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So You Want to Compete with Steam (2018)
- growt 4y agoIt’s interesting that since this was written the epic game store was started and I think it’s quite successful. Although, just like the article predicted, epic did it with lots and lots of money.
- lakomen 4y agoWhat a load if bullcrap. Those kinds of posts are just giving me a reason to do it, out of spite.
- b3nji 4y agoI love that by reading this article, I've been introduced to itch.io.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- davidkuennen 4y agoIn cases such as this, which there are a lot, I guess finding a niche if possible would be a good approach. Cater to people who get lost in the big ocean that is steam searching for the one small pond that is you. Whatever that may be.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- laurencei 4y agoShould be [2018] in title. Previous discussion (215 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16173199 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16173199
- hardware2win 4y agoOne annoying as hell thing on Steam is that you purchase the game and still have to create account on Rockstar/xbox/epic/blizzard site in order to play it, wtf. I would pay 1$ if steam created those accounts on some their random ass emails and just let us play
- BiteCode_dev 4y agoThat should be illegal IMO. You are forced to subscribe after you paid.
- cube2222 4y agoNo, you're not. You're forced to create another account, but that account is free.
- jsiepkes 4y agoIt doesn't matter if it's free because you have to agree to a EULA when creating that account.
- shultays 4y agoin most AAA games, you need to accept an eula to play it as well even if it does not want an account
- sanitycheck 4y agoTrue, but your personal information and consent to use it has value. That said, the Steam store page does tell you in advance this will be necessary if you know where to look. I don't buy those games, if I want them I'll eventually grab console versions used.
- dagw 4y agoSteam is surprisingly good at offering refunds. So if you find a subscription wall you don't agree to after you bought a game, Steam will almost certainly refund your money.
- cube2222 4y agoFor me the main thing lacking in all popular Steam "competitors" (looking mostly at the epic games launcher right now) is lack of reviews. A store without reviews is mostly useless for exploration, while the Steam review system is excellent. I very often wait for a game to come out on Steam just because I want to see the reviews before buying.
- chupasaurus 4y agoGOG has it.
- anothernewdude 4y agoI don't know about that. I don't buy games on other platforms because steam is how I search for games.
- moonchrome 4y agoYou read game reviews for that ? I just YouTube gameplay videos or intro or whatever. I'll watch a narrated review, but just reading about the game is kind of irrelevant for me. Maybe in the old days of game magazines, but these days - videos do a way better job of telling me what I'm in for.
- beebeepka 4y agoI also look at Steam user reviews because people tend to share what they like or hate in relatively short form. I've been gaming for more than 3 decades. Know very well what I like and what I don't. Sure, gameplay videos are great but as an old FPS guy, looking for gameplay recorded by someone who knows what they are doing takes more time. It really does. That's why I look fir videos after taking the time to read what people think. That said, I've stayed away from professional reviews for more than 2 decades.
- unionpivo 4y agoI read the negative comments mostly, to see if game has some glaring issues. Steam generally does a good job of bringing relevant issues to the top, like latest patch breaking something, less than stellar netcode on fighting games, etc.
- globalreset 4y agoThe thing with Steam is - at no point in history it felt like the company is just milking its users. Something that otherwise never happens nowadays. Every single bigger company is just trying to maximize the profit by being borderline abusive, but not Valve, despite their vast dominance. For this very reason they have my loyalty and no exclusives, promotions, pricing plans etc. are going to make me switch. Not to mention that as Linux user, they might be the single biggest force that made it so that I have more games on Linux than I have time to actually play.
- gcanyon 4y agoI just want to be able to play N++ without having to launch two apps to do so.
- ReptileMan 4y agoBeing privately owned has its advantages
- afroboy 4y agoThe answer is simple, the company is not public it's private. it doesn't seek infinite growth which is impossible thing to to.
- honkdaddy 4y agoYeah this is a key point when you consider Valve’s strategy. Gabe still owns >50%, and is a billionaire without a tonne of outside ventures, he can afford to play around a bit. I think this is why they’ve been able to experiment so much the last few years, to varying success.
