5punk

Steam has become probably the foremost way of purchasing PC games. It's fairly easy to use, has a huge variety of games, very good availability, and is popular with developers. On the other hand it's quite often more expensive and your account - and all those games within it - is entirely at Valve's mercy. For these reasons it can prove divisive, and while I think most people are happy with the service there is quite a vocal minority who don't like it. So what do you people think? Saviour of PC gaming, or dangerous monopoly?

Personally I love Steam. I don't have an optical drive any more, and I dislike proprietary stores like Uplay and Origin to varying degrees. The main reason I only buy from Steam these days, though, is that I like to have access to all my games and social tools through one interface. Joose once said something profound which has stuck with me for years, which was something along the lines of "there is only a finite number of electronic devices people will carry around in their pocket, and that number is exactly one." I feel the same way about my gaming platform, I don't want to have several different ones all updating and competing for my system resources. I'm also very aware of Valve's almost monopoly though, and I don't like monopolies. So the ideal situation for me would be a unified GUI which I could use to access Steam, Battlenet, Origin etc. I can't see that ever happening though.

Dog Pants wrote:Saviour of PC gaming, or dangerous monopoly?

Yep, both of those things.

The problem lies in the fact that as far as consumers go, our aim is (as you rightly said that joose rightly said*) to use the least possible things, to access the most possible content, which is why even with IPTV services, piracy exists.

While steam has competition (ish) it has to work to our advantage, else we won't use it. Right now it's convenience, regular sales and reasonable prices, as soon as they have a true monopoly, we're effectively tied into whatever they decide to do, they already have a considerable amount of money from all of us.

Ultimately we just have to hope that they stick with their current values and if something better does appear** and kill steam, that they'll arrange some kind of DRM disablement/handover.

*Hopefully I disagreed with the cupcake back then though.
** Remember when napster/kazaa/suprnova/joost/newzbin was a thing?

While I like Steam, I do worry about our reliance on it. If they decide to plaster everything with adverts or some other move we might not like at some point in the future, we all have so much invested in it that the only option would be to just put up with it. Xfire tried to do the unification thing - you could chat across various networks, it detected games from any source and had its own managed friends list - until it all went wrong and they got bought out. GOG no longer just do old games, they too have fallen prey to investors who want that bigger slice of profit from selling new games. Things can and do change.

I don't like how Steam doesn't work very well with things that aren't on Steam, and I don't like that all things aren't on Steam. The reasons for that are multiple, "competing" platforms being a big one - and is the biggest annoyance to the end user. The other main one is that Steam isn't a free distribution platform - they charge and take a cut - far too much for some publishers.

Dr. kitteny berk wrote: While steam has competition (ish) it has to work to our advantage, else we won't use it. Right now it's convenience, regular sales and reasonable prices, as soon as they have a true monopoly, we're effectively tied into whatever they decide to do, they already have a considerable amount of money from all of us.

It would need a significant (and terrible) change of management at Valve to stop the regular sales and reasonable prices being a thing. Not for any kind of ethical/moral reason, but because they genuinely believe that the crazy sales and such actually makes more money overall. Its a difficult thing to measure conclusively, but the figures certainly seem to back up their theory. I know Tom Francis of Gunpoint fame has said that his income (not sales, but actual total amount of money coming in) spikes considerably during a sale, and interestingly does not tail off immediately once the sale ends either. He was talking about it on a podcast I listen to, and he was very much in agreement with them: having the occasional 90% off sale does seem to result in more total money than not.

Whilst Valve management people still believe that we are not going to see an end to silly sales, even if they suddenly take a turn to the money grabbing dark side.

On the subject of them having all our games: There is something somewhere, probably written in more legalese than this, a statement from Valve saying that if they suddenly went out of business for whatever reason they have something in place that would essentially detach steams online requirements from our games, so anything we already owned we would still have access to. Of course, that relies on them not turning Evil at some point and just removing that whilst no one is looking. It also made more sense to me when Steam was just a platform for delivering you a game; now it is often directly tied in to the functioning of the games multiplayer, so I am less convinced that this would be such an easy thing to do. But still, the thought is (currently) there.

