5 ms·
Valve conquered PC gaming – what comes next?
- neonate 1y agohttps://archive.ph/dmHDP https://archive.ph/dmHDP
- senko 1y agoFrom the article: > it basically prints money. Is "next" needed, then? (the title is a hook - the article is overall a nice coverage of valve, worth a read)
- Yeul 1y agoSadly humans always want more money and their greed inevitably destroys the money printer.
- webdevver 1y agoi think what comes next is the entire industry shrinking like the motion picture industry. i think we're past peak PC gaming, and gaming in general. the real money is in social media, which i suppose steam has elements of. indeed perhaps that is the real fuel for its success, and not the game store aspect.
- pixxel 1y ago[dead]
- whoisyc 1y agoWe are not past peak PC gaming. What we might see soon is the end of big budget AAA game production. It’s not even that AAA games are bad, it’s just they require such a ridiculous amount of production value that they have to be blockbuster after blockbuster to not fail, and when they do fail, they don’t just wipe out the lifetime saving of one guy who quit his job to make an indie game, they wipe out thousands of jobs and entire studios and franchises. My predictions is by 2030 Xbox will be out of business, PlayStation will be where pretentious auteurs make games that are 80% cutscenes, most savvy gamers play indie PC games, and Nintendo remains the only big name game studio to not collapse.
- john01dav 1y agoAAA games can provide experiences that indie games can't (this is nothing against indie games -- they're just different). So, there will be a market for them, but perhaps at a higher cost than currently in order to cover the risk of failure. Furthermore, large companies like Microsoft or Valve have enough resources to withstand such failures.
- Fire-Dragon-DoL 1y agoWhat would that be? I haven't had an AAA game deliver something that an indie game couldn't
- hnlmorg 1y agoYour predictions don’t match any expert analysis I’ve read. Nor my own observations either. I think Xbox game pass and their streaming services will ensure Xbox will continue to grow. PlayStation are in a more precarious position because they rely on hardware sales. Xbox doesn’t. PlayStation is also the hardest platform for amateurs to target. That said, I don’t expect PlayStation to collapse either. Your comment also suggest that you think EA would collapse. Which is laughable considering EA make a killing from monthly iterations of sports titles. They could survive on that alone, never mind all their other major cash cows. People made the same predictions about movie budgets as well. Yet movie studios still make a killing despite the costs.
- sylens 1y agoWe are already seeing the beginning of this as less and less games are made targeting the high end, bleeding edge specs. The Nintendo Switch 2 and a wave of portable devices similar in style to it and the Steam Deck will become the target platform for most developers over the next decade. There will be a proper PS6 but it will be incredibly expensive (perhaps more so than the PS5 Pro) and the audience for that will continue to shrink.
- 0xTJ 1y agoNot only is what you're saying about being past peak PC gaming factually wrong, but I can't imagine agreeing with your opinion. How is the real money in social media? Those platforms that make money almost exclusively by making the user experience worse (in particular shoving ads and promoted content down your throat, and harvesting your personal data). In contrast, selling games actively makes money by giving people what they want.
- john01dav 1y agoOnly a subset of games aren't toxic as you describe. Plenty of toxic micro-transaction and gambling mechanics exist.
- sfn42 1y agoYou don't have to participate. I don't play any pay to win games. I play some games with in-game micro transactions like cosmetics and such, but I don't spend money on it. For me it's really an ideal situation. I can play great games like overwatch 2, Apex legends, cs2, path of exile and more completely for free. I can ignore bullshit games like I dunno Genshin impact? I think that's one of the really toxic pay to win games. There's also that Diablo mobile game. I don't participate in those. It's that simple. You offer a good deal I take it, offer a bad one I dont.
- pawelduda 1y agoCare to elaborate what is this "peak PC gaming" we're past?
- samrus 1y agoAbsolutely not past peak gaming. Gaming as a medium hasnt even begun to peak. The infrastructure aside, creators havent properly used games to make art yet, just toys. In terms of film history, we are currently in the "train approaching stop" era of gaming at the AAA level with all these movie-games just trying to tell a static story with no real user interaction in it, and in the silent film era with indie games, where some games like DDLC and undertale (and mayne the fromsoft titles to a degree) beginning to do interesting things with the interactivity inherent in the medium. There is a long long way to go before the blockbuster fatigue era
- 0xTJ 1y agoI do have some concerns that other companies will manage to take legal actions that harm Valve's user experience without actually helping consumers. They have a near-monopoly on PC gaming, which sounds bad at face value. But the only reason for that is that they've continually developed an excellent platform that helps connect people with games that they want to play, and then be able to play them. There are very few marketplaces that strike the right balance of presenting you with options you want, while not artificially getting in your way. (In other words, it's not very enshittified.) There's nothing stopping someone from never buying another game on Steam, and moving to another marketplace on PC, unlike the store monopolies on consoles and mobile devices.
