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It's really getting to the point Gabe needs to cash out and turn Steam into a non-profit...
I trust him while he's alive, but some day he'll die, and who knows what will happen to Steam.
We could wake up one morning and find out there's a $10 monthly fee to access Steam's "services" including every game you ever purchased.
We can't just cost on the hopes nothing changes forever.
You can start shopping on another store, like GOG. But also, the add-ons thing feels like these folks have never shopped for video games anywhere else, because everyone does that.
Steam has some upsides most take for granted.
The work they do to get all the strange controller setups working (and let others make configurations) is a huge time saver when all you want to do is play your games.
Free cloud saves are a life saver when you go from device to device.
The Linux work they do is fantastic.
It goes on and on. But yeah the biggest deal is that if they ever go full corpo....we are in trouble.
I'm going to nitpick the controller stuff too, because they could have done it in a way that was store agnostic, but of course, they benefit if they don't do it that way.
Oh yeah totally. But it deals with proprietary drivers...so im not 100% sure what the restrictions are there. The mapping could be done open source if there was a need/want.
Yeah, Steam Input could have been huge for the entire gaming industry, but instead it's only for Steam and so only can get fixed by Valve, who just doesn't really care about coming back to things and keeping them working after initially building something. Frustrating to see something almost so good just kinda limp along, accumulating bugs no one will fix because Valve doesn't really care beyond the simple button mapping use.
Just like how dynamic collections could have been pretty great, but Valve got a rudimentary version working, patted themselves on the back, and left forever without even implementing the most basic tools anyone would need to actually use them (boolean combinations, actually using the tags you set on games, etc). It could even have been a slick new interface to Steam's tagging (imagine if you set a collection specifically as a tag, and Steam took your manually adding and removing games there as tag votes) that might've helped ease some of the dumb problems tags have (there'd be a lot more info for Steam to draw on than just the people actually updating tags on the store page).
I'm kind of impressed no one makes a better gaming social-launch client than Steam, but then Steam's own client has a massive lock in advantage so you basically can't make something that wholly replaces it, and Valve doesn't care to play nice when they want that obvious Steam-game vs non-Steam-game divide.
Is there any launcher that doesn't offer free cloud saves these days?
(not neglecting that Stream normalized it, for the record)
GOG offers them, but they're inconsistent and only work with their launcher. While I have some GOG games on my Steam Deck, they don't transfer saves over to my PC.
I mean, Steam cloud saves only work with Steam, no?
Consoles, though I suppose those aren't what you're talking about.
This is exactly why this shit constantly annoys me. Steam is not unique in how they handle their store. If you don't want to pay Valve a fee as a dev, then don't put your game on Steam. No one is forced to do that.
Now, you will lose many sales. But a service being popular does not make it a monopoly. Other stores exist, and are even discussed in the article. All of them have some similar method of getting add-ons. Steam's happens to be very easy -- again, that doesn't make it anti-competitive.
Also: the fact that this is about "PC monopoly" and "Microsoft" is not mentioned is just... wild. And sad.
While I don't buy a lot of PC games, I did pick up Stellaris on GOG.
The weird second-class status I get when it comes to betas and mods is enough for anyone to scream. Especially since if I wanted to move to steam, I'd have to re-buy every add-on I want to play.
Add-on lock-in really is a thing. Even if it may be as much a lazy publisher as it is a greedy storefront.
It's strange, because if I buy an expansion for a board game, I don't have to shop at the same store that I bought the base game from.
Personally this reeks of being a shadow lawsuit by Epic games.
With the end goal being to let people buy and play the games on Steam, but then buy the addons via EGS.
If that happened, that would mean you'd be able to buy DLC for all of your free EGS games on Steam as well. Selling DLC for those games is probably just about the only money that store brings in outside of Fortnite.
Hah, not from me! It won't be the first time that I buy a game on Steam that I previously played for free on EGS, just so I can buy the DLC. I will never spend a cent on EGS.
Unfortunately that doesn't help with multiplayer games that rely on steam
An extremely similar API exists in GOG, for better and for worse, because it functionally is the only DRM in GOG. And of course Epic offers the same thing, too.
How many devs actually take advantage of it though?
It happens all the time. Sometimes it's a disclaimer on the store page, or sometimes they just list "multiplayer", and I have to find out via forums if the game is actually DRM-free or if they're using the equivalent GOG multiplayer service. And the reason it's there is to entice those developers who rely on the equivalent Steam services, but I wish those API calls could somehow be co-opted into actual DRM-free multiplayer.
I can‘t find the specific video where it came up, but I remember Chet Faliszek, who worked at Valve from 2005 to 2017, mentioning, that Gaben‘s death is something that has been planned for and won‘t be as much of an issue for Valve as people might think.
It‘s of course in no way guaranteed to work out in the end, I don‘t know the specifics of the plans or if everyone‘s going to go along with them. But seeing how well Valve is doing and also how little Gaben actually seems to steer the company, I‘m somewhat optimistic that it‘ll be fine after his passing. Not optimistic enough not to have my most beloved Steam games backed up somewhere, of course, but still somewhat optimistic.
