12 ms·

Steam is not healthy for gaming

79 points by eswat 9y ago

MrZongle2 9y ago
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14352762 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14352762
Jimmie_Rustle 9y ago
| If you were to ask the average PC gamer, they’d swear up and down that there’s no way they’d ever give their money to such a corporation. Stopped reading here, what retarded nonsense.
- penagwin 9y ago
  Quite the opposite, most people joke (but seriously) that we lose our wallets during steam sales. We just willingly give them all of your money.
  - havetocharge 9y ago
    Isn't that exactly how commerce has worked throughout the times? You're not being robbed, you're the one who is purchasing the games. If you lose your wallet during this activity, maybe you should not engage in it at all?
- PhasmaFelis 9y ago
  Yeah, I don't see how anyone who's followed gaming news for more than 5 minutes can think that "the average PC gamer" is defined by concern for labor abuses.
  - WorldMaker 9y ago
    Yes, but there is still a very surprisingly vocal set of PC gamers that always seem to refer to Valve as if Steam were the local Mom & Pop shop down the street and not the Wal-Mart of videogames that it has become. (It's fine that Steam is the Wal-Mart of PC Gaming, but let's treat it that way.)
- J5892 9y ago
  He's implying that an average PC gamer would never use Uber, Lyft, or Airbnb. The whole article seems like the author just woke up from a 15-year coma and is having trouble coming to terms with modern commerce.
  - andrepd 9y ago
    "That's just the way it is now" isn't a refutation.
  - Nadya 9y ago
    >The whole article seems like the author just woke up from a 15-year coma and is having trouble coming to terms with modern commerce. Seems more like a Games Journalism article written by someone who isn't "a gamer". Which is par for the course nowadays. I'd be hard pressed to find any PC gamer who doesn't think Steam improved upon the way things used to be done. I do know one person who is an exception but their issue isn't the gaming side of things but the fact they liked to collect boxes for the box art. Fewer games being released as a box = fewer box arts for their collection.
    - WorldMaker 9y ago
      We could play the "no true Scotsman" game for a while, but I've yet to meet a games journalist that is less of "a gamer" than I am. The article admits Steam improved the way things had been done before. It simply asks us to question our relationship with Steam today, if it's continuing to do real good. It wonders why so many people are still adamant Steam is a Mom & Pop shop when it's the PC gaming Wal-Mart today.
      - Nadya 9y ago
        >We could play the "no true Scotsman" game for a while, but I've yet to meet a games journalist that is less of "a gamer" than I am. I predicted this would be a response (or, similarly, "gatekeeping"). "Gamers" in the literal sense? Sure. But most people mean "gamer" as in "gaming enthusiast". There's a certain level of skill or knowledge expected of anyone calling themselves an "enthusiast". If you lack both of those things you'll find it hard for anyone to take you seriously. Just like an "artist" who is both untalented and ignorant (eg. no knowledge of common terminology, history, or popular figures) wouldn't be taken seriously as an "artist", regardless of how much time they spend on it. Polygon infamously released 30 minutes of gameplay footage of Doom that was mocked for the player being so bad it's like they've no experience with an FPS game [0]. Polygon in general has a long track record of being ignorant of entire facets of gaming culture, to an extent that many enthusiasts say "Bullshit. You don't know what you're talking about." Their reputation for being ignorant and clickbaity wasn't earned because they're good at what they do, quite the contrary. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3pQ0oO_cDE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3pQ0oO_cDE
rjbwork 9y ago
Vox is not your friend, and Polygon is not healthy for gaming.
- strictnein 9y ago
  > "Polygon is not healthy for gaming" This, a million times over.
- santaclaus 9y ago
  Why is that?
  - icpmacdo 9y ago
    There only purpose is to make money. If you not spending anything on the product you are the product.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
pavel_lishin 9y ago
> Valve themselves eagerly trumpeted that they had paid more than $57 million to Steam Workshop creators over four years — an enormously impressive figure until you realize that it's only 25 percent of the sale price, which means Valve just made $171 million profit from ... setting up an online form where you can submit finished 3D models. Yeah, come on, you guys! They barely did any of the work! They just set up a form! How dare they expect to be compensated for that? It's not like there's a huge infrastructure powering all of that, that not only required an initial investment of money, time and brainpower, but also requires ongoing maintenance! The article does raise some good points, but the overall raise-the-pitchforks tone makes it seem less credible - especially when most of the complaints seem to be that Valve is running a profitable business while delivering value to customers. The author forgot what installing and playing games was like before Steam - better write down those CD keys somewhere safe, or never lose the cases - or the CDs themselves. (Or, god forbid, keep the manual around forever so you can refer to line 5 on page 17, and type in the third, seventh and eight word.) And one of the reasons people hated EA was because EA abused its employees and developers, not because they had a shitty game client; if you want to compare someone to Uber/Lyft/AirBNB, they are a much closer candidate.
- pikzen 9y ago