- r1chardnl 1y agoThere's nothing stopping someone from never buying another game on Steam, and moving to another marketplace on PC, unlike the store monopolies on consoles and mobile devices. Except for the (large) Steam library of games you already have on Steam.
- mtsr 1y agoSure, but it works on all pc platforms and the runtime is pretty light and can be pretty easily circumvented from what I’ve heard. Of course it will never be as easy as having a single storefront for all your content, but as we can see from the streaming market, that’s not something that will happen either way.
- 0xTJ 1y agoI phrased that as "never buying another game on Steam" because of the existing library aspect. Sure it's nice to just have one launcher, but you can absolutely move to another marketplace while using Steam for the games that you've already bought. You can keep Steam installed and keep downloading your games through it, but you don't need to give them another penny.
- m11a 1y agoThat's a weak form of lock-in though, because you can switch to another platform going forward, and access your previous Steam purchases for free. No ads, no subscription fee. Stay signed out of Steam Chat and the social stuff, and you've basically just got a heavy application launcher. Compared to PS+ and Xbox Live, which charge subscription fees to continue accessing online content, it's a pretty sweet deal for the consumer.
- luqtas 1y agohopefully a DRM-free, peer-to-peer network way of distributing games without the abusive 1/4 tax out of your revenue simply because they are hosting your game don't came with visibility talk because chances of having your indie title being seen there is minimal. marketing exists for a reason and it's also costly. and don't came up with "THEY OFFER ONLINE SERVICES AND OTHER GOODS" because most don't even f* care about dark-pattern-grind-like achievements or a social-media HUB for sharing screenshots or streaming if they at least sold Deck at a true loss and made a decent VR (also sold at loss) i wouldn't be hating for sure /s
- 0xTJ 1y agoPeople can always buy on another platform if a publisher chooses to make it available. This isn't the iPhone app store, where you're mostly stuck with whatever Apple demands from you. You are also absolutely wrong about indie titles. Many of the games that I'm presented on my personalized top pages on Steam are indie. And Steam makes it very easy to find indie games. I don't understand your point on "marketing exists for a reason and it's also costly". You seem to be undercutting yourself by saying that the marketing provided by the Steam store provides actual value. Selling hardware at a loss only makes sense when you control everything that's done with it. Consoles can be sold at losses because they can't (generally) be used for purposes other than playing games on which the console makers make money. But a Steam Deck is just a PC. If they sold them at a loss, people could just buy them and use them as PCs.
- luqtas 1y agoSteam is literally a monopoly. the Apple argument doesn't cut. you are free to use (F)OSS but go freelance graphic design with Gimp or Krita telling your clients to f*-off Adobe files. or any CAD work. the average Windows Nvidia user won't trade convenience just take a quick check on wishlists, buys and views of indie people releasing games on Steam without marketing budget (money or popularity wise). it isn't a magic bullet, otherwise, marketing would be obsolete... even AAA industry burns millions of USD at 30% is a huge hit on top of all the thing studios have to pay. they just comply because it's either that or go home on the PC market; with rare exceptions like Minecraft and whatever popular is out there nowadays
- ChrisNorstrom 1y agoPessimistic Me: Nothing. They are too comfortable. They are stuck in rainy cloudy Bellevue Washington, in a skyscraper with limited space. Approx the same employee count as decades ago. Neither Epic's games store, EA's Origin, Microsoft's Games for Windows Live, nor Amazon's, was able to dethrone them. They tried to branch out into Movies and Music, they used to sell movies on there but removed the ability in 2019 because no one was using it. Looking back now, it even threw me off, but it's obvious now... People don't want to download movies, they want to stream them like YouTube videos. I'm sure people would want that with games too but that's difficult to do right now. Video games are an emotion, music and movies and books and comics are too. If I were them I'd try to expand Steam so it sells all types of media content. I think it's a mistake not to. Optimistic Me: I was worried about them about a decade ago because anytime you think you are "too big to fail" you set yourself up for long term failure and "getting comfortable" is usually what begin's a company's decline. But they've made some really good decisions to branch out. Like getting into hardware. They've got the Steam Link, Steam Machine, Steam Controller, their VR headset "the Index", and their handheld Steam Deck. So I guess Valve's a hardware company too now.
