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Steam keeps on winning
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this post was submitted on 27 Dec 2023
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I know everyone loves Valve, but it feels super weird to be celebrating a monopoly so much and so ferociously. (I know Steam isn't a technical monopoly. We don't need to have that discussion)
Gaben is old, and he's gonna retire. It'll likely be a lot sooner than anyone here is comfortable with. When Valve gets sold, or even when gaben isn't in total control anymore, things are going to start changing, and there isn't going to be a healthy, diverse marketplace to soften that.
There is a very good chance that the PC platform will be a really horrible place because of the lack of consumer choice in which they can purchase and play games.
This genuinely doesn't get talked about enough. Steam is a private company and Gabe Newell seems to be the de facto "head" of the company, despite its famously "flat" management structure. There is no guarantee a new leader will have the same values or lead the same way. There is ripe opportunity for Steam to become a steaming pile of shit. I don't know about the exact ownership structure beyond Newell, but unless the employees are far more empowered through things like ownership stake in the company, new leadership could effectively destroy how things currently work at Valve to be replaced by any number of terrible business decisions.
Gabe is old as hell. It's coming.
Dude, he's 61. You guys are making it sound like he's as old as a presidential candidate..
You don't need to be old to die tomorrow.
True, but that's unrelated to people pretending that he's older than dirt 🤷
Long live the King!
Hopefully they have some sort of transition plan for who will take over when Gabe retires. As long as they hand the reigns over to someone with similar ideas and not some business type they could be fine given they are privately owned.
Has there been any news at all on who the potential successors are?
Read somewhere that his son who has a similar philosophy was going to take over
First time hearing about this. Hope it works out.
Gabe is only 61. But based on his size he will probably go from health issues from that sooner than old age will get a skinnier Gabs.
That’s because at a certain point things like this should just become services.
But that’s wildly against capitalists mindset so…
Agreed, further the behavior of valve has to be understood like that of bandcamp before it was sold, an anomaly in a capitalist system that is vastly underperforming and dysfunctional from the perspective of those with money and power. It isn't, valve is doing great (so was bandcamp) but and I really want to stress this point for the naive gamers here who dont have a very well developed sense of the political realities of capitalism as an ideology (as opposed to some "natural order" of commerce or trade), it doesnt matter if valve is in its most profitable state right now. When it falls under the control of different rich business people it will immediately begin having its heart ripped out, rationality actually comes a lot less into the picture than you think if you believe in economics as a pure science rather than a belief system that uses more math and acronyms than most.
If there arent robust alternatives to valve then, it will be a big step back.
It's not Steam's fault if their competitors can't make a good product. Steam is still the only one with Linux support.
There is nothing exclusive to steam with respect to Linux support. All of the things required for games to run on Linux which valve support are fully open source and even existed before valve got involved. They just threw money at the efforts and turbo charged it (which is great).
Yes, which makes it even more puzzling that the competitors don't even try to capitalize on the success of Steam Deck and publish their own store on Flathub, utilizing the very same FOSS technologies to make the games run.
Maybe they're making more money behind the scenes from another corporation that perhaps pays for them not to do so? Exclusivity deals, etc. etc.?
In an ideal world, if Gaben was a real saint, he would turn Steam into a foundation or steward-owned purpose organization before he retires, that can't be sold.
Thank for the interesting read
Steams biggest competition isn't another launcher, it's piracy. Gabe is wise enough to know that, if the next guy to take over is a chode they'll learn the hard way.
It's absolutely weird and unhealthy to celebrate it.
This is it. Look at history and every major company in the past 200 years. Once the shift happens, it all goes to hell. And yet people are still shouting about some "Steam Victory" like wtf?
Nothing lasts forever, but occasionally things can hang on for awhile. Nintendo isn't quite the beloved company they were a few decades ago, but they've been doing ok for the past ~130 years.
I agree with all your points... but... IMHO some things keeping Steam honest are services like GoG and if course the High Seas, but more than that there's the plethora of other entertainment options.
This isn't housing, air, or water. A person can just not play if it's too much hassle or too costly. If Steam or any given entertainment option isn't worth using, people just won't. There's no shortage of things to do other than play games, much less use Steam for gaming.
I agree that we shouldn't imagine Steam will never change, nor should we blindly worship or glorify Valve/GabeN. I just think that games and entertainment generally is an arena where market forces actually work to benefit the consumer.
Of course employment practices and company culture is a whole 'nother thing...
I agree with the sentiment that Steam will eventually have a shitification, but I remain optimistic because the PC platform is more open than mobile platforms.
GOG and Humble are existing, smaller stores. Microsoft had three stores they use to sell and install games. Half of the FAANG companies would love to get in on this space if an opportunity showed itself. If we get past high interest rates, I can see VCs getting in on this space.
It won't be pretty and we can support smaller options now. But I don't think it'll be horrible.
It is technically a monopoly, you don't need 100% market share to be considered one otherwise Google wouldn't be considered a monopoly but it is.
One day, Valve will be under different ownership, and we will regret the time we fought for their monopoly.
That will be a shame for already purchased Steam libraries, but because the PC is an open platform and their "monopoly" is drastically overstated, it might just be the opportunity for GOG to rise up. Or maybe even Epic, if it actually bothers doing better. Valve can't, and won't ever be able to completely control where people buy PC games.