  Hey, I'm hosting a server with a shitty PHP app, but you can put your addons on it. I'm just asking for 75% of your income. Not profit, no, income. I'm running the infrastructure after all. Not to mention that this 25% figure is largely exaggerated, and it's closer to 7-8% in reality. Steam is not all bad. But the last thing Valve needs is people defending them, because they have been doing fuck all work for the past years. Delegating everything to the community is not work. Steamworks API is still a joke. Greeenlight is a joke. 99% the cosmetics they are putting out are done by the community. CSGO skins? Done by the community. DotA2 skins? done by the community. Team Fortress 2 items? I can't even remember the last time the game was updated with some thing they made themselves. They outsourced an update to the community, ffs. The last time Steam itself had a meaningful update was years ago. Still waiting on an actually good Big Picture mode. I am not saying they do not deserve payment for their work. Just that the ratios are heavily skewed in their favour and as the only serious players in the market, this is bad for everyone but them. Until the day Origin, Uplay, Galaxy, etc. get better (spoiler: never), we are bound to their whims and whishes. You can be the most benevolent dictator of all time, you're still a dictator, and I'm still going to protest. >better write down those CD keys somewhere safe, or never lose the cases - or the CDs themselves. Joke's on you, I enjoy having cases. I actually miss having physical boxes and manuals and all the goodies that came with games.
gallerdude 9y ago
Steam fills a need and does it well. I have zero issues with it.
- H1Supreme 9y ago
  Totally. Steam single handily got me back into gaming on a (semi) regular basis.
  - graphitezepp 9y ago
    It made me not have an urge to pirate by removing the crap parts of drm.
  - macintux 9y ago
    Conversely, Steam turns me away from gaming. I want to own my games, not rent them with hopes Valve won't take them away from me.
    - wst_ 9y ago
      Use Google. Their content is mostly DRM free and you can download games to local disk.
- ZenoArrow 9y ago
  Okay, but the article touched on more points than just the consumer side. Do you see any issues with Steam from the perspective of content creators? Not necessarily with the platform itself, but in its cut of profits?
  - gallerdude 9y ago
    I attempted to put a game on Steam. I failed. I don't find Steam at all responsible for this - my game wasn't quality enough.
- eutropia 9y ago
  I regularly pirated games before steam because it was convenient and cheap. Now I never pirate games.
self-diversity 9y ago
I've never understood the drive toward some notion of commercial-free purity the gaming world seems to embody. Is it due to the heavy teenage boy presence that underlies so many other unsavory aspects?
jakebasile 9y ago
Valve isn't my friend, no corporation is. They are largely benevolent despite some missteps. I can forgive that, mistakes are made. Steam has been a great boon to my hobby and I would dearly miss it if it were gone.
- calibas 9y ago
  I wouldn't call any major corporation benevolent or malevolent, they're effectively amoral entities. They're your "friend" so long as they stand to profit from you.
  - jakebasile 9y ago
    That's kind of what I meant. Valve's goals mostly align with what I want for PC gaming. I guess it's less "benevolent" and more concurrence.
  - marcosdumay 9y ago
    > They're your "friend" so long as they stand to profit from you. You wouldn't lose much by rewriting the definition of "malevolent" on the dictionary with those words above.
  - sakawa 9y ago
    I don't agree with this. NGOs are primarily meant to do (morally) good things to the society where we live (usually help helpless people), where corporations pursue profit, which is usually not a bad thing unless they break the law (with a misleading behavior with the customers, antitrust, tax evading, and I'd like to say also lobbying). Anyway, Steam users are also paying to consume the game, even if they don't own it. And I really doubt the 2% of their users read even the first paragraph of the EULA contract (where they do specify the above, yep I read it.)
projektir 9y ago
The main negative I see with Steam is that it seems to make gamers expect even lower prices on games, which is especially bad for indie studios...
- pythonaut_16 9y ago
  I don't have links right now but Valve has published some numbers that seem to suggest the opposite- that their low price sales sell so many more copies of games that they bring in more revenue than when the game is at full price. Also you can see how effective the model is for indie games. Take Stardew Valley for instance. A hugely successful indie game that's made the author a ton of money. And it still sells for less than Harvest Moon/Story of Seasons.
  - graphitezepp 9y ago
    Isn't this the parents point? There super low sales drive prices down because they work. Personally I see this as 'the market' working in a helpful way for consumers and don't see the problem with low price expectations. Not like the rate people are making games to sell is low.
    - WorldMaker 9y ago
      The thing to keep in mind is that this is the Wal-Mart model: drive prices as low as possible (and maybe sell in bulk). It squeezes/kills the little suppliers (such as indie developers), drives down the notional market value of goods, but feels like a good deal for consumers. At least in current society there isn't anything overtly wrong with "the Wal-Mart model" as it stands, but recognizing a Wal-Mart model is the first steps towards trying to figure out if it is long term healthy for the community. (Which brings us back to the article at hand, questioning the long term health of the community in the face of a Wal-Mart like Steam.)
- georgeecollins 9y ago
  Indie developers complain about Steam because they are the most vulnerable to its problems. They don't have the pricing power to avoid the race to the bottom of sales. But without Steam and the distribution it provides a lot of them wouldn't have a business model. So on one hand: Isn't it great that there is this easy way for almost anyone to distribute their game; and on the other: isn't it terrible that so many people are distributing their game and driving down the price?
