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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 reven

by BbzzbB 5y ago

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.

m4rtink 5y ago
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!
robertlagrant 5y ago
> 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.
adam_arthur 5y ago
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
CppCoder 5y ago
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%.
baud147258 5y ago
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
_the_inflator 5y ago
I side with you, however in the light of recent advances of Apple, I support any form of platform diversity. I also believe, that over long Steam might me sold by Microsoft. MS and Google are building a different stack/ecosystem.
ryathal 5y ago
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.
Bayart 5y ago
> 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.
BuckRogers 5y ago
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.
ndneighbor 5y ago
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.
- sgarman 5y ago
  A lot of that functionality is really valuable to game makers and game players. Their controller API is top notch, same with save syncs.
hendersoon 5y ago
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).
- k12sosse 5y ago
  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.
kzrdude 5y ago
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.
- Aeolun 5y ago
  > haven't tried to use any very dark patterns to make more money They don’t really have to. They’re still private right? What are they going to do with even more money?
  - 1_player 5y ago
    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.
    - Torifyme12 5y ago
      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.
      - account42 5y ago
        Valve have done a lot, but there were commercial games available for Linux before Steam. Even the first Humble Bundle was before Steam for Linux.
      - BbzzbB 5y ago
NikolaNovak 5y ago
My 100 Croatian Lipa: 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. Everybody else is just a pain in my kiester :-/
- smcl 5y ago
  I already thought it was cute that the Crotian currency was "kuna", I had no idea it was also subdivided into "lipa" too :D For others: kuna means "pine marten" and lipa is "linden tree" in many Slavic languages
  - NikolaNovak 5y ago
    Things are no less cute in my new country with Loons and Moose :->
arka2147483647 5y ago
My opinion: - Steam was first, and because of that; - They have all the features (both for users, and gamedevs) - They have all the Games - They have all the Users In particular, in the Gamedev side, Steam is not a Storefront, they are a platform, much like say, Xbox Live or PSN. For example Steam provides: - Friends - Leaderboard - Chat (Text and Voice) - Multiplayer/Network api, which handles routing and NAT punch through - Update/Install delivery globally - Savegame cloud sync - etc, etc Steam docs are actually public, so go take a look: https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features If you develop your game for Steam, then Steam does a lot of heavy lifting for you.
- bob1029 5y ago
  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.
- munk-a 5y ago
  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.
  - arka2147483647 5y ago
    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
uejfiweun 5y ago
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.
- account42 5y ago
  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.
- Macha 5y ago
  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.
dartharva 5y ago
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.
- zuminator 5y ago
  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.
staticman2 5y ago
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.
- LegitShady 5y ago
  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.
indymike 5y ago
> 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.
- paulryanrogers 5y ago
  > 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.
  - philistine 5y ago
    > 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 https://www.gog.com/game/darwinia)!
NelsonMinar 5y ago
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.
DanHulton 5y ago
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.
- awill 5y ago
  Exactly. I choose to use Steam because it's good. If you have an iPhone, you don't choose the AppStore. You're stuck with it.
  - mLuby 5y ago
    If I want to play a game that's only sold via Steam, I have no choice but to use Steam. It's less bad than the App Store since game devs technically have a choice, but in effect it's often the same.
    - DanHulton 5y ago
      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.
    - awill 5y ago
      That's a good point. I guess I do get annoyed when there are epic exclusive games.
- BbzzbB 5y ago
  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.
eatsyourtacos 5y ago
Steam- * Just works * It's simple * 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.
- hnbad 5y ago
  > * Steam sales 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.
JohnWhigham 5y ago
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.
cestith 5y ago
Steam still fulfills Gabe's promise.: 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.
polski-g 5y ago
If you want to release a game for the PC not via Steam, you are free to do so. You cannot release an app for iOS absent iOS app store. That's the problem. Apples becomes the gatekeeper instead of your own technical prowess
zamadatix 5y 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.
mywittyname 5y ago
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.
- tyfon 5y ago
  >except maybe Apple. Apple obsoleted all 32 bit iphone apps a few years ago, so not even remotely comparable to steam in this area imho.
- paulryanrogers 5y ago
  > 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.
  - mywittyname 5y ago
    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.
  - _carbyau_ 5y ago
    I agree with most of your comment ... but "OS drops 32 bit / x86 support" gets a hard disagree. Steam provides the game. It "will be around for a long time." It is not Steams job to ensure the game runs on every device or OS version for eternity however. That is up to the publisher of the game. If you install Steam on an older version of the OS that does have 32bit/x86 support, Steam does its job. I do think however that Steam should add clarification to the "game requirements" to specify OS version or hardware however.
Sebb767 5y ago
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.
rkido 5y ago
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?
- selfhoster11 5y ago
  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.
  - rkido 5y ago
    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.
your_username 5y ago
At the very least, I can be assured that Steam is actively being worked on. I get an update every time I sign in!
nonbirithm 5y ago
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.
vkou 5y ago
> Is there a technical reason why Steam is a such a force in the space? First mover, just works, not too bloated, all your games are on it. It's possible to build a better storefront/launcher, but for some weird reason, every competing one except GoG fails point #2 or point #3.
jholman 5y ago
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.
lifeformed 5y ago
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.
faeriechangling 5y ago
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.
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keithnz 5y ago
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.
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poink 5y ago
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.
Semaphor 5y ago
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.
bastawhiz 5y ago
> Microsoft is throwing the towel and bowing to Steam's cartelish 30% I would be quite surprised to hear that Microsoft didn't cut some sort of Very Good Deal with Valve.
- BbzzbB 5y ago
  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.
  - notafraudster 5y ago
    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%

by BbzzbB 5y ago

m4rtink 5y ago

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!

robertlagrant 5y ago

> 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.

adam_arthur 5y ago

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

CppCoder 5y ago

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%.

baud147258 5y ago

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

_the_inflator 5y ago

I side with you, however in the light of recent advances of Apple, I support any form of platform diversity. I also believe, that over long Steam might me sold by Microsoft. MS and Google are building a different stack/ecosystem.

ryathal 5y ago

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.

