No company is your friend. But Valve does a great job at being consumer friendly. Steam is a great low-pressure sales environment. It provides features that make it more enjoyable for users to play, hang out, communicate, share content, mods. It doesn't harangue you or change your settings, or the UI, or your games (mostly) without reason and warning. Things work like you expect them to in other apps, back buttons work. You can pop open multiple windows. It gets out of your way. You can even set your kids accounts to not have access to the store, something that literally no other company does. I'd love to disable the Minecraft Marketplace for my kids because sometimes they spend more time looking at things there than playing.
GabeN called piracy a service problem. And he's right. I've received games free on other platforms like Epic or EA and I've bought them from Steam just so I don't have to use the terrible apps. If I was younger or couldn't afford it, maybe I'd be sailing the seas. I bought Alan Wake 2 on Epic since it's a timed exclusive. I plan on buying it again once it releases on Steam because Epic is just so terrible. All the effort went into the store and almost none into the actual act of playing the game which is where I'm spending the majority of my time while I'm in the app!
Most companies don't care about customer satisfaction or post sales support. They have your money, why would they. Oh, yeah, repeat customers.
EDIT: Just to add a gripe about Amazon. Their games app is so bad that if you use the back button on your mouse while a screenshot is open the page changes but the image stays until you close it. If you click on a game to view the details in a long list of games and then go back it loses your sort order and position in the games listing. It's frustrating to use even just to find something to play. Steam has its own rough edges, but they're not in the golden path of discover -> buy -> install -> play -> share
That's why lots of us are worried about when something happens to Gabe, and some black suited C level raven is promoted as CEO and starts asking questions like "why don't we push for the latest expansion packs? why don't we gate features behind subscriptions?" and all that anti-consumer shit that breaks with the original spirit of so many products.
Indeed, it's hard to imagine a person (that I don't personally know) who I more want to ensure a very, very long and productive life than GabeN. He has done more for us Linux/open source people than nearly anyone else I can think of besides maybe the Linux kernel team, Red Hat, and Arch, Debian and other bigtime contributors.
The sticky thing that keeps me in the steam platform is the software itself: notably, Steam Workshop. I normally source my games DRM free but after some experience trying to manage mods of heavily modded games like Rimworld I have come to discover that the value add of package management via Workshop for the exact same price is 100% worth it. Even though I trade DRM for it.
Yeah, GoG is my other go-to for games. I'm not a big fan of DRM, but I'm OK with DRM that respects me. Valve has never abused the DRM or let it get in my way. I can play offline, I can use multiple computers, I can share games with my family on their computers. All things considered it's pretty respectful of the reality of how people want to experience and share their content.
Interesting. I think the software is absolutely tasteless. For a long time it had to update "twice", asking you to restart steam 2 times in a row. It defaults to showing an "ad" on startup. Its chat had a bug that had hidden messages everytime someone wrote you, so you had to reopen the window several times to see it.
Headbangingly bad software and UI design. I've seen people from Fiverr create better UI in 2 hrs.
Not to mention there's a terrible 5-10% sale 99% of the year thats more expensive than everywhere else you can buy the game.. Just great.. What a treat to gamers, gotta feel real lucky to get -5% off 365 days a year!
While I know that Steam has DRM, it's never been as onerous as other types of DRM.
I also know that Steam DRM isn't that hard to bypass. Generally just some patched DLLs. But I've never had a real need to bypass it. Steam lets you play offline with no connection. My games are, to a first approximation, mine and Valve doesn't need to be informed every minute I'm playing if I so choose.
Gabe's premise is right on. We pirate from Netflix and Epic because it's orders of magnitude easier than playing by the rules. I buy from Steam because it's easier than piracy.
As a rule, I don't pirate steam games. If it's something I'm interested in, it's probably worth my money. I do pirate from EA and others because the Sims 4 is not worth $500 in any universe. I pirate shows and movies because it's too much time and money to even figure out who has what I want this week.
You beat pirates by making your service more attractive than piracy. Steam is a better experience than free, and a better experience than all the other paid options. This is how you win.
I just wish the platforms weren't beholden to the publishers. To a certain extent, pulling a game from Steam is like pulling it off the shelves at big box stores, but the difference is the games CAN'T find their way to resale shops; they're gone forever.