im3w1l 9y ago
While I'm emphatically not a fan of the Platform as a way of extracting rent, Steam is one of the more acceptable cases, since it isn't preinstallled and integrated with (or gasp given exclusive access by) the OS.
- paulryanrogers 9y ago
  Ironically I think the ideal is an OS with open infrastructure for 'stores' and all the good features they bring. (Ease of discovery, auto updates, etc.) This is how Linux repositories got it right.
conanbatt 9y ago
My main beef with steam is that the client is a piece of crap. With the big bucks they have they should have a much better UX/UI and overall engineering. They enjoy a massive network effect plus the key handling helped increasing the switch costs, but they should go down. Platforms like itch.io are much better, and GOG.com at least keeps improving.
- Karunamon 9y ago
  Steam definitely takes the Google approach - throw out a minimum viable product, automate as much as possible, and provide little-to-no support. That also means the experience is similar. When it works, it works well and you don't have to think about it. When it doesn't work, be prepared to lose hours-to-days of your life to a system that seems to be as kafkaesque as possible.
  - dreen 9y ago
    Except its not minumum and not viable. Its bloated with lots of features added over the years on top of each other, and its terrible.
  - conanbatt 9y ago
    This is not in touch with reality. The steam client has like 10 years, its bloated, slow and unsatisfactory. If you could do steam ratings on the steam client, they would get clobbered.
- dreen 9y ago
  Absolutely agree, the load time is often very slow and completely unnecessary, just have a thin client in the background checking for updates, and if you want to look at your "Steam Inventory" whatever the fuck that is there should be a separate thing for that.
- rhinoceraptor 9y ago
  Graded on a curve, the Steam client is excellent. Origin and Blizzard's desktop client are both incredibly bad. It's like you're using a GPU manufacturer's overclocking GUI from 2007.
Karunamon 9y ago
This is outrage clickbait, pure and simple. The comparison of Steam Workshop to "an online form where you can submit finished 3D models" is so dishonest it crosses over into willful deception. This is the same Polygon (a video game site) that put out an article complaining about how unfairly they were treated when they released a video showing that they don't even understand the basics of video games. The whole site is problematic.
- oridecon 9y ago
  the steering wheel https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3pQ0oO_cDE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3pQ0oO_cDE
preinheimer 9y ago
Their lack of refund policy kicked me off the platform in 2010. I bought Civ V, then discovered that Mac port was a piece of crap. It didn't matter how fast your computer was, or how new your video card was, it rendered like stop-motion animation once you had more than a few units. It probably took 10-15 emails, being bounced between steam, the publisher, and the port developer to finally get steam credit "as a courtesy".
- rhcom2 9y ago
  This is a lot easier now. If you have played the game for less than 2 hours and purchased it within 14 days Steam will refund you pretty much no questions asked.
  - hobarrera 9y ago
    I tried this once for a game that crashed on startup. My game "suddenly" had 11 hours played (according to steam). The game crashed, but it turns out that steam kept the counter going after it did, so not only did it not work: it also meant no refund.
boona 9y ago
If any entity isn't healthy for the gaming community it's Polygon. This and other click bait articles they release regularly try to stir up controversy where there isn't any.
georgeecollins 9y ago
This is such a screed. I love PC games and was a very successful PC game developer in the nineties. Piracy was killing the business, don't let anyone tell you otherwise. Steam is extremely successful but it is not a monopoly. All the smart developers I know use Steam but also maintain alternate points of distribution for all kinds of business reasons. If you don't like Steam, don't use it. There are many alternatives.
fb03 9y ago
Steam got me back into gaming after a long period not having free time to fuck with activations, custom installs etc. If I get a new box, I just log-in and my shit gets installed. I don't have enough time to game and they're getting a cut for the service they provide, is this unacceptable?
- WorldMaker 9y ago
  It's acceptable, it's fine, the issue at hand is that we've reached the point that Steam is the Wal-Mart of PC videogames and a lot of people act like they still think Steam is some sort of Mom & Pop shop. It doesn't hurt to examine our Wal-Marts and want them to do better (even if many of us will still shop at them).
Lagged2Death 9y ago
The story and so much of the discussion about it seem to exclude the boring possibility: Valve is not run by benevolent entertainment angel-saints, but neither is it run by mustache-twirling villains. The things they do have both upsides and downsides. I'm surprised by the concerns over refunds. In my experience, brick-and-mortar stores that sold computer games were generally not too friendly about refunds. GameStop's website says downloadable PC purchases are not eligible for refunds at all. I was going to say that Steam's monopoly status is overstated, since there are a few (much smaller) competitors. But in fact it looks like the games I bought on Impulse years ago have vanished; GameStop bought Impulse, rebranded it, and later shut it down. As far as I can tell, my licenses have disappeared into the ether. Motivating just about any former customers to avoid GameStop in future, I would think. Boggling.
t0mbstone 9y ago
I'm confused... I've gotten refunds from Steam on multiple occasions, with no trouble at all? Steam has both pros and cons. For me, the benefits greatly outweigh the cons.

