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The history of the web is one of centralization not decentralization. Steam is already a very good solution for distributing PC games and it has the added bene

The history of the web is one of centralization not decentralization. Steam is already a very good solution for distributing PC games and it has the added benefit of implementing a payment model, DLC features, social capabilities, updates, cloud-synchronized saved games, and, perhaps most importantly, a discovery service for finding new games. It even supports automatic WINE mode for windows-only games in linux (a feature that surprised me). I welcome the day when more games run automatically in OSX or Linux, but I think the need for an app platform isn't going to go away. And as someone who plays games often offline (on a plane or sometimes the train) it's really nice to not require an internet connection to play something.

nikkwong 8y ago
Sure, but.. it does require downloading steam, which is a huge barrier to entry. As someone who's not a gamer, I've never downloaded Steam, which bars me from being exposed to all of it's content. That barrier also probably prohibits non-gamers such as myself from becoming ultra casual gamers. I'm sure the content is incredible, and I'd probably find it addicting. But heck, I can't be bothered into downloading steam. I'd be interested to see how landing on a webpage with a game ready-to-go turns non-gamers such as myself into infrequent or even frequent gamers. I would also argue that the ubiquity of the web is what makes games like agar.io and slither.io so popular, especially for kids. I remember being at techshop in SF and seeing kids rushing straight to their computers after school and opening slither.io and playing instantly. No friction. I'm sure that lends to their success. The web is great!
- pfisch 8y ago
  You land on the webpage. Now enter all your payment info, validate purchase, make account. Cool Or is it f2p? So you land on page, still need to make an account for persistence. Also will need to do credit card eventually for game developer to make money. Also now game developer is looking at cdn costs of over 500 a month at a minimum for any kind of real game that is even 0.5 gb in size. I actually own a web assembly f2p game like this. It is really not a bright future for games that compete with real client games on steam that are not tiny and have the barest performance requirements. With unity basically the entire game needs to fit in like ~512 mb of ram, and runs poorly.
  - giornogiovanna 8y ago
    Or, you can create an account after investing a few hours or so into the game, at which point a bit of friction is irrelevant. And sure, the credit card details will have to be entered eventually, but again, you'll be very invested at that point, so a bit of friction doesn't matter. Regarding the CDN costs, with some very aggressive caching (Service Workers and stuff), is it really that much worse than a downloaded game? You're the one who actually has a game, though, so I guess there really is a problem here.
    - pfisch 8y ago
      You don’t pay for the bandwidth to download a game on steam.
      - giornogiovanna 8y ago
        That's a good point, although I'd guess that Steam's 30% cut should more than cover it.
        pfisch 8y ago
        Depends how successful your game is, the price per copy, and how big it is.
- kkarakk 8y ago
  you're advocating for captive audience pre-installed appstores not the web
jillesvangurp 8y ago
The history of the web is circular. The history of Google is that they replaced a walled garden (Yahoo was a glorified yellow pages type catalogue for webpages) with search that worked for the whole web. Yahoo is no more. Their catalogue got replaced by a search box. Steam is kind of a nice walled garden. The problem is that it's not the only one and that there is loads of stuff outside their walls. There's the Apple store, the Google store, the Amazon store. And that's just mobile. A few things these stores have in common: - pay to play: they all heavily promote games that pay to be promoted. This favors games with big budgets and is a monetization problem for smaller players; like indie games. - censorship and conflicts of interest between application/game developers are a problem regularly result in applications being blocked/removed for all sorts of reasons that boil down to arbitrary restrictions imposed by the store owner. - extortion rates on monetization, in app purchases, subscriptions, etc. make being there costly. - search is a problem. Even Google's search in the appstore is comparatively shit. I regularly resort to using their web search to find apps I know definitely exist in their app store. Apples store is a maze of misdirection. Their search is shit. - Getting into the store requires a non trivial amount of work and in some cases entrance fees. PWAs fix the distribution problem and remove app stores as a necessity for that. Google, Duck Duck go, already take care of the discovery problem better than most app stores and in any case people discover things via social media, friend referrals, etc. Being featured in the top 20 of the IOS app store is not a feasible thing for most developers. Also, browsers already keep us safe so we don't need to rely on app store screening any more. So, time to tear down those walls once more. The history of walled gardens is that eventually somebody climbs over the wall and figures out there is a world beyond. Biblical stuff even, if you are into that ;-).

