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"Market makers" are a very important economic function. Just because it's hard to put your finger on a tangible product, the fact that they were able to create
by c3534l 11y ago
"Market makers" are a very important economic function. Just because it's hard to put your finger on a tangible product, the fact that they were able to create a unified framework for selling games to customers is worth quite a lot of money. A lot of people had tried (and failed) to do similar things in the past. Those things you mentioned are almost irrelevant. The actual value they're delivering is being able to easily and economically distribute your game to a wide audience and, as a consumer, connect me with a large number of games. It's like trying to say the value of a road is the stopsigns and traffic lights on them, not the fact that it's connecting two cities.
- mediumdeviation 11y agoDisagree. The 'market' is far less important when the good you're selling takes up no tangible shelf space - people have been buying games just fine without Steam for decades before Steam, and still are. Steam itself, by dint of being another layer between gamers and their games, have to justify its existence and value to them, and generally does through a variety of features as well as its legendary sales. But being a marketplace and distribution network alone does not get you anywhere, not when the cost of setting up shop on the Internet is so low these days.
- pfisch 11y agoI don't think you would say any of this if you were an indie dev. Actually I don't think anyone has said it yet, but the truth is 90% of the value of Steam is in marketing. Steam gives you millions upon millions of impressions from people actively looking to buy a game right now. Steam also does a lot to reduce piracy by providing a seamless way to patch your game. This allows you to release tons of patches which make it very hard to torrent the current version of your game.
- makomk 11y agoSteam certainly used to provide valuable marketing to indie devs, but these days it's so stuffed full of shovelware and Early Access games that might never be finished that it's not so great anymore. They don't even feel they need to obey consumer rights laws on stuff like false advertising, refunds, deceptive pricing, etc.
- pfisch 11y agoSo do you make your living from Steam? I do and you just are wrong about whether or not the marketing is valuable.
- coldtea 11y ago>people have been buying games just fine without Steam for decades before Steam, and still are The problem is the "just fine" part. For indie game shops it has been far from "just fine".
- c3534l 11y agoA bit of a late reply, but would you say banks are not important to the economy? Or capital markets? Those aren't tangible either. As a sillier example, consider online dating where theres not even an underlying product or service at all (well, no legal ones anyway). Actual tangible objects make up such a small portion of the economy these days. The labor required to grow corn or manufacture furniture or whatever is miniscule in comparison to the number of people those products serve.