Story time: I was pretty upset when my original copy of GTA: Vice City was intentionally broken, then the "Definitive Edition" was released a short time later. Especially in the case of GTAIII, they removed the top-down camera so it's not a 1:1 flat upgrade. I find it quaint and fun to try and beat that game using the top-down camera of GTA1 and 2, so was rather disappointed.
> Just to add a gripe about Amazon. Their games app is so bad that if you use the back button on your mouse while a screenshot is open the page changes but the image stays until you close it.
That's more a critiques to how software development happens today. Its a consequence of decoupling the product ownership from the developer, who only implements what's required according to the ticket/feature requested by the PO.
To be clear, I'm not saying that passing full ownership of the software to the developers they've hired to be effectively code monkeys would work. And neither do I think that the approach of having the developers be the owners of the software "scales" (teams like that will always be small and have very little space for Jr. positions).
It's very illuminating if you look at the average developer salary at valve, they're just approaching software development differently then Amazon and Epic (and rest of the industry for that matter)
> I've received games free on other platforms like Epic or EA and I've bought them from Steam just so I don't have to use the terrible apps.
I got Star Wars Outlaws free on the Ubi Soft app with my GPU last year. Haven't touched it yet - waiting for the Steam version to drop to a low enough price and some free time to open up on my calendar to warrant picking it up
I know that some portion of profits from the game, even on Steam, will go to them because they funded and published it. But after the exclusivity expires I'd expect Remedy Entertainment will probably have the standard 70/30 split with valve and whatever Epic see from that sale will be a smaller percentage. I love Remedy and how they practice their craft and art.
Economic semantics aside, yes. I hate Epic so much I'll pay them again not to have to use it any longer.
If I could copy one feature from Steam to the Apple Store it would be seasonal sales. And bundle prices. If I could copy two features from Steam to the Apple Store...
My friend had to go through huge gyrations to offer a discount for upgrades on a productivity app. Your choices seem to mostly be either never get paid again by old customers or over/undercharge people.
On Steam you can sort it out with a bundle discount.
Steam also did the legwork to adapt to other countries' cultures, means and payment systems.
They do regional pricing, including systems which make it difficult to pretend you live in a poor country, which you absolutely need if you want publishers to adopt that. They do local payment methods. They let kids (and kids and teenagers are an important part of this market) buy gift cards in physical stores, and pay for them with cash.
Mobile App Stores are a lot worse at all of these, especially Apple's.
Crates were in TF2 (and in some MMOs before that), but I think you can more readily blame Overwatch for that one. And paid levelling was a KMMO staple long before. But I can't argue about the DotA2 battle passes, or the expensive hats/stat-track weapons.
And how many of these "game" services don't work with controllers.
For fucks sake, what decade is it?
I especially hate games that work 99% on Steam, but have a 1% issue with them requiring cookie banner dismissal (fuck you Rockstar) even after dealing with the logins.
Steam is just so much better than everyone else that they can have a cut of Rockstar and Electronic Arts money.
> Steam is a great low-pressure sales environment.
Eh.. It seems very common for Steam users to have libraries of thousands of purchased games, 99% unplayed, purchased at steep discounts during sales. The way Steam operates does a great job of instilling Fear Of Missing Out, and getting people to buy things they never end up using.
It's not like this is Steam fault. You can always return games you played under 2 hours no questions asked. Some people just like to buy stuff they dont need or hoard random things, but it's as old as humanity itself
At leastrented digital games on Steam account dont contribute to global warming, waste problems and dont use tons of electicity to mint some tokens.
I guess only major issue Steam really have to solve is ability to inherit these digital purchases if owner has died. Their license agreement dont have proper procedure for that.
yeah valve are scummy on loot boxes, but their steam service is top notch. And they're right, since not only they compete with publishers or f2p live service games, they also compete with pirated service, which can be highly reliable, and free.
Steam is more convenient, reliable, and affordable, so no wonder they can compete with piracy
It truly is, and it's the culmination of a long history of development to get to this point. Back in, I want to say 2016 or so, we had Steam Machines, which were a series of hardware partnerships with various vendors for a console-style form factor of essentially PC hardware running on the first version of Steam OS.
