6 ms·

> Just make it a nice experience. Haven’t you been paying attention? That’s not how we do things in business anymore…

lacy_tinpot 7mo ago
It's truly incredible how difficult business people make doing business. Doing business is very simple, easy, and straightforward, but I suspect in a lot of cases the individual behavioral aspects of the executives get in the way of doing good business. Direction and leadership is something that these companies never seem to get right.
- joe_mamba 7mo ago
  >It's truly incredible how difficult business people make doing business. And they're the ones making the most money and avoiding the layoffs.
malfist 7mo ago
Well, we might make it a nice experience until we've attracted enough of you people to have a network affect. And then it's a steady march of price increases, additional revenue streams (including selling your data!) and reduction in features because they were "too expensive to maintain"
uyzstvqs 7mo ago
Steam does. That's why they're the undefeated king. This applies to everything. If you see a product category where users are legitimately unhappy; then enter it, build something actually good, you'll be the biggest and richest in no-time.
- laughing_man 7mo ago
  That's what's happening to Windows as we speak.
- troosevelt 7mo ago
  Steam has a lot of issues but there are too just lots of areas where better products don't win out over inferior products, that's just not how the world works for lots of reasons.
  - storus 7mo ago
    Updating games on HDDs on Steam takes ages; I often see the download complete but then wait another 30 minutes for their diff to complete; and that happens with 10-20 games every week when they have big updates (10GB+). Just for this one thing I would switch elsewhere.
- jrozner 7mo ago
  People hated steam when it launched but you needed it to play CS 1.6. It made installing mods easier. Then HL2 released, orange box, and they were able to get a critical mass as they provided platforms support for other games. Steam got better. It’s still not great but they have so much market share that basically any PC gamer already has it. Epic wants some of that money. The problem is nobody wants to install another store and they aren’t doing anything to improve gamer’s experience other than giving away games and having some exclusives. They’ll never hit the critical mass needed that way.
  - pas 7mo ago
    it was pretty meh back then, so people had pretty understandable reasons. it made LAN parties harder for example :) but it got a lot better. Epic had more money and time compared to Valve. and their store is still worse. sure, Steam has an enormous moat, but that won't be the case forever, Epic should be ready with a nice platform to exploit niches that Valve misses instead they hemorrhage money on things that does not make their fundamental position any better.
    - pjmlp 7mo ago
      Indeed people behave as if Gabe would live forever, or Valve's management will always take the perfect decisions. Eventually like it comes to all of us, there will be time to a new generation of game stores, or gaming devices.
      - happymellon 7mo ago
        But it won't be Epic unless they change their attitude.
  - ChoGGi 7mo ago
    > People hated steam when it launched but you needed it to play CS 1.6. I thought CSS was the first release on steam beta? I remember playing the crap out of it, then the actual steam release happened, and it somehow turned into a laggy buggy hunk of crap for months.
- johnnyanmac 7mo ago
  Steam was first to market and it took forever for competitors to form. It being a good service is secondary.
  - usrusr 7mo ago
    If Valve started to routinely do Bad Things on Steam they'd be gone pretty quickly. Many would go to GoG, some just stop buying games. Bad Things do occasionally happen (bad things like those "oops, we don't actually have licenses for the music used in the game you bought" revokes), but Valve keeps succeeding in keeping it to a rather low background noise level. Competitors have two decades of being that good or better to catch up. You can't buy trust, you can just put money into not losing any of the trust that grew over time. When competitors have done that for two decades, Valve, unless they fail in the meantime, will have even more.
    - johnnyanmac 7mo ago
      I heard the same thing for Discord last month, and reddit and Twitter a few years back. It kind of worked for Twitter due to be outstandiningly bad, but it still didn't "kill" Twitter in the colloquial sense. I don't see it going down any differently with Steam. It may take a dent and open up a competitor, but it won't do a move so catastrophic that it losses its leader status from that alone.
      - Jensson 7mo ago
        "pretty quickly" is a few years, not one month. Chrome dominated the browser market pretty quickly even though the richer bigger company microsoft already had most of the browser marketshare, and that was 3 years. Before those 3 years it seemed like nobody would be able to make a dent in microsofts monopoly, and then it was gone in just 3 years. If steams fumbles as hard as microsoft did with internet explorer they too could be mostly gone in 3 years, replaced by a giant competitors product.
        johnnyanmac 7mo ago
- gverrilla 7mo ago
  > If you see a product category where users are legitimately unhappy; then enter it, build something actually good, you'll be the biggest and richest in no-time. In what role-playing game?
DANmode 7mo ago
Not with that attitude! Demanding it is how Steam came about!
red-iron-pine 7mo ago
only if you're publicly traded