79 points by eswat 9y ago

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14352762 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14352762

| If you were to ask the average PC gamer, they’d swear up and down that there’s no way they’d ever give their money to such a corporation. Stopped reading here, what retarded nonsense.

penagwin 9y ago
Quite the opposite, most people joke (but seriously) that we lose our wallets during steam sales. We just willingly give them all of your money.
- havetocharge 9y ago
  Isn't that exactly how commerce has worked throughout the times? You're not being robbed, you're the one who is purchasing the games. If you lose your wallet during this activity, maybe you should not engage in it at all?
PhasmaFelis 9y ago
Yeah, I don't see how anyone who's followed gaming news for more than 5 minutes can think that "the average PC gamer" is defined by concern for labor abuses.
- WorldMaker 9y ago
  Yes, but there is still a very surprisingly vocal set of PC gamers that always seem to refer to Valve as if Steam were the local Mom & Pop shop down the street and not the Wal-Mart of videogames that it has become. (It's fine that Steam is the Wal-Mart of PC Gaming, but let's treat it that way.)
J5892 9y ago
He's implying that an average PC gamer would never use Uber, Lyft, or Airbnb. The whole article seems like the author just woke up from a 15-year coma and is having trouble coming to terms with modern commerce.
- andrepd 9y ago
  "That's just the way it is now" isn't a refutation.
- Nadya 9y ago
  >The whole article seems like the author just woke up from a 15-year coma and is having trouble coming to terms with modern commerce. Seems more like a Games Journalism article written by someone who isn't "a gamer". Which is par for the course nowadays. I'd be hard pressed to find any PC gamer who doesn't think Steam improved upon the way things used to be done. I do know one person who is an exception but their issue isn't the gaming side of things but the fact they liked to collect boxes for the box art. Fewer games being released as a box = fewer box arts for their collection.
  - WorldMaker 9y ago
    We could play the "no true Scotsman" game for a while, but I've yet to meet a games journalist that is less of "a gamer" than I am. The article admits Steam improved the way things had been done before. It simply asks us to question our relationship with Steam today, if it's continuing to do real good. It wonders why so many people are still adamant Steam is a Mom & Pop shop when it's the PC gaming Wal-Mart today.
    - Nadya 9y ago
      >We could play the "no true Scotsman" game for a while, but I've yet to meet a games journalist that is less of "a gamer" than I am. I predicted this would be a response (or, similarly, "gatekeeping"). "Gamers" in the literal sense? Sure. But most people mean "gamer" as in "gaming enthusiast". There's a certain level of skill or knowledge expected of anyone calling themselves an "enthusiast". If you lack both of those things you'll find it hard for anyone to take you seriously. Just like an "artist" who is both untalented and ignorant (eg. no knowledge of common terminology, history, or popular figures) wouldn't be taken seriously as an "artist", regardless of how much time they spend on it. Polygon infamously released 30 minutes of gameplay footage of Doom that was mocked for the player being so bad it's like they've no experience with an FPS game [0]. Polygon in general has a long track record of being ignorant of entire facets of gaming culture, to an extent that many enthusiasts say "Bullshit. You don't know what you're talking about." Their reputation for being ignorant and clickbaity wasn't earned because they're good at what they do, quite the contrary. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3pQ0oO_cDE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3pQ0oO_cDE