- jvanderbot 1y agoThe steam deck was a game changer. It's hard to overstate how positive it is in my mind. You can run any cloud gaming service on it. It's open and accessible. It brought a near perfect emulation (ok HAL?) layer to all my Linux machines. It's breaking windows monopoly and cracking open the other distributors closed systems. I can even run NVIDIAs cloud gaming so I may not even need new hardware. (Now having said all that I'm still sore over the new doom game which has ray tracing enabled permanently. It invalidates all my old hardware and the steam deck)
- haunter 1y agoHopefully some strong regulation against unregulated gambling? As much good as Valve did they are also the source of some original sins, like the battlepass system and the whole skin gambling market. It's a total black market with shady companies all around the world leeching on the Steam API without any oversight from anyone.
- zero_shift 1y agoIt really depends whether VALVe remains the Benevolent Dictatorship of GabeN or sells out, goes public or something. In the latter case, what happens is the Extraction Vultures roll in, pitch some flashy slides about innovation and then progressively ruin PC gaming. That can't be allowed to happen, so therefore, VALVe can't be allowed to monopolise this market.
- erikerikson 1y agoThere is a path including more prosocial corporate structures such as B Corp, Fair Shares, et cetera that explicitly include being functional for all stakeholders.
- mattkevan 1y agoAfter years of working in public companies, where nothing mattered beyond the next quarterly results, I’m lucky to be working for a company that’s both a B Corp and an Employee Owned Trust. Instead of exiting to a buyout or IPO the founder basically sold the company to itself. Makes a huge difference when a company can just remain comfortably profitable and doesn’t have to chase double digit growth.
- DrNosferatu 1y agoValve has a golden opportunity, with little downside, to go next level: Extend SteamOS to seamlessly support other hardware beyond AMD (Nvidia, Intel), and, also offer a simple and clean Linux desktop environment on it. No one wants to upgrade from Windows 10. A free, a fully-featured Linux OS SteamOS would put a Steam Store on every PC with relatively little effort and huge potential gains.
- wordofx 1y agoEveryone has upgraded from windows 10 with the exception of like 3 people who are the same people who stayed on windows XP until their favourite game didn’t run on it.
- 0xTJ 1y agoThat is factually wrong. According to [1], Windows 11 has only just about caught up to Windows 10 in marketshare. [1] https://www.pcworld.com/article/2834970/windows-11-has-nearly-caught-up-to-windows-10-with-market-share-spike.html https://www.pcworld.com/article/2834970/windows-11-has-nearl...
- wordofx 1y agoAnd then there’s steam which sits at ~60% for windows 11. Or are we not talking about gaming?
- 0xTJ 1y agoYour original comment did not specify gaming, but rather "everyone". Regardless, over 1/3 Windows users of Steam still being on Windows 10 is not "3" (even figuratively). Even that 60%, while a majority, isn't overwhelming.
- CyMonk 1y ago35,69% of steam users run windows 10 in june 2025 . https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/ https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/
- everdrive 1y agoHopefully nothing is next for Valve except for continuing to improve what they already have. Valve is very rare in the corporate space; they never went public, and so are providing a good service to customs rather than squeezing every last dime out of customers on behalf of shareholders. The moment Gabe Newell is replaced, or Valve goes public there will be a massive problem with PC gaming.
- badpun 1y agoLet's hope he wants to make Steam his legacy, and, upon retirement, will put it in a trust that precludes profit maximization.
- pavlov 1y agoMy prediction is that Netflix will buy Valve when Gabe Newell decides he truly doesn’t care anymore. From the article: “… the chart indicates Steam had an operating margin of about 60 per cent and made $2bn of commission revenues, for about $1.3bn in profit just from Steam commissions in 2021.” That’s a very impressive profit and limits who can afford to buy it. Netflix could pay something like $50 billion in stock to own the gaming market.
- ysofunny 1y agothis pretty much will turn Steam into a subscription. Keep paying or loose your library of "licensed" games ???? this would probably be too evil, even for today's End-game Corporate America, so it'll probably be a mix of a subscription for any and all new games, but you can keep your old games if your account is old enough
- Shorel 1y agoNetflix can't buy if Gaben is not selling.