It was an incredible idea, but at the time rather frustratingly, I think some people came down with what I like to call The Verge Syndrome, which is to judge things on whether or not they're an overnight success, and otherwise deemed failures. So, according to some people, the fact that there were fewer Steam Machines than PlayStations in the world meant that the project as a whole was a failure.
And so the Steam Machine was not successful (by that metric at least), but it got the ball rolling on increasing sophistication in developing the Linux ecosystem and the understanding of hardware that culminated in the Steam Deck, which is a triumphant rebalancing of the PC gaming universe, away from dependence on Windows. But try telling that to someone in 2016.
I'm happy to sing the praises of Valve, but I think a particular distinguishing virtue they're holding on to is being willing to play the long game and not giving up in the absence of overnight success.
And kill Steam Deck just like they did with Netbooks, why get Proton translation of the real XBox experience.
Gamers that reach out to handelds in Nintendo Switch numbers don't care about what OS their consoles use, and won't be buying Steack Decks "because Linux!".
I'd much rather a partnership than an acquisition. Valve is great, but open, repairable hardware is not their core mission. I think Framework needs to stay independent to maintain that.
But also, Valve is doing a decent job of it on their own already, with the steamdeck being quite repairable and upgradeable, especially in comparison to the competition. I'd rather there be a greater number of companies all independently demonstrating that repairable hardware can be a commercial success rather than the market takeaway being "oh that's just that weird Framework thing, it won't work for us".
I love the idea in one sense, which is that I think they're two great companies working in areas that could plausibly converge and be quite complementary. I do have to imagine there's something about their different respective business missions or business cultures, and the ethos and philosophies that inform them that might not make it work in practice. Although I definitely see a place for a framework laptop that's happy to run SteamOS.
I think perhaps that's the goal is that there's any number of companies that we feel are pretty great that are phenomenal at serving a specific vision of gaming and computing that's oriented around Linux and that are quite happy to talk to each other in effective ways and so I wouldn't necessarily say that the culmination of that should be a merger between those companies but an ecosystem that thrives with deeply compatible hardware and software.
The Framework Desktop is what you would want for a Steam Machine 2.0. But the price is around $1,186 and I think that price is too high for a game console. As a PlayStation 5 Pro is $700. Maybe they could reach that price with a second-gen chip? Or when they introduce a new chip and this machine gets discounted.
I do think Linux-based experience for a TV based game console is still lacklustre. There are rumours that Valve integrating either Google TV/Chrome OS. And it would be nice for a game console to also be used as a media center for Netflix and others.
>So, according to some people, the fact that there were fewer Steam Machines than PlayStations in the world meant that the project as a whole was a failure.
I mean, there's no metric short nor long term where we call the steam machines a success. It was an experiment and some neat tech (hardware and software) came out of it. Valve is still a business at the end of the day.
But yes, a business that can salvage the good and iterate is apparently 1000x better than what we get nowadays in this late stage capitalism, where something sells millions and the company still cuts back and lays off staff, while milking it to the ground.
>a particular distinguishing virtue they're holding on to is being willing to play the long game and not giving up in the absence of overnight success.
Gabe learned it straight from old school Microsoft. I don't know what happened to Microsoft in that time.
Breaking the seal and demonstrating the capabilities, and getting it into the hands of consumers set the conditions for the Steam Deck's success. The Steam Deck exists because the Steam Machine existed, and it's in this context that the Steam Machine succeeded. You don't need overnight instant success for the program itself to succeed.
I purchased a steam deck when they first came out specifically to financially support Valve's Linux efforts and I haven't regretted that purchase for a second. In the past year I had a couple of days where my laptop was not working. I got out my steam deck, plugged it into my dock, and got back to work like nothing happened (after installing some software of course, like emacs). I've re-purchased games that I own on consoles just to get the PC versions to de-couple my games from hardware, so now I'll be able to run Flower on powerful beasts, portable handhelds, and computers that haven't been invented yet whereas before it was stuck on a loud aging ps3.
My only complaint is console exclusives like the nintendo games. I don't want to have to purchase Nintendo's universal turing machine just to be able to run their software when I already have a perfectly capable universal turing machine. It would just lead to more e-waste and wasted closet space.
Sure I can pirate and emulate the games, but I am an employed adult, I want to give you money for your games. Release your games on Steam so I can do that without burdening the world with more e-waste.
You know this already but the reason nintendo doesnt release their games on other systems is so you have to buy the system.