It's truly incredible how difficult business people make doing business. Doing business is very simple, easy, and straightforward, but I suspect in a lot of cases the individual behavioral aspects of the executives get in the way of doing good business. Direction and leadership is something that these companies never seem to get right.

joe_mamba 7mo ago
>It's truly incredible how difficult business people make doing business. And they're the ones making the most money and avoiding the layoffs.

malfist 7mo ago

Well, we might make it a nice experience until we've attracted enough of you people to have a network affect. And then it's a steady march of price increases, additional revenue streams (including selling your data!) and reduction in features because they were "too expensive to maintain"

uyzstvqs 7mo ago

Steam does. That's why they're the undefeated king. This applies to everything. If you see a product category where users are legitimately unhappy; then enter it, build something actually good, you'll be the biggest and richest in no-time.

laughing_man 7mo ago
That's what's happening to Windows as we speak.
troosevelt 7mo ago
Steam has a lot of issues but there are too just lots of areas where better products don't win out over inferior products, that's just not how the world works for lots of reasons.
- storus 7mo ago
  Updating games on HDDs on Steam takes ages; I often see the download complete but then wait another 30 minutes for their diff to complete; and that happens with 10-20 games every week when they have big updates (10GB+). Just for this one thing I would switch elsewhere.
jrozner 7mo ago
People hated steam when it launched but you needed it to play CS 1.6. It made installing mods easier. Then HL2 released, orange box, and they were able to get a critical mass as they provided platforms support for other games. Steam got better. It’s still not great but they have so much market share that basically any PC gamer already has it. Epic wants some of that money. The problem is nobody wants to install another store and they aren’t doing anything to improve gamer’s experience other than giving away games and having some exclusives. They’ll never hit the critical mass needed that way.
- pas 7mo ago
  it was pretty meh back then, so people had pretty understandable reasons. it made LAN parties harder for example :) but it got a lot better. Epic had more money and time compared to Valve. and their store is still worse. sure, Steam has an enormous moat, but that won't be the case forever, Epic should be ready with a nice platform to exploit niches that Valve misses instead they hemorrhage money on things that does not make their fundamental position any better.
  - pjmlp 7mo ago
    Indeed people behave as if Gabe would live forever, or Valve's management will always take the perfect decisions. Eventually like it comes to all of us, there will be time to a new generation of game stores, or gaming devices.
    - happymellon 7mo ago
      But it won't be Epic unless they change their attitude.
- ChoGGi 7mo ago
  > People hated steam when it launched but you needed it to play CS 1.6. I thought CSS was the first release on steam beta? I remember playing the crap out of it, then the actual steam release happened, and it somehow turned into a laggy buggy hunk of crap for months.
johnnyanmac 7mo ago
Steam was first to market and it took forever for competitors to form. It being a good service is secondary.
- usrusr 7mo ago
  If Valve started to routinely do Bad Things on Steam they'd be gone pretty quickly. Many would go to GoG, some just stop buying games. Bad Things do occasionally happen (bad things like those "oops, we don't actually have licenses for the music used in the game you bought" revokes), but Valve keeps succeeding in keeping it to a rather low background noise level. Competitors have two decades of being that good or better to catch up. You can't buy trust, you can just put money into not losing any of the trust that grew over time. When competitors have done that for two decades, Valve, unless they fail in the meantime, will have even more.
  - johnnyanmac 7mo ago
    I heard the same thing for Discord last month, and reddit and Twitter a few years back. It kind of worked for Twitter due to be outstandiningly bad, but it still didn't "kill" Twitter in the colloquial sense. I don't see it going down any differently with Steam. It may take a dent and open up a competitor, but it won't do a move so catastrophic that it losses its leader status from that alone.
    - Jensson 7mo ago
      "pretty quickly" is a few years, not one month. Chrome dominated the browser market pretty quickly even though the richer bigger company microsoft already had most of the browser marketshare, and that was 3 years. Before those 3 years it seemed like nobody would be able to make a dent in microsofts monopoly, and then it was gone in just 3 years. If steams fumbles as hard as microsoft did with internet explorer they too could be mostly gone in 3 years, replaced by a giant competitors product.
      - johnnyanmac 7mo ago
gverrilla 7mo ago
> If you see a product category where users are legitimately unhappy; then enter it, build something actually good, you'll be the biggest and richest in no-time. In what role-playing game?

DANmode 7mo ago

Not with that attitude! Demanding it is how Steam came about!

red-iron-pine 7mo ago

only if you're publicly traded