- ThrowOregonAway 1y agoMobile, they conquered mobile gaming with the Steam Deck. Is the bingbing wahoo really that enduring? Nintendo’s insistence on infantile games will sink them.
- skizm 1y agoI have heard from other internet comments (with no sources) that Gabe is planning on handing Valve off to his son when the time comes. Does anyone know if there is any truth to this?
- Shorel 1y agoThe view exposed in the article is all wrong. It is MBA-analyst levels of wrong. Valve didn't conquer anything. Valve defended PC gaming when everybody else including Microsoft, had abandoned it, and focused on consoles. Windows XP had amazing gaming APIs, like DirectInput: still superior to XInput after all these years, because of more axis and better FFB support; and DirectSound3D, which enabled hardware accelerated 3D positional audio. These APIs were declared obsolete by Microsoft, in favour of XBox-compatible inferior APIs, which were feature equivalent to the APIs in the inferior hardware of the first XBox console. Inferior not in absolute terms, but inferior to what a PC was capable of. And that was just the beginning. Microsoft focused and pushed for their console, and most AAA game studios followed suit. Consoles have been incredibly profitable, so their gambit has paid off. PC Gaming was for old nerds, old game mechanics like FPS (Counter Strike) and RTS (Starcraft) and indie gaming. Valve kept the dream alive. Valve kept open computing alive, in a sense, as consoles are closed computing, and in some cases you need expensive proprietary licenses just to produce a game for one of the consoles, like Nintendo. So no, it was not that Valve released Steam in the right moment. Valve is a big reason PC gaming is alive and thriving. They believed in PC gaming when all the big companies went the console way. Valve saved PC gaming. Then Microsoft and the AAA game studios took notice and we have the XBox store on Windows, and many game launchers, but they are opportunistic companies, who would destroy PC gaming if they could, to get their console profits up.
- fakedang 1y agoIt's the FT, what do you expect? Intelligent analysis about the gaming industry? FT writes for its geriatric readership, for whom this article sounds like actionable information (the hurr durr, gaming is for kids crowd).
- ashoeafoot 1y agoDumb money listening to dumb things propping up dumb businesses doing dumb deals, like devaluing ips and rebuying new ones over and over with dumb money.
- hamilyon2 1y agoSteam's anti-piracy measure is being better, convenient, adding massive value to gamers.
- vlade11115 1y ago> “Anybody who wants to put Valve out of business could do so, but nobody cares,” argues Michael Pachter, a gaming industry analyst at Wedbush Securities. This is untrue; many tried. Almost every major publisher has its own launcher. The problem with them all is they absolutely suck. Even Epic Games Store, the biggest competitor with the most money poured into it, is ridiculously bad in almost every way. Aside from the lack of network effect, it just misses most of the QOL features, is slow, ugly, and very unpleasant to use. Almost universal agreement in the PC gaming community is that EGS is a bootloader for free games that it throws at the user. Every time I use EGS, I am constantly amazed by how bad it is, despite probably tens of millions of investments. The second point that the article completely misinterprets is Microsoft's role. Microsoft (Xbox specifically) is hands down the closest company to beating Steam in its own game. PC game pass provides a constant stream of very good games available on day one for dirt cheap. The work that Microsoft is doing on optimizing Windows for games in general and for handheld consoles in particular is very promising (see Xbox Ally X). This is the threat that Valve faces. Not just a better store, but the absence of a store and "buying games" in general. For example, I intended to buy The Outer Worlds 2 on launch. Now that I know it will be available day one on Game Pass, there is almost zero chance that I will buy it on Steam or anywhere else.
- msgodel 1y agoGOG has the only serous competitor to Steam IMO. It's the only big store that's well behaved enough for people to actually want to use it.
- Yeul 1y agoGOG is sabotaging themselves with their anti DRM policy. The gaming industry will ALWAYS use DRM. This will keep GOG a niche player.
- Maskawanian 1y agoTheir anti-DRM stance is arguably their only compelling feature as opposed to just buying steam. I remember the old game launcher that was called Desura?, which a lot of those third-party keys sites would sell keys for, and it's no longer around. So one of the main concerns with these online platforms is them disappearing and losing all your stuff. Quite frankly, I am happy that GOG exists for this niche. It would be less "sabotaging" if consumers would actually vote in their own interests. However, this has been shown time and time again to never happen, sadly.