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Media embedded advertising has already been a thing for years, but companies hate leaving money on the table so they cannot resist the temptation of showing mor

Media embedded advertising has already been a thing for years, but companies hate leaving money on the table so they cannot resist the temptation of showing more ads. I wonder why it is that Steam hasn't had any issues remaining such a successful video game platform, while other forms of media have struggled to keep up. You're competing with piracy, but you throw ads in my face. I can download any show or movie I want and have it playing in minutes without having to deal with multi platform bullshit. That's real convenience. Oh, and the show or movie never gets taken away because some execs decided to be greedy. Although at this point I'm so fed up with most modern media that I've lost any interest to watch it, even if it's free and in a convenient format. Most stuff doesn't even seem interesting enough to pirate. The age of mindless consumption is nearing an end. I'm hopeful that the future will be a mix of locally crafted consumption balanced with a healthy mix of content creation.

blibble 4y ago
> I wonder why it is that Steam hasn't had any issues remaining such a successful video game platform, while other forms of media have struggled to keep up. it's privately owned and by someone that loves video games that was already wealthy when he founded the company
bicdez 4y ago
> The age of mindless consumption is nearing an end. How so?
hirundo 4y ago
> The age of mindless consumption is nearing an end I think the only thing that could do that is a degree of general poverty so great that mindless consumption immediately impacts survival. And even then some people would choose intoxicants over food and shelter.
gonehome 4y ago
> “ I can download any show or movie I want and have it playing in minutes without having to deal with multi platform bullshit.” Is this as true as it once was? It seems most of the old trackers are offline or dead now. I’d guess because of the success of streaming services finally meeting the market demand. It’s also possible I’m just old and out of the loop now.
- U6XWpjvdqi4xTPJ 4y ago
  Just hop on over to Rutracker, there's plenty of stuff. And Usenet is still great for movies and TV, although in my experience music is getting a lot harder to find (the wide and free/cheap availability of music streaming probably has something to do with this).
- geraldwhen 4y ago
  Google and bing filter out the results you want. Other search engines work fine.
- Fezzik 4y ago
  TPB is still going strong. Older content is sometimes difficult to find but anything new or even slightly popular from the last 50 years is more-often-than-not obtainable.
- ElCheapo 4y ago
  Imagine a world where anyone who wants can set up his little torrent seedbox sharing with the whole globe some content they really like without worrying about getting a nice little letter in the mail. I'm pretty sure if people were free to do so (and cheap and easy commercial options sprung up) we would be able to find any content we desire and download it and (if it's popular enough) even stream it
- davidgerard 4y ago
  For comedy gold, look through the DMCA notifications that Google links you to, and that's your index of helpful and current torrent sites. Many are very usable through machine translation too.
- EB-Barrington 4y ago
  Hi, yes, as true at it ever was. Indeed, the choice is wider than all the paid streaming services combined.
- radlad 4y ago
  Yes, this is absolutely still true if you have access to a couple private trackers.
AstralStorm 4y ago
Steam is successful because its advertising is rather low key, showing a popup with offers, and providing a search, directory plus suggestions. Their gain is from consumer analytics too. (They also take a cut for using their platform from the game developers or publishers. It also provides some added value like achievements, basic social media in forms of forums and chat, some (somewhat broken at times) controller handling, some bug reporting, cloud save handling, voice communication handling, even some space to host game related content. On the whole, more value added than taken by paltry ads. The bigger value minus is the "Steam DRM" - requirement for an online connection to use the downloaded application. And providence help you if you post inflammatory comments under an account that owns game access licenses. You will lose that. The other ones don't do it quite as effectively, esp. the suggestions part. Being a game library and download service is not what makes Steam in particular good, though it is an essential part.
- pdpi 4y ago
  It’s important to take Steam DRM in context. In a world where DRM was becoming more intrusive by the day, and you had to contend with every game having its own unique way to mess your system up in its fight against piracy, Steam provided one single DRM system that almost everybody agrees to use. For consumers, worse than no DRM, but miles ahead of the status quo it replaced. Also, Steam does have an offline mode. You just have to ping the mothership every few weeks iirc.