Bayart 5y ago

> 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.

BuckRogers 5y ago

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.

ndneighbor 5y ago

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.

sgarman 5y ago
A lot of that functionality is really valuable to game makers and game players. Their controller API is top notch, same with save syncs.

hendersoon 5y ago

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).

k12sosse 5y ago
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.

kzrdude 5y ago

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.

Aeolun 5y ago
> haven't tried to use any very dark patterns to make more money They don’t really have to. They’re still private right? What are they going to do with even more money?
- 1_player 5y ago
  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.
  - Torifyme12 5y ago
    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.
    - account42 5y ago
      Valve have done a lot, but there were commercial games available for Linux before Steam. Even the first Humble Bundle was before Steam for Linux.
    - BbzzbB 5y ago

NikolaNovak 5y ago

My 100 Croatian Lipa: 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. Everybody else is just a pain in my kiester :-/

smcl 5y ago
I already thought it was cute that the Crotian currency was "kuna", I had no idea it was also subdivided into "lipa" too :D For others: kuna means "pine marten" and lipa is "linden tree" in many Slavic languages
- NikolaNovak 5y ago
  Things are no less cute in my new country with Loons and Moose :->

arka2147483647 5y ago

My opinion: - Steam was first, and because of that; - They have all the features (both for users, and gamedevs) - They have all the Games - They have all the Users In particular, in the Gamedev side, Steam is not a Storefront, they are a platform, much like say, Xbox Live or PSN. For example Steam provides: - Friends - Leaderboard - Chat (Text and Voice) - Multiplayer/Network api, which handles routing and NAT punch through - Update/Install delivery globally - Savegame cloud sync - etc, etc Steam docs are actually public, so go take a look: https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features If you develop your game for Steam, then Steam does a lot of heavy lifting for you.

bob1029 5y ago
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.
munk-a 5y ago
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.
- arka2147483647 5y ago
  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

uejfiweun 5y ago

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.

account42 5y ago
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.
Macha 5y ago
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.

dartharva 5y ago

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.

zuminator 5y ago
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.

staticman2 5y ago

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.

LegitShady 5y ago
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.

indymike 5y ago

> 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.

paulryanrogers 5y ago
> 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.
- philistine 5y ago
  > 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 https://www.gog.com/game/darwinia)!

NelsonMinar 5y ago

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.

DanHulton 5y ago

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.

awill 5y ago
Exactly. I choose to use Steam because it's good. If you have an iPhone, you don't choose the AppStore. You're stuck with it.
- mLuby 5y ago
  If I want to play a game that's only sold via Steam, I have no choice but to use Steam. It's less bad than the App Store since game devs technically have a choice, but in effect it's often the same.
  - DanHulton 5y ago
    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.
  - awill 5y ago
    That's a good point. I guess I do get annoyed when there are epic exclusive games.
BbzzbB 5y ago
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.

eatsyourtacos 5y ago

Steam- * Just works * It's simple * 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.

hnbad 5y ago
> * Steam sales 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.

JohnWhigham 5y ago

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.

cestith 5y ago

Steam still fulfills Gabe's promise.: 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.

polski-g 5y ago

If you want to release a game for the PC not via Steam, you are free to do so. You cannot release an app for iOS absent iOS app store. That's the problem. Apples becomes the gatekeeper instead of your own technical prowess

zamadatix 5y 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.

mywittyname 5y ago

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.

tyfon 5y ago
>except maybe Apple. Apple obsoleted all 32 bit iphone apps a few years ago, so not even remotely comparable to steam in this area imho.
paulryanrogers 5y ago
> 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.
- mywittyname 5y ago
  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.
- _carbyau_ 5y ago
  I agree with most of your comment ... but "OS drops 32 bit / x86 support" gets a hard disagree. Steam provides the game. It "will be around for a long time." It is not Steams job to ensure the game runs on every device or OS version for eternity however. That is up to the publisher of the game. If you install Steam on an older version of the OS that does have 32bit/x86 support, Steam does its job. I do think however that Steam should add clarification to the "game requirements" to specify OS version or hardware however.

Sebb767 5y ago

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.

rkido 5y ago

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?

selfhoster11 5y ago
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.
- rkido 5y ago
  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.

your_username 5y ago

At the very least, I can be assured that Steam is actively being worked on. I get an update every time I sign in!

nonbirithm 5y ago

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.

vkou 5y ago

> Is there a technical reason why Steam is a such a force in the space? First mover, just works, not too bloated, all your games are on it. It's possible to build a better storefront/launcher, but for some weird reason, every competing one except GoG fails point #2 or point #3.

jholman 5y ago

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.

lifeformed 5y ago

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.

faeriechangling 5y ago

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.

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keithnz 5y ago

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.

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poink 5y ago

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.

Semaphor 5y ago

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.

bastawhiz 5y ago

> Microsoft is throwing the towel and bowing to Steam's cartelish 30% I would be quite surprised to hear that Microsoft didn't cut some sort of Very Good Deal with Valve.

BbzzbB 5y ago
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.
- notafraudster 5y ago
  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%