rjbwork 9y ago

Vox is not your friend, and Polygon is not healthy for gaming.

strictnein 9y ago
> "Polygon is not healthy for gaming" This, a million times over.
santaclaus 9y ago
Why is that?
- icpmacdo 9y ago
  There only purpose is to make money. If you not spending anything on the product you are the product.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

pavel_lishin 9y ago

> Valve themselves eagerly trumpeted that they had paid more than $57 million to Steam Workshop creators over four years — an enormously impressive figure until you realize that it's only 25 percent of the sale price, which means Valve just made $171 million profit from ... setting up an online form where you can submit finished 3D models. Yeah, come on, you guys! They barely did any of the work! They just set up a form! How dare they expect to be compensated for that? It's not like there's a huge infrastructure powering all of that, that not only required an initial investment of money, time and brainpower, but also requires ongoing maintenance! The article does raise some good points, but the overall raise-the-pitchforks tone makes it seem less credible - especially when most of the complaints seem to be that Valve is running a profitable business while delivering value to customers. The author forgot what installing and playing games was like before Steam - better write down those CD keys somewhere safe, or never lose the cases - or the CDs themselves. (Or, god forbid, keep the manual around forever so you can refer to line 5 on page 17, and type in the third, seventh and eight word.) And one of the reasons people hated EA was because EA abused its employees and developers, not because they had a shitty game client; if you want to compare someone to Uber/Lyft/AirBNB, they are a much closer candidate.

pikzen 9y ago
Hey, I'm hosting a server with a shitty PHP app, but you can put your addons on it. I'm just asking for 75% of your income. Not profit, no, income. I'm running the infrastructure after all. Not to mention that this 25% figure is largely exaggerated, and it's closer to 7-8% in reality. Steam is not all bad. But the last thing Valve needs is people defending them, because they have been doing fuck all work for the past years. Delegating everything to the community is not work. Steamworks API is still a joke. Greeenlight is a joke. 99% the cosmetics they are putting out are done by the community. CSGO skins? Done by the community. DotA2 skins? done by the community. Team Fortress 2 items? I can't even remember the last time the game was updated with some thing they made themselves. They outsourced an update to the community, ffs. The last time Steam itself had a meaningful update was years ago. Still waiting on an actually good Big Picture mode. I am not saying they do not deserve payment for their work. Just that the ratios are heavily skewed in their favour and as the only serious players in the market, this is bad for everyone but them. Until the day Origin, Uplay, Galaxy, etc. get better (spoiler: never), we are bound to their whims and whishes. You can be the most benevolent dictator of all time, you're still a dictator, and I'm still going to protest. >better write down those CD keys somewhere safe, or never lose the cases - or the CDs themselves. Joke's on you, I enjoy having cases. I actually miss having physical boxes and manuals and all the goodies that came with games.

gallerdude 9y ago

Steam fills a need and does it well. I have zero issues with it.