  - vorador 4y ago
    Yeah it feels like people forgot about the Sony Rootkit DRM (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootkit_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...) that ended up exploited by malware.
  - KiranRao0 4y ago
    In some ways, Steam has provided an experience better than having no DRM. I can hop in a friend's computer and download any game I've purchased. Or I can delete old games to free up space and redownload them later (without having to deal with DVDs or external USB drives). The tradeoff is handing over the control of my game library to a company. I can see how that tradeoffs can be compelling to some and not worthwhile to others.
jcranmer 4y ago
> I wonder why it is that Steam hasn't had any issues remaining such a successful video game platform, while other forms of media have struggled to keep up. Well, Youtube's ad problem comes from the fact that it is run by the largest internet advertiser. Netflix--video streaming in general--suffers from the fact that there are very few major content producers, and after seeing the monetary success of Netflix, the content producers decided to create their own streaming platforms and deliver their content only via them. While there have been attempts to build alternative video game platforms than Steam (notably Epic Games Store and Origin), they haven't been able to enforce an exclusivity deal of the kind that showed up in video streaming. I'm not entirely certain why, but it seems to be a mixture of the lack of centralization in developers (so must-have is much less a factor in video games as it is for movies), the need for multi-platform distribution anyways to reach consoles, and the necessary social media integration (you need friend lists to be able to invite friends) making fragmentation more painful for users.
- Spooky23 4y ago
  I disagree re Netflix. They invented their own problems by pivoting from an video platform to a platform that measured itself by how much attention it could steal or time it could waste. You may recall they were patting themselves in the back by adopting this strategy of minimally viable programming. Well, Disney got their shit together and turns out people want to watch good TV. Whatcha know? It’s a management failure and the ad pivot is a bigger failure. If there was a board with a clue, they would fire the management and start over.
- rowanG077 4y ago
  Epic game store definitely tries to enforce exclusivity. Prime example beeing Square Enix games. FF7 Remake first released on Epic Game Store and only much later released on Steam. Kingdom Hearts still isn't available in Steam and probably never will be. It's one of the prime reasons I will never buy from them. That way lies madness.
  - jcranmer 4y ago
    Yes, they've tried to, but as I've said, it hasn't been particularly effective. Most of the games that had the year-long Epic store exclusivity period happily released on Steam at the end of that period.
gsatic 4y ago
Is HN an example of mindless consumption?
- pdimitar 4y ago
  It's definitely not its design goal as far as I can tell. However we the people in general have addictive tendencies and we're just kind of turning HN into every other compulsively scrolling social media. But that's on us.
- aranelsurion 4y ago
  Maybe not. As far as I can tell it doesn't prioritize engagement/hours spent over everything else, first page is a mixture of very niche stuff and very common stuff with very little clickbait either way. To me HN feels like having a conversation with an interesting friend. It's not necessarily the most productive thing to do, nor it has any other major goal inherent to it, still at the end of the day it doesn't feel mindless or time lost. To compare, if I use Twitter for 10mins, it's 1min of entertainment at best and 9minutes of bullshit/flamebait/doomscrolling/shallow crap that makes me feel dizzy by the end of it.
  - jamiek88 4y ago
    Funny you should say that. I got into a bit of a twitter rabbit hole and ended up realizing my heart was racing, knuckles white and teeth grinding. I was furiously pounding on my keyboard to reply to what was probably a bot before I came to my senses and closed the page. I can see how that shit is addictive. Rage is a hell of drug.
mythrwy 4y ago
It's a strange state when YouTube videos of villagers in Africa building a mud hut or a guy in Asia building a fish tank taken with cheap cameras by amateur videographers are many times more entertaining then Hollywood blockbusters that cost 10's of millions to make.
- goatlover 4y ago
  Isn’t that entirely subjective? More interesting to how many people? Would people pay money to watch?
HellDunkel 4y ago
What is locally crafted consumption?
- smitty1e 4y ago
  Artisanal cheeses and beers, for example.
notsapiensatall 4y ago
Among other things, Steam is not operated by a publicly-traded company. They don't need to answer to faceless shareholders at the end of every quarter. They can settle for making whatever they consider to be "enough money" without chasing endless growth.
