The Steamy Issue Of Digital Distribution
As mentioned in the Sunday Papers yesterday, there has been some controversy sparked after remarks made by Gearbox's Randy Pitchford to Maximum PC regarding Steam, where he stated that the digital distribution service from Valve was "exploiting a lot of small guys." This was later countered by an article on Gamasutra where Tripwire's John Gibson [...]
Author: John Walker Category: RockPaperShotgun feature john gibson randy pitchford steam Valve Publish Date: Mon, 12 Oct 2009 14:00:22 +0000
As mentioned in the Sunday Papers yesterday, there has been some controversy sparked after remarks made by Gearbox's Randy Pitchford to Maximum PC regarding Steam, where he stated that the digital distribution service from Valve was "exploiting a lot of small guys." This was later countered by an article on Gamasutra where Tripwire's John Gibson retorted, "Ask the Tripwire Interactive employees if they feel exploited, as they move into their new offices paid for by the money the company has made on Steam."
Interested to see if there were other positions we spoke to 2D BOY and Zombie Cow, who have sold their games on Steam, to find out about their experiences.
I can see why industry people might be apprehensive about trusting Valve and Steam because of their sole control over it, but honestly Valve hasn't done anything to give the idea they're going to fuck everyone over.
Also, there is no reason that Steam will become the only place to buy games. Part of thee reason they've grown so big is by offering what people want at generally OK prices (dirty foreigners not withstanding). If they start messing with shit, it's really easy to jump ship and stop buying from Steam.
There ARE other options, eg. Impulse, I just like to have my stuff centralized, although lately I've been looking at all online purchasing option before buying it from Steam. Admittedly though, Steam features by far the closest to complete catalogue of recently released games without any physical media, I'm especially thinking of decent indies here.
Yeah Steam's catalog is pretty damn impressive and I think that Valve deserves some money for getting all of these different publishers to put all their content in one place. That cannot have been easy to do.
There's a reason why Steam is so successful, and that's because people buy from it. Pure and simple. The reasons for people buying from it are probably many, but I like to think that a decent part of it is because Valve understand their customers. Good content, reasonable prices, and a decent front end. Compare it to, for example, EA Downloader, who are somewhat the opposite. People are reluctant to even have EAD on their system.
Still, Pitchford has generated some interesting discussion, and that can only be good for the industry. What I don't like about Steam, personally, is that it tries to be a gaming utility, like GWL wanted to be, but it only supports games bought on Steam, and so it remains less viable than the likes of Xfire. Which means I have to have different bits of software that do the same thing.
I love steam, it's easily one of the biggest advancements in digital distribution since, well, ...ever.
I really wish they wouldn't charge me as much as they do though, like Baliame said I now check other distribution platforms first as steam is no longer the cheapest option, I don't know much about distribution rights and the like, but I'm sure there is no real reason for it, they could easily charge us less and still make a large profit.
Most Steam-haters have either had issues with the client, release-day problems or bought boxed games which require Steam activation.
Other downsides are the regional price differences and availability (set by the publishers), non-optional auto-updating of games, lack of flexibility in installation locations, no support for very old PCs, no way of reselling games and the risk that a hacked/banned account will lose you all your purchases.
Steam does spy on you to a degree and it's an extra program which needs to run on your PC for its games to work.
However, if had I a game to sell, it'd be my first choice for distribution. Their cut/fee goes towards their hosting, plus almost every game gets an advert splashed up at some point. Even after that, every game is treated fairly, with equal space in the listings and links to metacritic scores. Obviously we don't know the prices they charge, but the article suggests it's a lot better than the deal mentioned, which is kind of what I'd expect for retail boxed deal.
FatherJack wrote:Most Steam-haters have either had issues with the client, release-day problems or bought boxed games which require Steam activation.
Other downsides are the regional price differences and availability (set by the publishers), non-optional auto-updating of games, lack of flexibility in installation locations, no support for very old PCs, no way of reselling games and the risk that a hacked/banned account will lose you all your purchases.
Steam does spy on you to a degree and it's an extra program which needs to run on your PC for its games to work.
However, if had I a game to sell, it'd be my first choice for distribution. Their cut/fee goes towards their hosting, plus almost every game gets an advert splashed up at some point. Even after that, every game is treated fairly, with equal space in the listings and links to metacritic scores. Obviously we don't know the prices they charge, but the article suggests it's a lot better than the deal mentioned, which is kind of what I'd expect for retail boxed deal.
It doesn't really spy on you. There's the opt-in hardware survey and some of Valve's games do track play stats, but Steam itself doesn't do anything sneaky as far as I know.
The Steamy Issue Of Digital Distribution
Does about as much as xfire. It's not as invasive as, for example, WoW's Warden or any kind of DRM which came after and including Starforce 3.