Translation: When not accountable to greedy-ass shareholders, they don’t have to do the whole “If you’re not growing you’re dying!” bullshit; and can just keep the employees they need without constantly expanding and enshittifying their services.
Steam is available in over two hundred countries and you think 100 employees is enough to manage that? To do the account support, billing support, vendor support, user content moderation, technical support, hardware partnerships, server management, platform development, legal compliance, business development, web development, database management, HR, accounting…etc in multiple regions and in every respective language? One employee per every two countries?! Figure it out.
Steam has certainly degraded over the past 15 years, it just gets a pass because the pointless economies it created to capitalise on are player-driven: steam workshop & steam community market.
Neither offer something which didn’t already exist, they just do so in a way which generates income for Valve. Including in ways that are predatory toward people predisposed to gambling etc behaviours, and enable exploitation by 3rd parties (which Valve also profits from)
What steam brought to the table was the first content delivery network for games. Digital Marketplaces were not a thing when Steam launched, and most software was still sold on store shelves. They are reliable, and customer friendly - that’s why no other content delivery network has gotten any kind of foothold, because competitors consistently create platforms that are more difficult to navigate and screw customers over shortly after their launch by removing content or having some sort of major rights-issue.
Steam Workshop and Steam Community market account for almost nothing in the grand scheme of what makes Valve its money.
They have spent tons on developing the tools to play games on Linux through Proton, and have shown themselves to be enthusiasts themselves when it comes to supporting gamers with some of the more robust VR systems as well.
Its content delivery network for games existed without those things 15 years ago is my point. If the argument is that being privately run exempts them from the need for constant pointless expansion, there is no greater contradiction of that than examples where it expanded pointlessly. Systems which they hired an in-house economist to develop; whom rejects their modern implementations on the principles I described.
It dominates the market without any effort whatsoever to force companies to distribute exclusively through them or otherwise weaken competition because it’s far and away the best out there.
And EGS (and EA Play, and Ubisoft, and GOG, and…) show that just making a functional launcher is far from trivial.
A launcher is an unnecessary contrivance of anti consumerism (DRM). GOG Galaxy is entirely optional.
That and the other launchers are a product of Steam’s dominance, not a cause of it.
Steam only historically dominated GOG, snowballing off the success of their first-party titles & providing a platform for DRM where GOG chose not to.
Valve has done a lot of great things, I’m not seeking to argue against that. To argue it hasn’t become artificially bloated for purposes of maximising profit over the years seems silly, though.
The launcher is a massive value add, pretty much singlehandedly responsible for PC being a relevant gaming platform at all, and the features (that you can easily ignore) are also huge value adds to a significant number of people. There are no features that are “bloat”. There are things I don’t personally care about, but all of them are the single reason some measurable chunk of users prefers steam over anything else.
Steam/Steamworks is DRM. You can’t purchase games on Steam and play them independently of Steam.
The overlay, the community pages, reviews, friends chat etc were all there circa 2010 and function identically to how they do today. Regional pricing was there too, today it’s been reneged in many countries to protect against region-spoofing.
The primary group of people who prefer Steam only for Steam Workshop and/or Community Market are those who seek to extract profit from them. There were paid mods before Steam Workshop and it was fine. There were digital collectibles inside games before Steam Community Market and it was fine. There wasn’t any skin gambling, though.
These systems are designed to provide functions which already existed, but with Valve taking a cut of the sales. That is a profit-adding for Valve, and literally value-reducing for consumers. They are popular because they are bundled with a popular pre-existing service, that’s it.
There are plenty of games that are entirely DRM free and can be played straight from the EXE.
Steam Workshop is a massive value add. The premise that it’s not is a joke. Not every game has a community that distributes mods that way, but it’s by far the easiest way to add mods, and the people who value steam for Workshop absolutely have nothing at all to do with extracting profit.
Translation: When not accountable to greedy-ass shareholders, they don’t have to do the whole “If you’re not growing you’re dying!” bullshit; and can just keep the employees they need without constantly expanding and enshittifying their services.
Steam is available in over two hundred countries and you think 100 employees is enough to manage that? To do the account support, billing support, vendor support, user content moderation, technical support, hardware partnerships, server management, platform development, legal compliance, business development, web development, database management, HR, accounting…etc in multiple regions and in every respective language? One employee per every two countries?! Figure it out.
Steam has certainly degraded over the past 15 years, it just gets a pass because the pointless economies it created to capitalise on are player-driven: steam workshop & steam community market.
Neither offer something which didn’t already exist, they just do so in a way which generates income for Valve. Including in ways that are predatory toward people predisposed to gambling etc behaviours, and enable exploitation by 3rd parties (which Valve also profits from)
What steam brought to the table was the first content delivery network for games. Digital Marketplaces were not a thing when Steam launched, and most software was still sold on store shelves. They are reliable, and customer friendly - that’s why no other content delivery network has gotten any kind of foothold, because competitors consistently create platforms that are more difficult to navigate and screw customers over shortly after their launch by removing content or having some sort of major rights-issue.
Steam Workshop and Steam Community market account for almost nothing in the grand scheme of what makes Valve its money.
They have spent tons on developing the tools to play games on Linux through Proton, and have shown themselves to be enthusiasts themselves when it comes to supporting gamers with some of the more robust VR systems as well.
Its content delivery network for games existed without those things 15 years ago is my point. If the argument is that being privately run exempts them from the need for constant pointless expansion, there is no greater contradiction of that than examples where it expanded pointlessly. Systems which they hired an in-house economist to develop; whom rejects their modern implementations on the principles I described.
Also, GOG exists.
It dominates the market without any effort whatsoever to force companies to distribute exclusively through them or otherwise weaken competition because it’s far and away the best out there.
And EGS (and EA Play, and Ubisoft, and GOG, and…) show that just making a functional launcher is far from trivial.
A launcher is an unnecessary contrivance of anti consumerism (DRM). GOG Galaxy is entirely optional.
That and the other launchers are a product of Steam’s dominance, not a cause of it.
Steam only historically dominated GOG, snowballing off the success of their first-party titles & providing a platform for DRM where GOG chose not to.
Valve has done a lot of great things, I’m not seeking to argue against that. To argue it hasn’t become artificially bloated for purposes of maximising profit over the years seems silly, though.
Steam doesn’t require DRM.
The launcher is a massive value add, pretty much singlehandedly responsible for PC being a relevant gaming platform at all, and the features (that you can easily ignore) are also huge value adds to a significant number of people. There are no features that are “bloat”. There are things I don’t personally care about, but all of them are the single reason some measurable chunk of users prefers steam over anything else.
Steam/Steamworks is DRM. You can’t purchase games on Steam and play them independently of Steam.
The overlay, the community pages, reviews, friends chat etc were all there circa 2010 and function identically to how they do today. Regional pricing was there too, today it’s been reneged in many countries to protect against region-spoofing.
The primary group of people who prefer Steam only for Steam Workshop and/or Community Market are those who seek to extract profit from them. There were paid mods before Steam Workshop and it was fine. There were digital collectibles inside games before Steam Community Market and it was fine. There wasn’t any skin gambling, though.
These systems are designed to provide functions which already existed, but with Valve taking a cut of the sales. That is a profit-adding for Valve, and literally value-reducing for consumers. They are popular because they are bundled with a popular pre-existing service, that’s it.
There are plenty of games that are entirely DRM free and can be played straight from the EXE.
Steam Workshop is a massive value add. The premise that it’s not is a joke. Not every game has a community that distributes mods that way, but it’s by far the easiest way to add mods, and the people who value steam for Workshop absolutely have nothing at all to do with extracting profit.