- ChrisLomont 4y ago
  Steam still has shareholders to answer to, with the same human motives as any shareholder, so I don't think this argument holds water. I suspect they'd try to get whatever growth they can because otherwise eventually someone will overtake them. And empirically they are still growing at rates [1] not common among any class of companies, so someone there is certainty pushing for incredible growth. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/308330/number-stream-users/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/308330/number-stream-use...
  - notsapiensatall 4y ago
    The difference is that their shares are not publicly offered. Their shareholders much more likely to be people with vested interests in the company's long-term health, rather than retail investors and hedge funds who reliably demand short-term returns.
    - Ekaros 4y ago
      Also I'm pretty sure they are making enough money as they are. And don't need to chase that ever increasing stock valuation. Which might not even mean increased profits.
      - Jensson 4y ago
        But public stocks seems to focus on valuation over profits, which is reasonable given how things turned out. Apple going from 1 trillion to 2 trillion valuation is much more valuable to shareholders than Apple paying out 100 billion in profits. But if the stocks aren't publicly traded then the main pay-out are the profits, so they try to maximize profit over growth, which is probably much healthier for the economy overall.
skocznymroczny 4y ago
Steam was at the right place at the right time. Also it was more insidious in its behavior. Throughout the late 2000s and 2010s most AAA games were Steam releases only. Even boxed copies were not much more than a Steam code. This allowed them to build a powerful network effect. At some point gamers were demanding that any new big release was a Steam release ("no steam no buy").
- jabbany 4y ago
  This does make some sense. Games are big (file size wise) and prone to updates. Steam helped handle this distribution in a reasonable way. It's also why people prefer app stores or package managers, because they give a predictable distribution experience over hunting for scattered software. I'd say the problem with Steam is that it should have a community-run alternative/competitor. There hasn't been much push for one since Steam isn't a walled garden and Valve has historically been pretty ethical, but still...
  - matheusmoreira 4y ago
    > Games are big (file size wise) and prone to updates. Steam helped handle this distribution in a reasonable way. Indeed. Steam is the original package manager of Windows. It's so good that nobody really remembers what it was like before Steam. They don't remember downloading and manually applying half a dozen incremental patches to their games. People are used to its incredible convenience now. As far as DRM content licensing digital fiefdoms go, it's certainly the least bad. It's easy to forget that we don't really own anything on Steam. It certainly pisses me off when other studios start launching shitty alternatives to it that are even worse in every single way.
  - fomine3 4y ago
    Also Steam's CDN is extremely fast in my experience. I'm surprised how MSFS2020 downloader sucks.
- MisterBastahrd 4y ago
  There's another factor too: Steam just plain doesn't change the store that much. When I open the Steam store to browse, I bypass literally everything to scroll to the bottom of the page. There I will find a few tabbed lists. One will show me new and "trending" games (I have no idea what they consider trending), one will show me the current top selling games, and another will show me upcoming games that are receiving hype. I rarely ever view anything else on that page unless they're running a seasonal sale.
JanisErdmanis 4y ago
> I can download any show or movie I want The golden age of movie piracy has already passed. It is becoming quite hard to pirate 10y+ movies at a good quality. Also, streaming services do offer remastered film versions rarely available for pirates.
fxtentacle 4y ago
The age of mindless consumption has fully arrived, with AI-driven platforms like TikTok feeding you endless content for free. It's just that selling behavior manipulation of your users (e.g. ads) turned out to be a better business model than (honest) subscription payments.
winternett 4y ago
That's refreshing to read. I thought I was the only one tired of reruns of the office and south park combined with vapid cheaply produced reality and tik tok video clip replay shows. I really wonder why anyone would dump $100 or more on cable TV any more unless perhaps they need to watch sports channels. Commercials are dull as well, the way they repeat "accidentally"... ugh. It will eventually burn out once the pandemic isolation is all over. It's really going to be a drought for blockbuster entertainment, At least we have plenty of 90s movies and music to fall back on, It's a good thing I kept my old DVDs, Mp4s, Mp3s, and my DVDr drive... No commercials at all unless I want to see them. :)