- bayofpigs 4y ago
- shultays 4y agoDidn't it kinda reach the ceiling already when it comes to PC game market share? Hard to grow above that
- Jweb_Guru 4y agoEven if you were to do all these things (including have superpowers), you still wouldn't be able to compete with Steam. They have built up too much consumer trust over the years, to the point that people automatically view competitors with suspicion. For competitors to succeed, Steam will have to start being aggressively anti-consumer.
- 2Gkashmiri 4y agoyou are sounding like that is a bad thing. >They have built up too much consumer trust over the years, to the point that people automatically view competitors with suspicion. For competitors to succeed, Steam will have to start being aggressively anti-consumer. this is often said about "sin goods", you know... like alcohol or drugs or guns..... people need cigarettes so why not ours."..... we don't have good things on the internet these days. Good things are often taken over, sunset and killed off like geocities of the past. Steam is one-off nice and that is a good thing overall
- Jweb_Guru 4y agoI don't think it's a bad thing, necessarily. I do think anyone who thinks they can take on Steam at this juncture is fooling themselves, though. Epic did everything the article suggested and it's still not close to the point where a significant fraction of the gaming audience would consciously choose an Epic release over a Steam one.
- oreally 4y agoIt is a kind of a bad thing from the perspective of monopolistic practices. As a game developer I'm hoping for a better deal than a 30% cut, but then I see the other stores and there's not much viable choices. Also if steam decides to cut out my genre like it does through algorithms changes, etc, I'm hosed. Such is the price of a winner take all industry. My hopium is that it changes in the future so that the customers win, and the small guys win before the big platform does.
- 2Gkashmiri 4y ago
- p1necone 4y agoI generally won't use any game store that doesn't have text reviews, they're so so much more useful than just numerical scores/star ratings. I especially like being able to read negative reviews on games that look appealing to me to identify whether the primary complaints about them are actually things I'm likely to care about. Idea for a competitor: let users post video reviews!
- MauranKilom 4y agoBut then how do you know which of the 20 minute review videos to watch?
- ceravis 4y agoLet users post reviews of the video reviews? ;) I kid -- but a simple thumbs up/down metric could help separate signal from noise (as is done with current text reviews on Steam).
- TulliusCicero 4y agoUser-posted video reviews sounds kinda useless to me, just because it'd be hard to skim, but they'd also be low quality enough on average to where you wouldn't want to sit through a bunch.
- rippercushions 4y agoIt's worth remembering that Google tried this with Stadia, with levels of investment unimaginable for a regular startup and a product that was superior in many ways (instant games! no hardware requirements!), and still failed. Of course you can Monday morning quarterback this and point out Stadia's limitations (weak games library, hurr durr Google Reader, etc), but still, the cards were stacked in their favor and they still couldn't pull it off.
- swores 4y agoI work in the games industry, and honestly I don't know anyone who was optimistic about Stadia. Some people thought no chance, others thought that Google would care enough to keep pushing it for many years and keep spending unlimited money to maybe find success, and I didn't hear from anyone who thought better than that. Of course I'm not claiming to speak for everyone in the industry, just for people in my network who I either discussed it with or whose opinions I saw online. But it very much isn't the case that everyone predicted success until "Monday morning quarterback"ing.
- TulliusCicero 4y agoI work at Google and I was immediately skeptical of Stadia (I don't work on that product, obviously). Partly from being a gamer myself, thinking about latency, but also because: * Google has a reputation for abandoning services, and games bought on Stadia would be locked there. What happens if/when Stadia goes under? Who knows, but there's a decent chance of, "tough shit, all your games are gone." * It's hard to get momentum when you're targeting hardcore gamers, who mostly already have consoles/PC's, thus removing one of your biggest advantages.
- Handytinge 4y ago> What happens if/when Stadia goes under? Who knows, but there's a decent chance of, "tough shit, all your games are gone." This had now been answered [1]: > We will be refunding all Stadia hardware purchases made through the Google Store, and all game and add-on content purchases made through the Stadia Store. 1. https://www.ign.com/articles/google-is-shutting-down-stadia-its-cloud-gaming-service https://www.ign.com/articles/google-is-shutting-down-stadia-...