I bought a switch. I didnt think I'd buy a switch 2 but damn it if I didnt just see the new mario kart and think, "Maybe I should get a switch 2". I would never buy another nintendo device if they released their games on other system. So they likely never will.
It's the same reason they will never put a mainline pokemon, a game that is basically made for mobile phones, onto ios or android.
You also probably know this, but they don't really care about the console per se. What you buying the console means is that Nintendo gets to stand on the bridge between your console and game developers and demand 30% or whatever it is.
Also getting a Switch 2, if nothing else than for all the first-party Switch 1 games I haven't had legal access to.
> They’re not saints, especially with the games distribution platform monopoly they’re sitting on top of
They got and have maintained that monopoly (I'll let others debate the merits of that wording) by being very very good to their users, which doesn't make the existence of the monopoly evidence that they aren't saints. If they were maintaining it through anticompetitive means, sure, but I've never seen anyone claim that they are, even Epic (who would definitely be making noise if they thought they could get anyone to listen).
The desktop video gaming ecosystem is in perhaps the best shape possible: there's one clear winner at the moment who makes all customers very happy, with a few runners up hedging against that winner becoming abusive after all. If Steam became worse than Epic it wouldn't take long for Epic to overtake them, but as long as it's not worse it's nice that everyone has agreed on a standard platform.
For example, I still don't use Epic. And I've probably even paid on Steam for games that Epic gave away for free.
What's worrying is Steam has enough mass to preclude me from buying games on GoG to a point. Linux support, for one. Frictionless playing on a Deck if i choose to get one in the future, for two. Steam built in streaming, for three.
I bought GoG first for a couple years, but now I'm agnostic again. Esp with games that have Linux versions.
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Still, the only games you really own are those you've downloaded the crack for. Unless they're from GoG and DRM free.
> [...] by being very very good to their users [...]
Helps that they don't have to be very very good to shareholders that don't give a fuck about games and just want money. I'm not really looking forward to find out what happens once Gabe passes on control of the company.
> If they were maintaining it through anticompetitive means, sure, but I've never seen anyone claim that they are
They did get sued for having "anticompetitive restraints on pricing" and "Federal Judge John C. Coughenour ruled that those claims were credible and that Steam gamers can claim compensation for Valve's illegal monopoly, but gamers, unlike developers, must file individual arbitrations to do so."
So, yes, it's been claimed and legally found that they have at least some anticompetitive practices, at least in the USA.
Yeah, when you wanna be evil, be evil to devs. They are stuck on two fronts and gamers are already pre-disposed to blame them for any problems anyway.
>If they were maintaining it through anticompetitive
Well we know they are now thanks to the lawsuits shedding light in the long known pricing parity clauses. Anyone asking "why isn't this game cheaper on Epic if take take a smaller cut" now has their answer. Without risking any dev's NDA.
I find it funny that every time other publishers try to recreate Steam with their own catalogues, a good chunk of gamers (myself included) just refuse to buy "exclusives" on other platforms, to the point they eventually crawl back to Steam. EA held out for a LONG time. I broke my reluctance only once because I wanted to play the latest FarCry game, but otherwise, I've kept all my games on Steam. They eventually caved too.
What's also interesting is some games will unlock for you if you buy them from their own stores, like the Elder Scrolls Online MMO will unlock on Steam for you if you just link your Steam account.
My only annoyance with them is with Valve for not making new games / franchises. They clearly have a good talent pool, but they're so much slower than Nintendo it feels like in this regard. They're finally adding a new game, but its just a Team Fortress spiritual successor.
Deadlock is absolutely not a Team Fortress spiritual successor, it has much much more in common with Dota 2 than TF2, and is really full of interesting features and polish for where it's at in its development.
In some ways, it's because valve caved and did the equivalent of tax cuts for the rich. You have revenue more than like, 25 million/yr as a publisher and you reduce your infamous 30% cut to 20%.
Im sure at thst point it's more worth considering.
And there are tons. Epic, EA, Ubi Play - they are pretty shitty.
Gog is the only one I would say is on par with Steam, but they have a different niche. Still, Valve is on top and not because they hinder the competition, but because the competition likes to shoot their feet. Often.