blibble 4y ago

> I wonder why it is that Steam hasn't had any issues remaining such a successful video game platform, while other forms of media have struggled to keep up. it's privately owned and by someone that loves video games that was already wealthy when he founded the company

bicdez 4y ago

> The age of mindless consumption is nearing an end. How so?

hirundo 4y ago

> The age of mindless consumption is nearing an end I think the only thing that could do that is a degree of general poverty so great that mindless consumption immediately impacts survival. And even then some people would choose intoxicants over food and shelter.

gonehome 4y ago

> “ I can download any show or movie I want and have it playing in minutes without having to deal with multi platform bullshit.” Is this as true as it once was? It seems most of the old trackers are offline or dead now. I’d guess because of the success of streaming services finally meeting the market demand. It’s also possible I’m just old and out of the loop now.

U6XWpjvdqi4xTPJ 4y ago
Just hop on over to Rutracker, there's plenty of stuff. And Usenet is still great for movies and TV, although in my experience music is getting a lot harder to find (the wide and free/cheap availability of music streaming probably has something to do with this).
geraldwhen 4y ago
Google and bing filter out the results you want. Other search engines work fine.
Fezzik 4y ago
TPB is still going strong. Older content is sometimes difficult to find but anything new or even slightly popular from the last 50 years is more-often-than-not obtainable.
ElCheapo 4y ago
Imagine a world where anyone who wants can set up his little torrent seedbox sharing with the whole globe some content they really like without worrying about getting a nice little letter in the mail. I'm pretty sure if people were free to do so (and cheap and easy commercial options sprung up) we would be able to find any content we desire and download it and (if it's popular enough) even stream it
davidgerard 4y ago
For comedy gold, look through the DMCA notifications that Google links you to, and that's your index of helpful and current torrent sites. Many are very usable through machine translation too.
EB-Barrington 4y ago
Hi, yes, as true at it ever was. Indeed, the choice is wider than all the paid streaming services combined.
radlad 4y ago
Yes, this is absolutely still true if you have access to a couple private trackers.

AstralStorm 4y ago

Steam is successful because its advertising is rather low key, showing a popup with offers, and providing a search, directory plus suggestions. Their gain is from consumer analytics too. (They also take a cut for using their platform from the game developers or publishers. It also provides some added value like achievements, basic social media in forms of forums and chat, some (somewhat broken at times) controller handling, some bug reporting, cloud save handling, voice communication handling, even some space to host game related content. On the whole, more value added than taken by paltry ads. The bigger value minus is the "Steam DRM" - requirement for an online connection to use the downloaded application. And providence help you if you post inflammatory comments under an account that owns game access licenses. You will lose that. The other ones don't do it quite as effectively, esp. the suggestions part. Being a game library and download service is not what makes Steam in particular good, though it is an essential part.

pdpi 4y ago
It’s important to take Steam DRM in context. In a world where DRM was becoming more intrusive by the day, and you had to contend with every game having its own unique way to mess your system up in its fight against piracy, Steam provided one single DRM system that almost everybody agrees to use. For consumers, worse than no DRM, but miles ahead of the status quo it replaced. Also, Steam does have an offline mode. You just have to ping the mothership every few weeks iirc.
- vorador 4y ago
  Yeah it feels like people forgot about the Sony Rootkit DRM (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootkit_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...) that ended up exploited by malware.
- KiranRao0 4y ago
  In some ways, Steam has provided an experience better than having no DRM. I can hop in a friend's computer and download any game I've purchased. Or I can delete old games to free up space and redownload them later (without having to deal with DVDs or external USB drives). The tradeoff is handing over the control of my game library to a company. I can see how that tradeoffs can be compelling to some and not worthwhile to others.