H1Supreme 9y ago
Totally. Steam single handily got me back into gaming on a (semi) regular basis.
- graphitezepp 9y ago
  It made me not have an urge to pirate by removing the crap parts of drm.
- macintux 9y ago
  Conversely, Steam turns me away from gaming. I want to own my games, not rent them with hopes Valve won't take them away from me.
  - wst_ 9y ago
    Use Google. Their content is mostly DRM free and you can download games to local disk.
ZenoArrow 9y ago
Okay, but the article touched on more points than just the consumer side. Do you see any issues with Steam from the perspective of content creators? Not necessarily with the platform itself, but in its cut of profits?
- gallerdude 9y ago
  I attempted to put a game on Steam. I failed. I don't find Steam at all responsible for this - my game wasn't quality enough.
eutropia 9y ago
I regularly pirated games before steam because it was convenient and cheap. Now I never pirate games.

self-diversity 9y ago

I've never understood the drive toward some notion of commercial-free purity the gaming world seems to embody. Is it due to the heavy teenage boy presence that underlies so many other unsavory aspects?

jakebasile 9y ago

Valve isn't my friend, no corporation is. They are largely benevolent despite some missteps. I can forgive that, mistakes are made. Steam has been a great boon to my hobby and I would dearly miss it if it were gone.

calibas 9y ago
I wouldn't call any major corporation benevolent or malevolent, they're effectively amoral entities. They're your "friend" so long as they stand to profit from you.
- jakebasile 9y ago
  That's kind of what I meant. Valve's goals mostly align with what I want for PC gaming. I guess it's less "benevolent" and more concurrence.
- marcosdumay 9y ago
  > They're your "friend" so long as they stand to profit from you. You wouldn't lose much by rewriting the definition of "malevolent" on the dictionary with those words above.
- sakawa 9y ago
  I don't agree with this. NGOs are primarily meant to do (morally) good things to the society where we live (usually help helpless people), where corporations pursue profit, which is usually not a bad thing unless they break the law (with a misleading behavior with the customers, antitrust, tax evading, and I'd like to say also lobbying). Anyway, Steam users are also paying to consume the game, even if they don't own it. And I really doubt the 2% of their users read even the first paragraph of the EULA contract (where they do specify the above, yep I read it.)

projektir 9y ago

The main negative I see with Steam is that it seems to make gamers expect even lower prices on games, which is especially bad for indie studios...

pythonaut_16 9y ago
I don't have links right now but Valve has published some numbers that seem to suggest the opposite- that their low price sales sell so many more copies of games that they bring in more revenue than when the game is at full price. Also you can see how effective the model is for indie games. Take Stardew Valley for instance. A hugely successful indie game that's made the author a ton of money. And it still sells for less than Harvest Moon/Story of Seasons.
- graphitezepp 9y ago
  Isn't this the parents point? There super low sales drive prices down because they work. Personally I see this as 'the market' working in a helpful way for consumers and don't see the problem with low price expectations. Not like the rate people are making games to sell is low.
  - WorldMaker 9y ago
    The thing to keep in mind is that this is the Wal-Mart model: drive prices as low as possible (and maybe sell in bulk). It squeezes/kills the little suppliers (such as indie developers), drives down the notional market value of goods, but feels like a good deal for consumers. At least in current society there isn't anything overtly wrong with "the Wal-Mart model" as it stands, but recognizing a Wal-Mart model is the first steps towards trying to figure out if it is long term healthy for the community. (Which brings us back to the article at hand, questioning the long term health of the community in the face of a Wal-Mart like Steam.)
georgeecollins 9y ago
Indie developers complain about Steam because they are the most vulnerable to its problems. They don't have the pricing power to avoid the race to the bottom of sales. But without Steam and the distribution it provides a lot of them wouldn't have a business model. So on one hand: Isn't it great that there is this easy way for almost anyone to distribute their game; and on the other: isn't it terrible that so many people are distributing their game and driving down the price?

im3w1l 9y ago

While I'm emphatically not a fan of the Platform as a way of extracting rent, Steam is one of the more acceptable cases, since it isn't preinstallled and integrated with (or gasp given exclusive access by) the OS.

paulryanrogers 9y ago
Ironically I think the ideal is an OS with open infrastructure for 'stores' and all the good features they bring. (Ease of discovery, auto updates, etc.) This is how Linux repositories got it right.

conanbatt 9y ago

My main beef with steam is that the client is a piece of crap. With the big bucks they have they should have a much better UX/UI and overall engineering. They enjoy a massive network effect plus the key handling helped increasing the switch costs, but they should go down. Platforms like itch.io are much better, and GOG.com at least keeps improving.