Unlike other corporations, they actually didn't really do all that much to make it a monopoly though. It's kind of an organic monopoly simply by being better than everything else, by a wide margin.
There's not much "lock-in" apart from the games one owns on the platform; and the social aspects of steam are mostly negligible or niche - sure there's the friendlist, but no gamer I know uses steam voice-chat so the friendlist is mostly replicated in discord and similar anyway.
If you're a game dev, small or big it doesn't matter, and your game isn't on Steam, it might as well not exist. The sales and exposure of a game on Steam dwarf all other alternate PC storefronts. Even Ubisoft caved in and released their games on Steam.
Monopoly doesn't mean being the only game in town, you can have 100 other competitors, but if your competitors have <10% market share and you have >90% then you're basically a monopoly.
Not only is Steam not a monopoly, TFA mentions how it’s possible to easily install alternative app stores on the Steam Deck.
It’s not just factually wrong to call them a monopoly, it’s uncharitable given that they are not engaging in anticompetitive practices despite being in a position (and arguably having the right) to do so.
I bought a Steam Deck OLED last year, and it's honestly astounding to me how well it both provides an amazing out-of-the-box experience for both the "gaming mode" Steam interface and the "desktop mode" with a regular Linux desktop without sacrificing basically any customization. It's a glorified tablet that in my baggiest pair of jeans I can just barely fit into my pocket, and somehow probably the most realistic attempt I've seen at making something suitable for the mythical "year of the Linux desktop", which wasn't even the goal!
It's also so clear to me in retrospect how long they've been building up to something like this. Investing in Wine and developing proton to make running Windows games on Linux as frictionless as possible, dipping their toes in hardware with much less ambitious projects like the Steam link and the controller for it so that they weren't going in without any experience as a company dealing with physical products...I can't imagine that this would have been able to pull for for most companies due to how much they had to be willing to invest in long-term endeavors that couldn't be guaranteed to succeed. I don't think it's that much of an exaggeration to say that they might have single-handedly lifted up Linux gaming to the point where I'll never end up using Windows on a personal machine again, and that's because they put so much time and effort into the tooling for running the games independent of their distribution network. At this point, I probably would have been willing to forgive them for releasing the Steam Deck as a locked-down device, but instead they went ahead the made it pretty much indistinguishable from my laptop and desktop in terms of how much I can change or remove things. There have been so many discussions about whether the App Store should be considered a monopoly or not on iOS, and if there's not consensus on that, I can't even fathom how someone could make the argument that Steam is.
> given that they are not engaging in anticompetitive practices
Well, not quite. They did get sued for having "anticompetitive restraints on pricing" and "Federal Judge John C. Coughenour ruled that those claims were credible and that Steam gamers can claim compensation for Valve's illegal monopoly, but gamers, unlike developers, must file individual arbitrations to do so."
(Their ToS wouldn't allow gamers to form a class action, but developers were apparently allowed to.)
They have an implicit most favored nation clause which is by definition anti-competitive.
Valve takes 30%. You can’t, in practice, sell your game on Steam and on another store at a lower price. That’s anticompetitive.
Downvote me if you want. But I recommend reading the transcripts from the Wolfire Games antitrust lawsuit against Valve before you do! They’re not a good look for Valve to say the least.
> They’re not saints, especially with the games distribution platform monopoly they’re sitting on top of
They are a monopoly, but it doesn't look to me that they are taking particular advantage of the position. I buy mostly indie games, so I may be out of the loop, but what are they doing that makes them "not saints" ? (Expecially in relation to their market share)
I believe saints would implement some sort of distributed platform that others could interoperate with, by sharing the launcher’s list of games (e.g. have Epic games automatically appear on the list), share the list of friends and achievements between platforms, and so on.
Break the network effect, and incentivise things that work against it. Implement open protocols rather than walled gardens.
Allow other platforms to truly have a chance.
Saints sadly have no place in the capitalistic world we live in though. If they exist, they are quickly outcompeted.
While I don't disagree with you I also don't think Valve is particularly bad in this area. Valve's games are not made for younger kids and Steam's parental controls are excellent.
Mobile games, especially Roblox, are a lot worse because they target much younger children with less parental control.
They have done absolutely nothing to be a monopoly. The only reason they are at the top is that their competition consistently keeps shooting themselves in the foot.