jcranmer 4y ago

> I wonder why it is that Steam hasn't had any issues remaining such a successful video game platform, while other forms of media have struggled to keep up. Well, Youtube's ad problem comes from the fact that it is run by the largest internet advertiser. Netflix--video streaming in general--suffers from the fact that there are very few major content producers, and after seeing the monetary success of Netflix, the content producers decided to create their own streaming platforms and deliver their content only via them. While there have been attempts to build alternative video game platforms than Steam (notably Epic Games Store and Origin), they haven't been able to enforce an exclusivity deal of the kind that showed up in video streaming. I'm not entirely certain why, but it seems to be a mixture of the lack of centralization in developers (so must-have is much less a factor in video games as it is for movies), the need for multi-platform distribution anyways to reach consoles, and the necessary social media integration (you need friend lists to be able to invite friends) making fragmentation more painful for users.

Spooky23 4y ago
I disagree re Netflix. They invented their own problems by pivoting from an video platform to a platform that measured itself by how much attention it could steal or time it could waste. You may recall they were patting themselves in the back by adopting this strategy of minimally viable programming. Well, Disney got their shit together and turns out people want to watch good TV. Whatcha know? It’s a management failure and the ad pivot is a bigger failure. If there was a board with a clue, they would fire the management and start over.
rowanG077 4y ago
Epic game store definitely tries to enforce exclusivity. Prime example beeing Square Enix games. FF7 Remake first released on Epic Game Store and only much later released on Steam. Kingdom Hearts still isn't available in Steam and probably never will be. It's one of the prime reasons I will never buy from them. That way lies madness.
- jcranmer 4y ago
  Yes, they've tried to, but as I've said, it hasn't been particularly effective. Most of the games that had the year-long Epic store exclusivity period happily released on Steam at the end of that period.

gsatic 4y ago

Is HN an example of mindless consumption?

pdimitar 4y ago
It's definitely not its design goal as far as I can tell. However we the people in general have addictive tendencies and we're just kind of turning HN into every other compulsively scrolling social media. But that's on us.
aranelsurion 4y ago
Maybe not. As far as I can tell it doesn't prioritize engagement/hours spent over everything else, first page is a mixture of very niche stuff and very common stuff with very little clickbait either way. To me HN feels like having a conversation with an interesting friend. It's not necessarily the most productive thing to do, nor it has any other major goal inherent to it, still at the end of the day it doesn't feel mindless or time lost. To compare, if I use Twitter for 10mins, it's 1min of entertainment at best and 9minutes of bullshit/flamebait/doomscrolling/shallow crap that makes me feel dizzy by the end of it.
- jamiek88 4y ago
  Funny you should say that. I got into a bit of a twitter rabbit hole and ended up realizing my heart was racing, knuckles white and teeth grinding. I was furiously pounding on my keyboard to reply to what was probably a bot before I came to my senses and closed the page. I can see how that shit is addictive. Rage is a hell of drug.

mythrwy 4y ago

It's a strange state when YouTube videos of villagers in Africa building a mud hut or a guy in Asia building a fish tank taken with cheap cameras by amateur videographers are many times more entertaining then Hollywood blockbusters that cost 10's of millions to make.

goatlover 4y ago
Isn’t that entirely subjective? More interesting to how many people? Would people pay money to watch?

HellDunkel 4y ago

What is locally crafted consumption?

smitty1e 4y ago
Artisanal cheeses and beers, for example.

notsapiensatall 4y ago

Among other things, Steam is not operated by a publicly-traded company. They don't need to answer to faceless shareholders at the end of every quarter. They can settle for making whatever they consider to be "enough money" without chasing endless growth.

