specific movie, tough luck.
Steam is the place to be for 99.9% of PC gaming, anywhere in the world. This is why gaming piracy is pretty much dead while people are still downloading movies and tv shows to this day.
Dunno, I can log into Steam and still download and play any game I've ever bought with all sorts of features like global controller configuration and syncing saves between my desktop and laptop.
I personally disagree, I don't want to downplay the power of having stand alone applications - but having one application that can help me matchmake in games and helps keep all those games up to date while clearly (and non-obnoxiously) advertising new features or DLCs for those games. Steam does this things really cleanly and I don't want to return to the world where each application has to self-update whenever I launch it.
But then people forget that the bugs back then were just as bad as today, you would get crashes literally every 15 minutes, and some were hilariously malicious - Pool of Radiance (late 90's version) would straight up nuke your C:\ drive if you uninstalled it from the non-default location.
Especially when it came to mods - since auto-updating wasn't a thing mod devs were a lot more happy to tie their mod to a specific patch of the game and just refuse to support other versions. There's something to be said about this making modding more accessible since you weren't committing to long term support patches as the game evolved... but it also made things a royal pain.
> They provide no benefit that couldn't be done a better way.
Centralized software install/update, with a good CDN behind it, is a pretty huge advantage. Even if you don't care about any of the other features of the Steam launcher, that one alone is worth it. Having every publisher run their own download servers means they're much more subject to getting overloaded under heavy demand, or becoming permanently unavailable if the publisher goes out of business.
Launchers are bundling roughly 4 main services into one: (a) automatic update, (b) storefront, (c) mod portal, and (d) social networking.
The most important services are of course the first two, and in this sense, you can think of them as basically something like apt, but built with software that requires you provide proof purchase before downloading it. This helps explain why having to use multiple launchers provokes such frustration among users--it means you basically have two package managers running on your system.
Maybe if software update were a part of standard OS services, it wouldn't be such an issue, but as it isn't [on desktops], another platform providing such services becoming popular for doing so shouldn't be surprising.
Nah, that is like using Linux without package manager. Sure you can do that, but manual work is considerable.
And generally I think Steam staying alive is much more likely than random places serving stuff. Even if it were DRM free. Just looking at history quite many services have come and gone on PC.
One thing I'm seeing here is that Bethesda is trying to migrate everything including Save Files where they can. (Which great for them, that sounds like the right thing to do.) A migration to Steam may be technically easier for some of those things. Save files can be weird in Xbox games/Microsoft Store games. In particular, I think the Xbox Store has a much smaller portion of the "Creation Club" mods than Steam, and that may have been a strong motivator.
More cynically, this seems a "games generation" where Microsoft is trying to "win PC gamers back" by being very Steam friendly/Steam forward in their PC releases and strategy. There's a lot better PR for Microsoft here if Bethesda migrates everything to Steam, and it may just be for those PR reasons.
What I could actually guess is that they don't want sales there, but instead of subscriptions. Thus the games are already part of Game Pass so it might make more sense to move them to platform that players want. And those who want on their app, will pay monthly instead...
I remember when it was in vogue for every game maker to build their own launcher or even full Steam clone - when EA pulled all its new games from Steam to get people to use Origin, when Ubisoft forced uPlay on you no matter how you bought the game, and so on. Now, it seems like we're pulling back from that situation somewhat - a lot of EA games are back on Steam, for example.
I wonder whether the experiment didn't work, or if it worked, but now the goals have changed again?