I'm out of the gaming platform loop but assume the timing of this post is related to the Switch 2 announcement?
Others have suggested the Switch 2 is one of the best endorsements for buying a Steam Deck.
(Not really a gamer, despite having written games, ha ha, but I picked up a Steam Deck a couple years ago to test a game I ported to it — and was duly impressed.)
For me, the switch is the only console I trust to leave my kids alone with. Nintendo builds great games for kids, but you pay for them. I mean, launch games like Mario Odysee and Breath of the Wild are still sold at full price, years later.
I have kids, and have had a Nintendo switch since launch. I cannot even let them play Mario kart alone without them being prompted to visit the store to buy levels or more characters. My 4 year old cannot go a few minutes without ending up back on the home screen, stuck in the settings menus or in the controller reconfiguration menu, asking me to get them back into the game (because they pressed the Home button)
Nintendo has lost it's way in regards to sandboxing a child in a safe environment. I looked at the new console and all I could think about is "another button I have to teach the kids to avoid"
Call me old fashioned, but I have purchased Nintendo DS lites for each of them as that is the last handheld I could find that doesn't introduce a browser or storefront with internet connectivity.
> Others have suggested the Switch 2 is one of the best endorsements for buying a Steam Deck.
If Nintendo charges $80 for games, this will normalize it, so everyone else will too. It won't be a difference between the consoles for long. The console, from the footage they've shown off, seems more powerful than the Deck, if the Cyberpunk footage is authentic.
Meanwhile, a detachable controller has already been their single leg up on Steam Deck, and now it's also a detachable mouse. This will actually be a better experience than the Deck (assuming the mouse doesn't hurt your hand). The Deck has best-in-class controller support as well as touchpads, but if the game does not seamlessly support simultaneous controller and KBM inputs, then you have to either map the touchpad to a control stick and deal with curving which sucks, or map all the buttons to keys and the left stick to WASD, and sticks for non-analog input also sucks. Whereas on the Switch, the mouse is just a mouse.
It's sticker price shock for sure. Historically speaking, this will just smooth over and people will set their sticks in the sand. If the 900 dollar PS5 pro can shrug it off, then I doubt there's much issue here.
> I'm out of the gaming platform loop but assume the timing of this post is related to the Switch 2 announcement?
Author here. Not really, it was a coincidence. I wrote this post around 8 months ago, and posted it on HN before but people didn't notice: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41151392
A licensing deal between Nintendo and Valve. Once could dream. Get the entire Steam lib on your Switch, then Valve gets a "Zelda: Breath of the Wild 3 - Only on Nintendo" store listing on Steam.
Sounds like the Switch 2 might be a bit more powerful and similarly priced to the 3-year-old Deck. But even if Switch’s hardware feature set was substantially better, Steam’s much cheaper (and more expansive) library is still the killer feature. I don’t think the Switch 1’s Zelda launch title has ever been discounted lower than $40 despite being 8 years old. On Steam, virtually every top title will be 50% within 2 years, if not 1.
My impression is that the general quality of games on steam is sub par the quality of, eg., Zelda.
Even with a steam deck, I am probably going to get the Switch2, mostly because I can lower my head on in-game profiteering, which is increasingly prevalent on steam games.
> My impression is that the general quality of games on steam is sub par the quality of, eg., Zelda.
My impression is that the general quality of games on the Switch (or Switch 2 or eShop) is sub par the quality of, e.g. Zelda. This is obviously because Zelda is a landmark title and it doesn't make sense to compare it with "the general quality" of games on Steam. It would make more sense to compare it with the quality of other landmark titles on Steam e.g. Baldur's Gate 3.
You can compare the general quality of games on Steam (which includes games like "Hentai Waifu 5") with the general quality of games on Switch (which includes games like "Hentai Waifu 5"), though I'm not sure it is that interesting of a comparison, since no one buys the "average" game but what they consider to be the best games on the platform.
I'd suspect that any attempt at an "objective" comparison (obviously, an impossible task) would land in favour of Steam simply because it has basically all of (core) gaming for most of history on it. Though obviously such an "objective" comparison would be meaningless for something like this where literally your subjective opinion should matter the most for your choice.
I would agree that the Switch's really big feature at this point is that it is where Nintendo games appear, and in that family-friendly-but-still-high-quality niche they are still worth chasing if you want them.