ChrisLomont 4y ago
Steam still has shareholders to answer to, with the same human motives as any shareholder, so I don't think this argument holds water. I suspect they'd try to get whatever growth they can because otherwise eventually someone will overtake them. And empirically they are still growing at rates [1] not common among any class of companies, so someone there is certainty pushing for incredible growth. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/308330/number-stream-users/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/308330/number-stream-use...
- notsapiensatall 4y ago
  The difference is that their shares are not publicly offered. Their shareholders much more likely to be people with vested interests in the company's long-term health, rather than retail investors and hedge funds who reliably demand short-term returns.
  - Ekaros 4y ago
    Also I'm pretty sure they are making enough money as they are. And don't need to chase that ever increasing stock valuation. Which might not even mean increased profits.
    - Jensson 4y ago
      But public stocks seems to focus on valuation over profits, which is reasonable given how things turned out. Apple going from 1 trillion to 2 trillion valuation is much more valuable to shareholders than Apple paying out 100 billion in profits. But if the stocks aren't publicly traded then the main pay-out are the profits, so they try to maximize profit over growth, which is probably much healthier for the economy overall.

skocznymroczny 4y ago

Steam was at the right place at the right time. Also it was more insidious in its behavior. Throughout the late 2000s and 2010s most AAA games were Steam releases only. Even boxed copies were not much more than a Steam code. This allowed them to build a powerful network effect. At some point gamers were demanding that any new big release was a Steam release ("no steam no buy").

jabbany 4y ago
This does make some sense. Games are big (file size wise) and prone to updates. Steam helped handle this distribution in a reasonable way. It's also why people prefer app stores or package managers, because they give a predictable distribution experience over hunting for scattered software. I'd say the problem with Steam is that it should have a community-run alternative/competitor. There hasn't been much push for one since Steam isn't a walled garden and Valve has historically been pretty ethical, but still...
- matheusmoreira 4y ago
  > Games are big (file size wise) and prone to updates. Steam helped handle this distribution in a reasonable way. Indeed. Steam is the original package manager of Windows. It's so good that nobody really remembers what it was like before Steam. They don't remember downloading and manually applying half a dozen incremental patches to their games. People are used to its incredible convenience now. As far as DRM content licensing digital fiefdoms go, it's certainly the least bad. It's easy to forget that we don't really own anything on Steam. It certainly pisses me off when other studios start launching shitty alternatives to it that are even worse in every single way.
- fomine3 4y ago
  Also Steam's CDN is extremely fast in my experience. I'm surprised how MSFS2020 downloader sucks.
MisterBastahrd 4y ago
There's another factor too: Steam just plain doesn't change the store that much. When I open the Steam store to browse, I bypass literally everything to scroll to the bottom of the page. There I will find a few tabbed lists. One will show me new and "trending" games (I have no idea what they consider trending), one will show me the current top selling games, and another will show me upcoming games that are receiving hype. I rarely ever view anything else on that page unless they're running a seasonal sale.

JanisErdmanis 4y ago

> I can download any show or movie I want The golden age of movie piracy has already passed. It is becoming quite hard to pirate 10y+ movies at a good quality. Also, streaming services do offer remastered film versions rarely available for pirates.

fxtentacle 4y ago

The age of mindless consumption has fully arrived, with AI-driven platforms like TikTok feeding you endless content for free. It's just that selling behavior manipulation of your users (e.g. ads) turned out to be a better business model than (honest) subscription payments.

winternett 4y ago

That's refreshing to read. I thought I was the only one tired of reruns of the office and south park combined with vapid cheaply produced reality and tik tok video clip replay shows. I really wonder why anyone would dump $100 or more on cable TV any more unless perhaps they need to watch sports channels. Commercials are dull as well, the way they repeat "accidentally"... ugh. It will eventually burn out once the pandemic isolation is all over. It's really going to be a drought for blockbuster entertainment, At least we have plenty of 90s movies and music to fall back on, It's a good thing I kept my old DVDs, Mp4s, Mp3s, and my DVDr drive... No commercials at all unless I want to see them. :)