- sublinear 4y agoIf your goal is to publish a high quality independent game, Steam is not relevant. If you have something truly original and worth sharing, the audience is more than desperate to find you and they will regardless of your marketing strategy, or lack of one. The tail does not wag the dog. I cannot remember the last time the layperson consumed most of what they do from genuine interest. Astroturf still sells, but for how long?
- TulliusCicero 4y ago> If you have something truly original and worth sharing, the audience is more than desperate to find you and they will regardless of your marketing strategy, or lack of one. I'm sorry, but this is incredibly naive. Yes, some gamers are like that, sure, but most aren't constantly scouring the internet for any hint of the games they like, even if they're into indies. I'm way more knowledgeable about video games than almost any of my gamer friends, and I still don't know that much, there's just so many games out there these days.
- Ekaros 4y agoSteam has tens of thousands of games. Dozens if not hundreds of those are excellent. And at times very affordable. Average gamer really have no reason to hunt good games outside Steam. And then when you get outside you have platforms like Itchio.io. With even more stuff and lot of it free.. For money you really need to be on Steam. Or be very prominent on level of Minecraft.
- Nemrod67 4y agoAs a lone gamedev with a game fresh out on Steam.... I hope that is the case XD Not so sure tho... Luck has a bigger part in any Human endeavor than what any of us says :p
- 12ian34 4y agoI'll bite... what's it called?
- b0afc375b5 4y agoBefore I learned about GOG I bought all my games from steam. Nowadays I only buy from steam if: 1) it's not on GOG, AND 2) it's a game I desperately want to play I don't think condition #2 will ever be met, because no matter how hard I try to get addicted to video games I just get bored and do something else. I buy from GOG because I like the idea that I actually own (not licensed, like steam) and can play the games I purchased even after game stores all shutdown.
- ThatPlayer 4y agoI like the idea of GoG, but the inconsistent ongoing developer support has stopped me from buying any more games on GoG. https://www.gog.com/forum/general/games_that_treat_gog_customers_as_second_class_citizens_v2/page1 https://www.gog.com/forum/general/games_that_treat_gog_custo...
- mrfinn 4y agoAnd on top of that GOG is the home of CD Projekt Red, and we are able to buy their (awesome!) AAA games with the same freedom. I stopped blindly buying from Steam the day I realized what would happen to my games collection if they decide to cancel my account for whatever reason against their TOS. Not that I have anything against them by now, but if I buy, I own. Otherwise I rent.
- iruoy 4y agoHe wrote a follow-up a year later. https://www.fortressofdoors.com/so-you-want-to-compete-with-steam-2/ https://www.fortressofdoors.com/so-you-want-to-compete-with-...
- eterevsky 4y agoFor me the killing feature of Steam is its longevity. I still have in my library the games that I bought in 2008. It means that I can reasonably expect my library to work for the rest of my life. I can't say the same of any other store, much less some newfangled startup. The only conditions under which I can imagine switching to another store is if publishers would suddenly stop releasing their games on Steam en masse. And I mean en masse, not just one or two popular publishers.
- lelanthran 4y ago> For me the killing feature of Steam is its longevity. I still have in my library the games that I bought in 2008. It means that I can reasonably expect my library to work for the rest of my life. I can't say the same of any other store, much less some newfangled startup. You can say the same of GOG. Right now I am playing more GOG games than Steam games, even though my steam library is much larger.
- Accacin 4y agoI want to like GoG, and do buy games there, but the client sucks. It's hard to navigate and for some reason insists on showing me 500+ Steam games rather than my smaller GoG library. Also, none of my friends use it, so if I buy a game on GoG, I'll eventually end up buying it on Steam too. The big case for GoG is buying older games as in general they're much easier to get working on a modern PC than buying on Steam (no idea if that's true, but it feels easier to me).
- lelanthran 4y ago> I want to like GoG, and do buy games there, but the client sucks. It's hard to navigate and for some reason insists on showing me 500+ Steam games rather than my smaller GoG library. > Also, none of my friends use it, so if I buy a game on GoG, I'll eventually end up buying it on Steam too. I was only addressing the longetivity requirement, not the UI or the network effects requirements.
- 4y ago
- dschuetz 4y agoI am amazed that Epic is not mentioned even once. Epic does all that: bribes developers, bribes players by giving away games for free each Thursday, even AAA's now and then. The Super Power that Epic has is their Unreal Engine Ecosystem. And all the money. And that is it!