You know, as opposed to consoles like Playstation, which, if you don't like how they are doing business, you just gotta deal with it.
It's just fanboyism. Everyone shits on PS and Xbox users, but PC gamers weren't privy to the fact that the PC master race trope was meant mockingly and kinda just ran with it. Now they stan a corporation.
Yep.
People fanboy over Steam endlessly without realizing that with time, it will turn to shit as well.
More competition is good, and maybe Epic is shit today but if their leadership changes then maybe it could actually significantly improve and surpass Steam.
But if it doesn't exist, then if Steam turns to shit then you're much more likely to just be stuck with shit.
In a similar vein, I'm still surprised that so few people care about possible long term issues of digital distribution generally.
I can still legally buy Atari 2600 games that are pushing 50 years old, but a whole bunch of games are gonna disappear from the legal market if Steam shuts down. Similarly, I can give away the old box of Atari games to my kids, and they can keep playing them after I die, but I can't even fucking give away my digital games. Sure, I can give them the password, but that's not even technically allowed. And they're probably gonna figure out the account isn't being used by the original owner and delete it when it's 120 years old or some shit.
The whole thing is a good temporary solution, but it's a shit long term solution. It basically relies on pirates for preservation. Thankfully, they're doing a pretty good job for most games.
Also, in theory a VC firm can buy up someone like Steam or EGS and start charging a monthly fee to access the games you already bought. You will have the option of giving up your collection or paying.
Well, hold on. Why shouldnt we rely on pirates for preservation?
Valve is the only major PC game store that isnt public. Possibly the only PC store period, tho I dont know that for a fact for the smaller distributors. The private nature is why they currently operate as the best option for users, and the odds of the other stores going private is basically zero. So when valve shifts winds, they will be the end of an era.
Do you expect us to be able to request or rely on public companies to ever do better for game preservation and user to user trade than a private company does? You already arent pleased with valves stance, and there is no indication anyone will ever do better than them.
Who else would ever do better? Pirates are the best option.
Historically, it was possible to preserve games without pirating them, just like museums can legally preserve paintings and archeological artifacts (even if copyright applies).
I think it would be best if something similar was still possible for games / software, but, AFAIK this would require either physical copies (that could be preserved without making an unauthorized copy) or sufficiently permissive licenses.
To put it another way, we didn't have to rely on pirates when physical copies existed. I mean, real physical copies that work without external services. There were still software pirates, but it wasn't a requirement. Now it's basically a requirement, because there's nothing to preserve except bits that you're not allowed to copy.
Also, copy protection is getting better, somewhat surprisingly. Last I looked, the number of games that can't be pirated was getting longer and longer. If a game can't be pirated, and we're relying on pirates for preservation, then it can't be preserved, and that seems like a problem. At least, from a preservation standpoint. There used to be a subreddit that kept track of uncracked PC games, and it's actually quite long!
Ok, but thats still also not about steam. Steam is a store, but they dont make much product. Game devs do that.
Game devs are the ones no longer making physical copies of their games. We should be pushing for the producers of games to be offering these.
As I said, it's a problem with digital distribution generally. It's killed physical copies. Even physical copies of PC games that do still exist are mostly just Steam or EGS installers and a CD key.
More specifically it's a problem with the way digital distribution is commonly handled. In theory, there could be no launcher requirement and consumers could be given the ability to transfer licenses and archive software. This would allow digital preservation to be handled mostly the same as physical was, and the games could be freely (and legally) passed down through the generations, and the games would work even if the original launcher shut down. I'm not aware of any distribution platform that offers those terms, though.
Preservation is a joke. Sure, for super old games sold on cartridges it works. But for anything around.. 1998 to 2010 or so? Forget it.
Even when you owned the original PC CDs with the box, the game updates are no longer available (Developer might not even exist anymore, site is shutdown). And if you get the wrong DRM like SecuROM you can't start your game at all. Valid CD key or not (I tried it with Sacred 2, couldn't get it to run due to the DRM servers being gone. Support from the shop I bought it years ago just gave me a Steam key afterwards, lol). And of course even if you get things to run, the online servers are no longer available, so that limits it to singleplayer games mostly.
Looking back at all the games I bought right now Steam is doing the best job when it comes to actually keep them running. GOG is a good second place. Hell, my PC doesn't even have a DVD drive anymore, it's simply not necessary.
Having played on PC for the last ~27 years I really don't understand the nostalgia. PC gaming back then was a major hassle between physical media, manual game patching (version 1.01a to 1.01b to 1.02 to 1.1 to ..) and shitty DRM that barely worked. We can only hope Steam isn't going down the gutter, but for now they rake in tons of cash and it's a privately held company so it should be fine.
I guess we'll see how this shakes out in the coming years. God willing, not much will change.
That's one way to swat away all criticism about the premise of your comment....
Considering the fact that Steam is not a monopoly and alternate storefronts continue to exist (Microsoft will not stop selling games individually on their own store even if it's just an afterthought to GamePass but it's the same platform as GamePass), there will be alternatives to Steam if Valve turns anti-consumer. There is little actual loyalty among gamers. Just look at Blizzard: At one point their customer base was almost as die hard as Nintendo's and it took only a couple of years to throw that away. (I noticed it when the audience actually booed at the Diablo Immortal reveal.)