I've been working on my Steam exit strategy for years. It's nice feeling like I could bail at any time without too much pain.
I'm hopeful Valve, and by extension Steam, will be fine. The employees are like minded, I don't see it going public and derailing once Gabe has left.
I don't mind someone going after Valve but I think the arguments presented are bullshit.
The price parity argument is an argument on paper but in reality we're not going to see different pricing, except maybe on the super rare occasion a company has their own storefront they want to build up with their first party games while also keeping the game on Steam for extra sales. Realistically that first party game is going to be exclusive to the store (see Alan Wake 2). And 3rd party publishers have no incentive to sell for cheaper on a different storefront because a lower cut by the platform holder would just mean they get to make more money per unit sold. I guess maybe if the storefront pays the 3rd party publisher extra so the storefront itself could set a lower price on the games, but I fear that might end up having the opposite effect where money-rich competitors (like Epic) can end up taking away market from smaller storefronts like GOG or Itch because despite selling games for less it's still not competing with Steam in terms of features so the market has to grow from somewhere. But I'll happily be wrong here.
The same way the 30% cut being too much is an argument on paper, but in reality if the cut does go lower the customer, the people actually buying the game, won't see it. One could argue that it has already gone down for AAA because Steam brings it's down to 25% after certain threshold and I think once more to 20% after the next threshold. Meanwhile AAA pricing has only gone up in the form heavier focus on MTX alongside an actual price increase from $60 to $70. The cut going down is just going to put that money in the publishers pocket. It would be a win for the publisher but not really a win for the customer.
The only argument that actually could be beneficial to the customer is the add-on argument. I'm not entirely sure what they mean by add-ons. If they mean Steams own made up marketplace of trading cards and stickers and all that shit what is the solution here? Have Steam close it down because there's no way in world other storefronts would ever make something like that and if they did it would never be made in a way where it could be interchangeable with Steams implementation. I hope by add-ons they mean DLC-s and I would 100% love it if I could buy a game on one platform and DLC-s from a different platform and just have them work together. That would actually be beneficial to the customer. But I don't see anyone codifying that as a regulation and if it were to happen it would be pretty big strain either on the storefronts or the publishers, because it would be a huge mess to track purchase across platforms to make sure what combination of games + DLCs any particular account has. I would love to see it happen, I just don't see it actually happening.
The arguments are there on paper but even if Steam did anything about them it probably would have little to no effect on the customers so the lawsuit doesn't really feel like someone is fighting for the consumer, it just feel like someone trying to take Steam down a peg. It's fine but it's unlikely to have an impact on the market, Steam will still stay the biggest seller because Steam offers features to the consumer that no other storefront offers.
There's nothing that says game developers can't allow add-ons to be installed from third party stores. Already works that way with games like Gratuitous Space Battles. I've bought the expansions on third party stores and simply put the zips or whatever in the relevant game folder.
I don't know if something has changed since that game, but I don't see addons sold by 3rd parties as a popular avenue for consumers simply because you have to then manually manage it.
Will say it would be nice to own games on one platform and be able to buy and manage the game via steam. Select the platform you bought it from / the install folder and let steam automagically update the DLCs in there for you.
We don't really know what the add-on argument is because the article doesn't really say much about it. I didn't mean Steam prohibits modifying game files, which is pretty much what you did to add the expansions. I meant it more like you describe in the last paragraph where your purchases are platform agnostic, you buy where you want to and you play where you want to.
This is a great write up to which I can only add that I know that in the ongoing US case, Valve has been arguing that not only is the 30% cut not particularly onerous, and is actually pretty close to the industry norm...
... they also make the argument that Steam provides much, much more to both the consumer and the prospective game seller that....well they just do actually offer many more features and services than existing comparable platforms.
The DLC thing is an interesting idea, but... oh god, basically, is my database manager brain's response to that.
You'd have to construct like a shared standard of game key liscenses across all digital platforms, you know, the not unlike the kind of thing every single idiot a few years back claimed would be possible with their NFT games.
This is... an interesting idea, but I don't see how you could actually implement this in practice without basically creating a government agency to manage it.
... Which would then also probably mean that said government would now directly know every game you own.
And then you'd have to think about how that would play with things like game key selling sites...
Yeah. This would be a nightmare to try to actually implement.
Now the government would be directly involved in DRM. Like uh, potentially, verify your actual identity with face scan to log in to your game library of any kinds of games... that kind of involved.
There are many other complexities and problems than that.
Blockchain game ownership.
I'm pretty sure the dlc thing is already possible. Guild wars 2 at least works this way, you can buy the game/dlcs either via steam or via their own store and then you can install and run the game either via steam or via their own launcher (although IIRC the steam way still has the launcher).
It's probably more of a case of steam providing a convenient way for developers to not need their own account system, so rather than them creating their own solution that integrates with steam and other sources, they just straight up use Steam's way.
To be honest I'd love it if they forced a way for steam and other shops to allow migrating your games between them, so I could take all the free games from epic but never use it. Currently my compromise is to just never use it and skip the free games.
Timmy Swiney is goint to lose money again.