- Sniffnoy 4y agoThe article predates the Epic Games Store; the followup https://www.fortressofdoors.com/so-you-want-to-compete-with-steam-2/ https://www.fortressofdoors.com/so-you-want-to-compete-with-... discusses it.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- robbie-c 4y agoThe article was from Jan 2018, from a quick google it seems like the Epic Games store was released in Dec 2018. You're absolutely right though, Epic did all of these things and more and is still a distant second.
- jabbany 4y agoI think the article summarizes things up pretty well. Steam is popular because it won a brutal evolutionary battle in the realm of PC distribution. PC games have never had any barriers to distribution, and old distribution methods (physical media, direct downloads etc.) still work just as well today as they did decades ago. Developers use Steam not because they are forced or bribed to do so, they use it because it is better -- it's just easier to make money by distributing via Steam (it could be any combination of things like the wider audience reach, easy DRM integration, built-in CDN and auto-update, built-in cloud saves, etc. etc.). In a sense, Steam's victory is like that of Wikipedia, GMail, or Youtube etc. It provided something that was for a long time magnitudes better than the competition. Looking at it this way, I think the article does miss one final way one might "beat" Steam -- a fundamental paradigm shift in how someone consumes games as entertainment. Steam's success depends on the idea that people want to do "PC gaming". That the idea of collecting, downloading, installing, and running games that they choose themselves on general purpose machines they own themselves is attractive to enough people. I personally believe and hope this idea will stay with us, but I am also from an older era of tech. What beats Steam will not be a better Steam. It will be something else, something that maybe seems obvious in hindsight but impossible to imagine today. Just as a fish does not question the water it lives in, and we the atmosphere we breathe, to truly compete with Steam, one must be something so obvious that consumers would wonder why anyone would ever choose anything else.
- stavros 4y agoHopefully that'll be cloud gaming, I'd love to be able to play, say, Cyberpunk on my phone in bed.
- leodriesch 4y agoThat is already possible with Stadia (and possibly other game streaming services).
- stavros 4y agoYes it is, but it's not there yet (see my reply to the sibling comment).
- simion314 4y agoI had my issues with Steam, but lately a new one come up, I have an old laptop with Steam and Half Life installed on it, so when we had do go on vacation my son wanted to take the old laptop to play some Half Life if bored, but Steam decided to upgrade and fuck itself, then I discovered that Steam Client uses Chrome and the client is no longer compatible with the OS on the old laptop. I did not had the tiem to screw around with cracks or some way to find an old client, fuck Valve, if your new client is not compatible with the OS then fucking stop update it, or make it possible for someone to continue playing the game, maybe a super simple Launcher that does not need Chrome.
- nicolaslem 4y agoThese launchers are the worst. I have five or six of them installed on my machine that are required to play the games I bought. Sometimes a launcher launches a launcher. Often both require an update. Whenever I boot Windows to play games, I have to be ready for multiple GB of updates to download, on a metered LTE connection, just to be able to open the launchers. I am not even sure what they do, when I buy a game the only thing I want is a URL to download it and a way to be notified of optional updates. Email or RSS feeds would to that just fine. Why do we accept so much useless bullshit?
- simion314 4y agoAgree, also forced game updates, you have 30 minutes to play a game but there was an update and the "Play" button is replaced with a "Update" button , it might work if you go in Offline mode this days, I am not 100% sure. DRM-ing the game should be possible without forcing a launcher, but probably that would be bad for business.
- junon 4y agoI tried to compete with steam. It definitely doesn't work. Thing is, people are happy with steam. Nobody cares for something else. Doesn't matter if your platform is better. Steam hasn't changed really at all over the years and... to be honest, it works for them.