Karunamon 9y ago
Steam definitely takes the Google approach - throw out a minimum viable product, automate as much as possible, and provide little-to-no support. That also means the experience is similar. When it works, it works well and you don't have to think about it. When it doesn't work, be prepared to lose hours-to-days of your life to a system that seems to be as kafkaesque as possible.
- dreen 9y ago
  Except its not minumum and not viable. Its bloated with lots of features added over the years on top of each other, and its terrible.
- conanbatt 9y ago
  This is not in touch with reality. The steam client has like 10 years, its bloated, slow and unsatisfactory. If you could do steam ratings on the steam client, they would get clobbered.
dreen 9y ago
Absolutely agree, the load time is often very slow and completely unnecessary, just have a thin client in the background checking for updates, and if you want to look at your "Steam Inventory" whatever the fuck that is there should be a separate thing for that.
rhinoceraptor 9y ago
Graded on a curve, the Steam client is excellent. Origin and Blizzard's desktop client are both incredibly bad. It's like you're using a GPU manufacturer's overclocking GUI from 2007.

Karunamon 9y ago

This is outrage clickbait, pure and simple. The comparison of Steam Workshop to "an online form where you can submit finished 3D models" is so dishonest it crosses over into willful deception. This is the same Polygon (a video game site) that put out an article complaining about how unfairly they were treated when they released a video showing that they don't even understand the basics of video games. The whole site is problematic.

oridecon 9y ago
the steering wheel https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3pQ0oO_cDE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3pQ0oO_cDE

preinheimer 9y ago

Their lack of refund policy kicked me off the platform in 2010. I bought Civ V, then discovered that Mac port was a piece of crap. It didn't matter how fast your computer was, or how new your video card was, it rendered like stop-motion animation once you had more than a few units. It probably took 10-15 emails, being bounced between steam, the publisher, and the port developer to finally get steam credit "as a courtesy".

rhcom2 9y ago
This is a lot easier now. If you have played the game for less than 2 hours and purchased it within 14 days Steam will refund you pretty much no questions asked.
- hobarrera 9y ago
  I tried this once for a game that crashed on startup. My game "suddenly" had 11 hours played (according to steam). The game crashed, but it turns out that steam kept the counter going after it did, so not only did it not work: it also meant no refund.

boona 9y ago

If any entity isn't healthy for the gaming community it's Polygon. This and other click bait articles they release regularly try to stir up controversy where there isn't any.

georgeecollins 9y ago

This is such a screed. I love PC games and was a very successful PC game developer in the nineties. Piracy was killing the business, don't let anyone tell you otherwise. Steam is extremely successful but it is not a monopoly. All the smart developers I know use Steam but also maintain alternate points of distribution for all kinds of business reasons. If you don't like Steam, don't use it. There are many alternatives.

fb03 9y ago

Steam got me back into gaming after a long period not having free time to fuck with activations, custom installs etc. If I get a new box, I just log-in and my shit gets installed. I don't have enough time to game and they're getting a cut for the service they provide, is this unacceptable?

WorldMaker 9y ago
It's acceptable, it's fine, the issue at hand is that we've reached the point that Steam is the Wal-Mart of PC videogames and a lot of people act like they still think Steam is some sort of Mom & Pop shop. It doesn't hurt to examine our Wal-Marts and want them to do better (even if many of us will still shop at them).

Lagged2Death 9y ago

The story and so much of the discussion about it seem to exclude the boring possibility: Valve is not run by benevolent entertainment angel-saints, but neither is it run by mustache-twirling villains. The things they do have both upsides and downsides. I'm surprised by the concerns over refunds. In my experience, brick-and-mortar stores that sold computer games were generally not too friendly about refunds. GameStop's website says downloadable PC purchases are not eligible for refunds at all. I was going to say that Steam's monopoly status is overstated, since there are a few (much smaller) competitors. But in fact it looks like the games I bought on Impulse years ago have vanished; GameStop bought Impulse, rebranded it, and later shut it down. As far as I can tell, my licenses have disappeared into the ether. Motivating just about any former customers to avoid GameStop in future, I would think. Boggling.

t0mbstone 9y ago

I'm confused... I've gotten refunds from Steam on multiple occasions, with no trouble at all? Steam has both pros and cons. For me, the benefits greatly outweigh the cons.