4 ms·

I 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 ha

I 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 ago
Hopefully that'll be cloud gaming, I'd love to be able to play, say, Cyberpunk on my phone in bed.
- leodriesch 4y ago
  That is already possible with Stadia (and possibly other game streaming services).
  - stavros 4y ago
    Yes it is, but it's not there yet (see my reply to the sibling comment).
- sanitycheck 4y ago
  If you don't mind the "cloud" being your LAN, and you already own Cyberpunk just download the Steam Link app.
  - stavros 4y ago
    I do use Steam Link, and it's great, but it'll be even more amazing when I neither need to own the games nor the computer. I want to be able to rent a computer in the cloud (like Nvidia Geforce Now) and rent the games as well, on a subscription basis (like Xbox Live/Xbox Cloud Gaming).
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
NickHoff 4y ago
> What beats Steam will not be a better Steam. It will be something else... Right. It will probably still have to be better than Steam though. Like a game streaming service in which all the games are available to play. Pay $20 per month, play any game whenever you want. The economics might even work out. They could pay each publisher $x for each hour that each person plays their game. More money for small studios since more people will be trying their game for a few hours, still lots of money for the big guys. From the players perspective it would be like buying a AAA game every 3 months. Expensive, but you get all the other games too and you don't need an expensive gaming rig. Or another idea - no monthly subscription fee, but you pay $X/hr for each game. Big games cost $0.10 per hour, free-to-play costs $0.005 per hour. Make the numbers work out so that publishers get the same overall revenue, but players like the flexibility. You could even limit your monthly spend. Cloud pricing for games?
- jabbany 4y ago
  Right! That's the problem with streaming services today: it's not a better experience for many people/use cases when it comes to consuming games. It only really works for someone who (1) plays mostly popular AAA titles as soon as they come out, (2) who plays _a lot_ of games relatively regularly, and (3) is OK with losing access to older games eventually. Clearly these people exist but I don't think there are that many of them... I'm a very casual consumer of games (I play a mix of big popular titles as well as small niche indie titles) and Steam is an amazing experience for me compared to all the alternatives. I can get games during discount events and play them when I have time, knowing that the games in my library will be there available for me to download even years into the future on whatever PC device I happen to have then should I want to re-experience them. Having a monthly streaming service makes no sense to this kind of use case where (1) games are diverse (2) usage is bursty not regular (3) on-demand access to old titles is desired. I think one way to get more people onto streaming, is to, like mentioned above, (1) make available a new pay-per-use $/hr model as an alternative to subscription, (2) keep the roster constant, do not cycle games out every month, cycle them out every decade if you have to, and (3) use actual compute pricing for the actual type of compute used: games that need a high-performance GPU? charge cloud GPU prices, indie titles that can run on a potato? aim for just CPU instance prices. Of course this is never going to happen. The industry is hungry for that sweet, sweet, MRR. Nobody* is selling perpetual licenses anymore. It's all about showing that you have perpetual faucets of revenue these days.

stavros 4y ago

Hopefully that'll be cloud gaming, I'd love to be able to play, say, Cyberpunk on my phone in bed.

leodriesch 4y ago
That is already possible with Stadia (and possibly other game streaming services).
- stavros 4y ago
  Yes it is, but it's not there yet (see my reply to the sibling comment).
sanitycheck 4y ago
If you don't mind the "cloud" being your LAN, and you already own Cyberpunk just download the Steam Link app.
- stavros 4y ago
  I do use Steam Link, and it's great, but it'll be even more amazing when I neither need to own the games nor the computer. I want to be able to rent a computer in the cloud (like Nvidia Geforce Now) and rent the games as well, on a subscription basis (like Xbox Live/Xbox Cloud Gaming).
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]

NickHoff 4y ago

> What beats Steam will not be a better Steam. It will be something else... Right. It will probably still have to be better than Steam though. Like a game streaming service in which all the games are available to play. Pay $20 per month, play any game whenever you want. The economics might even work out. They could pay each publisher $x for each hour that each person plays their game. More money for small studios since more people will be trying their game for a few hours, still lots of money for the big guys. From the players perspective it would be like buying a AAA game every 3 months. Expensive, but you get all the other games too and you don't need an expensive gaming rig. Or another idea - no monthly subscription fee, but you pay $X/hr for each game. Big games cost $0.10 per hour, free-to-play costs $0.005 per hour. Make the numbers work out so that publishers get the same overall revenue, but players like the flexibility. You could even limit your monthly spend. Cloud pricing for games?

jabbany 4y ago
Right! That's the problem with streaming services today: it's not a better experience for many people/use cases when it comes to consuming games. It only really works for someone who (1) plays mostly popular AAA titles as soon as they come out, (2) who plays _a lot_ of games relatively regularly, and (3) is OK with losing access to older games eventually. Clearly these people exist but I don't think there are that many of them... I'm a very casual consumer of games (I play a mix of big popular titles as well as small niche indie titles) and Steam is an amazing experience for me compared to all the alternatives. I can get games during discount events and play them when I have time, knowing that the games in my library will be there available for me to download even years into the future on whatever PC device I happen to have then should I want to re-experience them. Having a monthly streaming service makes no sense to this kind of use case where (1) games are diverse (2) usage is bursty not regular (3) on-demand access to old titles is desired. I think one way to get more people onto streaming, is to, like mentioned above, (1) make available a new pay-per-use $/hr model as an alternative to subscription, (2) keep the roster constant, do not cycle games out every month, cycle them out every decade if you have to, and (3) use actual compute pricing for the actual type of compute used: games that need a high-performance GPU? charge cloud GPU prices, indie titles that can run on a potato? aim for just CPU instance prices. Of course this is never going to happen. The industry is hungry for that sweet, sweet, MRR. Nobody* is selling perpetual licenses anymore. It's all about showing that you have perpetual faucets of revenue these days.