- Semaphor 4y agoI was wondering when it would get to Epic, but the article being from 2018 explains it. But didn’t epic kinda subvert this? Epic spent ludicrous amounts (I assume) of money on exclusivity deals and giving players freebies. But their store itself sucks. Maybe the dev tools are low friction, the store was far worse than Steam for a long time, and still is. I just started the client: 30 seconds of loading (okay, that was a lot longer than usual… did new free games arrive?) Click library: "We know we are slow, so look at this skeleton loader". It’s my fucking library? How can this take seconds to load? Click a game to find out more: It launches the game. Why do you have a launch button below the game if everything is a launch button? (replace launch with install for uninstalled games) Information is "right click" -> "go to store page". Wow. Back/forward: It’s a fucking Electron app, you get back/forward for free. No, wait, if you use some dumb JS Framework you don’t, and they don’t. Half the time, back/forward on the mouse does not work properly because they didn’t manually implement the hooks for whatever framework they are using. Okay, rant over. Anyway, this clearly shows that you can have a high-friction crap-client and still get people by just throwing enough money at devs and players for long enough.
- jialutu 4y agoTo solve your problem with Epic games, all you need to do is to find the installation directory of the said game, create a shortcut for it, and voila! A DRM free game! Remember, do not use Epic's own game shortcuts that the client created for you, since the shortcut path has the Epic client's COM object bound to it. As a note, this also works for games that's installed from GoG galaxy that requires the client to be up before the game runs.
- doix 4y agoIt's interesting how the sentiment towards Steam changed since it's inception. I remember back when we had to use WON to play counter strike, then it got shut down and we had to move to Steam. But steam forced you to upgrade to CS 1.6, we liked 1.5 so we "boycotted" it and played on dodgy private servers and eventually WON2 (I think that's what it was called). I remember not playing Half Life 2 for a while because it required Steam and I refused to install it. I eventually gave up and joined (17 years ago according to my account) and over those 17 it's one of those services that just got better and better. Linux gaming is now in the "it just works" territory. They fixed controller support (no more using dodgy drivers to make your PS3 controller behave like an xbox 360 one). They added support for online in local only co-op games (one person streams the game to the other, the other person sends controller input). There are so many cool tech features built into steam that I really can't imagine using anything else at this point.
- ThalesX 4y agoHalf Life 2 for me too. Being in Eastern Europe, that also marked the moment I sort of stopped pirating games.
- wink 4y agoI think you're mixing up a few things about the 'sentiment' here because of the timelines. If Wikipedia is correct enough Steam launched in autumn 2003 and as you say, for CS. All of us who didn't play CS did not care at all about Steam. Then late in 2004 HL2 came, that was a bigger draw but still, for many of us who didn't buy it.. don't care. My Steam account is from 2009, but I distinctly remember that I tried to sign up some years before for no good reason (maybe to grab a name) and couldn't get past the unreadable Captcha and because I STILL had no pressing reason (around 2006?) I let it go. I'm not saying I'm a hardcore Steam user, maybe more like a casual user who buys some games from time to time and I didn't feel a pressing need to sign up for the first ~6 years of service and at some point they had enough benefits that people signed up and bought games. TLDR: Steam was a niche product for many years so the current discourse about "the default game purchasing platform" is completely different than "publisher-owned distribution platform for 3 games"
- francasso 4y agoFrankly, it would be better to just spend the money on building political support for a monopoly case against Steam. Even though, technically, Steam is probably not in a monopoly position (afaik that would require for them to be able to raise prices high enough to get "supernormal returns", whatever that means).
- Ekaros 4y agoMonopoly case against Steam would be interesting. Essentially boiling to, them being monopoly because customers want to use them. Not because they do anything to prevent other platforms from operating and existing. Or even pay anyone for exclusivity...
- badsectoracula 4y agoMost companies who want to compete Steam want to replace it and become the new Steam, so any regulations against Steam would also be regulations against their imaginary future selves :-P.
- raxxorraxor 4y agoSteam is an essential part of breaking a Microsoft monopoly for PC games far more than it is one itself. Perhaps it is too large, but its interest are for the benefit of the consumer for once. This is a unique feature, it does not exist in any case that could constitute a monopoly elsewhere. Any political support against Steam would be full of special interests of large gaming companies that want to offer a worse service. And aside from GOG they all do offer a significantly worse service by any merits the customer could value.
- andrewclunn 4y agoGot my deck on Monday. Valve just made me an Arch Linux user / console gamer with a handheld that can play my PC games. Oh, and my friends list, game library, and save files transfer over too. Steam wins and I'm a happier gamer for it.