Personally though, that isnt such a big deal for me. I may have a Steam library of 458 games (!) but that doesn't mean I am playing them all, all the time. I have a half dozen recent games that I play at any one time, maybe stretching to a dozen if you include multiplayer. Sometimes i dip back into my collections archives of older games in a fit of nostalgia, but for the most part if Steam suddenly vanished and took all my games with it I could replace those things for a couple of quid from somewhere else. Or, more likely, I just wouldn't bother and wouldn't really miss them. So in a more realistic sense I am only locked in to Valve for the games I am playing now, and that is a situation that is replicated in a bunch of other things that we don't really think about. For example, if Android suddenly went evil I would need a new phone, because my phone is locked in to the Android operating system. If Microsoft or Playstation suddenly shut down we would be suffering a similar fate with our consoles. Right now, if Spotify went I would no longer have any music. I don't really worry about any of those things though, because A) they are super unlikely, and B) they would, realistically, not be that life shattering if they happened.

Mostly I don't worry about Steams near monopoly on the PC gaming market because for them to go wrong they need to be either financially troubled or sell out to bad people. The former is currently laughable, and if they latter was ever going to happen it probably would have by now. In fact, thinking about it, for the former to happen would require a loss in thier profits, which would pretty much require a massive loss in sales, which would need us to stop buying games from them, which would require us to start buying games from some better service. Which isn't going to suddenly happen overnight. So the only thing to really worry about is access to your library of old games that you probably havent played in ages and in all likelyhood are never going to touch again.

Joose wrote:It would need a significant (and terrible) change of management at Valve to stop the regular sales and reasonable prices being a thing. Not for any kind of ethical/moral reason, but because they genuinely believe that the crazy sales and such actually makes more money overall. Its a difficult thing to measure conclusively, but the figures certainly seem to back up their theory. I know Tom Francis of Gunpoint fame has said that his income (not sales, but actual total amount of money coming in) spikes considerably during a sale, and interestingly does not tail off immediately once the sale ends either. He was talking about it on a podcast I listen to, and he was very much in agreement with them: having the occasional 90% off sale does seem to result in more total money than not.

The boos of Pixeljunk Eden tweeted that their game made them as much money in eight hours of a community choice sale as it had made in its previous three years on Steam, so it's not uncommon.

Steam also does music now, I hadn't noticed until it started randomly playing something from the playlist it had found without asking me of music files on my PC. I didn't really need it to do that, or want it to - but it went ahead and did it anyway. I don't think they will suddenly turn evil, but it's things like that where they just put in what they want without asking that give me pause.

Sales are a peculiar thing that might be worthy of a topic of their own. Devs and publishers have accused them of devaluing their games, and while my gut reaction is to write their protests off as greed I can't quite convince myself they're wrong. I know I regularly add a game to my wishlist in order to pick it up in a sale later.

Dog Pants wrote:Sales are a peculiar thing that might be worthy of a topic of their own. Devs and publishers have accused them of devaluing their games, and while my gut reaction is to write their protests off as greed I can't quite convince myself they're wrong. I know I regularly add a game to my wishlist in order to pick it up in a sale later.

The counter to that is the amount of times people buy something they would have otherwise completely ignored because it was on sale. I know I have several games that I have never even started up, because they were in a Steam sale for a £1 or so and I thought, hey, why not?

Fuck, I'll add that even piracy is beneficial to devs.

CoD 4 would never have taken off on 5punk the way it did without everyone stealing a copy for a few weeks, and I'm willing to claim CoD4 ownership among 5punkers is over 80%

True, and with digital distribution you don't have an overhead per unit to make up like you do with physical distribution. Either way though, publishers are quite often saying they're finding it difficult to make their money back. On the other hand, the reason why I wait to pick up games on sale is because I don't need to buy them on release day. And thee reason for that is that I already have shitloads of games to play. So it's a buyer's market, and producers need to find ways to compete or economics will kill them. I'm thinking the first ones to go might well be the ones who steadfastly refuse to drop their prices.