nikkwong 8y ago

Sure, but.. it does require downloading steam, which is a huge barrier to entry. As someone who's not a gamer, I've never downloaded Steam, which bars me from being exposed to all of it's content. That barrier also probably prohibits non-gamers such as myself from becoming ultra casual gamers. I'm sure the content is incredible, and I'd probably find it addicting. But heck, I can't be bothered into downloading steam. I'd be interested to see how landing on a webpage with a game ready-to-go turns non-gamers such as myself into infrequent or even frequent gamers. I would also argue that the ubiquity of the web is what makes games like agar.io and slither.io so popular, especially for kids. I remember being at techshop in SF and seeing kids rushing straight to their computers after school and opening slither.io and playing instantly. No friction. I'm sure that lends to their success. The web is great!

pfisch 8y ago
You land on the webpage. Now enter all your payment info, validate purchase, make account. Cool Or is it f2p? So you land on page, still need to make an account for persistence. Also will need to do credit card eventually for game developer to make money. Also now game developer is looking at cdn costs of over 500 a month at a minimum for any kind of real game that is even 0.5 gb in size. I actually own a web assembly f2p game like this. It is really not a bright future for games that compete with real client games on steam that are not tiny and have the barest performance requirements. With unity basically the entire game needs to fit in like ~512 mb of ram, and runs poorly.
- giornogiovanna 8y ago
  Or, you can create an account after investing a few hours or so into the game, at which point a bit of friction is irrelevant. And sure, the credit card details will have to be entered eventually, but again, you'll be very invested at that point, so a bit of friction doesn't matter. Regarding the CDN costs, with some very aggressive caching (Service Workers and stuff), is it really that much worse than a downloaded game? You're the one who actually has a game, though, so I guess there really is a problem here.
  - pfisch 8y ago
    You don’t pay for the bandwidth to download a game on steam.
    - giornogiovanna 8y ago
      That's a good point, although I'd guess that Steam's 30% cut should more than cover it.
      - pfisch 8y ago
        Depends how successful your game is, the price per copy, and how big it is.
kkarakk 8y ago
you're advocating for captive audience pre-installed appstores not the web

jillesvangurp 8y ago

The history of the web is circular. The history of Google is that they replaced a walled garden (Yahoo was a glorified yellow pages type catalogue for webpages) with search that worked for the whole web. Yahoo is no more. Their catalogue got replaced by a search box. Steam is kind of a nice walled garden. The problem is that it's not the only one and that there is loads of stuff outside their walls. There's the Apple store, the Google store, the Amazon store. And that's just mobile. A few things these stores have in common: - pay to play: they all heavily promote games that pay to be promoted. This favors games with big budgets and is a monetization problem for smaller players; like indie games. - censorship and conflicts of interest between application/game developers are a problem regularly result in applications being blocked/removed for all sorts of reasons that boil down to arbitrary restrictions imposed by the store owner. - extortion rates on monetization, in app purchases, subscriptions, etc. make being there costly. - search is a problem. Even Google's search in the appstore is comparatively shit. I regularly resort to using their web search to find apps I know definitely exist in their app store. Apples store is a maze of misdirection. Their search is shit. - Getting into the store requires a non trivial amount of work and in some cases entrance fees. PWAs fix the distribution problem and remove app stores as a necessity for that. Google, Duck Duck go, already take care of the discovery problem better than most app stores and in any case people discover things via social media, friend referrals, etc. Being featured in the top 20 of the IOS app store is not a feasible thing for most developers. Also, browsers already keep us safe so we don't need to rely on app store screening any more. So, time to tear down those walls once more. The history of walled gardens is that eventually somebody climbs over the wall and figures out there is a world beyond. Biblical stuff even, if you are into that ;-).