I don't know how you get from there to "games on steam are sub par quality" because at this point, everything else is on Steam, so calling the rest of the Steam library "sub par" is effectively calling the entire rest of the industry, from top to bottom, "sub par", and I'd have a hard time with that one. Nintendo has a pretty good track record but they're just one company. And not because I love AAA, I'm pretty much out of the AAA loop entirely at this point, but because it's literally everything else. In particular, the XBox exclusive and PS exclusives are, if not dead, on life support. PS may still have a sort of "Japanese game that doesn't appear on Steam" niche, but even that's getting eaten into; every major Atlus release lately is showing up on Steam as a first-class citizen, for instance.
On the other hand, I've heard it said that the Steam Deck's sticker price is almost wholly justified as a single-purpose Baldur's Gate 3 device. Let alone Skyrim, Civ, etc.
Just because steam sells games that do in-game profiteering, doesn't mean you need to play them?
Nintendo games have consistently disappointed me with their lack of depth in their stories. Breath of the Wild had an amazing open world, but the characters came off as two-dimensional and the final boss was completely disappointing. (there's something especially uncanny about having a protagonist who doesn't utter a word, even if it's meant to help players self-insert) Mario Odyssey was even more pitiful in how it retread the same surface level cartoonish villainy of Bowser kidnapping the princess. Nintendo certainly makes games that are fun to play, but as an adult, I've come to expect more from art, and plenty of the games on Steam actually respect the capability of their audience to not turn off their brains.
> My impression is that the general quality of games on steam is sub par the quality of, eg., Zelda.
What? Given that 99.9% of all games are published on Steam, what you are comparing is Zelda against gaming as a whole, not “the quality of games on steam”
Zelda is good, but it’s not better than literally all of gaming. If you are not a die hard Nintendo fan, I’d rather use Steam and enjoy saner pricing. There is always emulation for Nintendo.
Totally. Steam store looks like a god damn aliexpress marketplace and is tasteless design.
The Store UI is disgusting and intrusive compared to all other competitors who actually have a decent overview and design..
You can collect gems, cards and other misleading virtual currencies.. Tons of misleading business practises and time-consuming bloatware distractions hidden behind that terrible UI.
Steam is first and foremost DRM. A game-prison. You don't own a single thing. Gamers have totally drunk the kool aid.. They forgot back when Steam was bloatware forced on Half-Life and Valve games and it was despised for a decade before they became complacent little worshippers.
People buy Nintendo consoles for Nintendo games, generally. It's actually baffling how other AAA game studios release games at full price in a buggy state, then are heavily discounted months later with enough patches for them to finally be playable. I don't like how Nintendo games rarely get decent discounts but I understand why they're preserving the image that their games are worth the price.
This is neither here nor there, but you can emulate a good amount of Switch games on the Steam deck which I find pretty comical. Better hardware was sorely needed.
Yeah; the Steam Deck still runs a Zen 2 chip, while handhelds like the Ally X are on Zen 4. We'll likely start seeing some handheld PCs begin upgrading to Zen 5/Strix Point this year, and IMO that may be the point where these devices start actually being able to replace desktop gaming PCs for some gamers.
I wonder whether this kind of discounting is healthy.
It's surely healthy for Valve's bottom line, but it introduces an element of unpredictability into pricing, creating an inconsistent reinforcement regimen, which is the kind that most effectively reinforces a behavior (namely the purchase of games).
Discounting also debases the perceived value of something, which, in addition, I suspect, to reducing the joy of ownership and use, should further encourage consumption.
I find myself more and more bored of video games, and I wonder whether this is partly because Steam and Humble Bundle's discounting practices have ruined the experience of acquisition and ownership, reducing it to a kind of gluttony and buffer-style gorging.
I also wonder whether Nintendo's pricing does a better job of maintaining the integrity of the experiences they want to offer players.
It's a trickle down effect for sure. Where indies suffer the most. You have games getting away with $70 price tags, but your indie game you spent 2+ years on better no cost more than 15-20 a pop and better have a 50% launch discount. You really can't sustain yourself even as a true solo dev in western countries (let alone if you need to commission/hire an artist/composer).
And when I say "sustain in western countries" I'm talking the bog bottom line of "us federal minimum wage", coming down to approx. $15k/year. That's 1000 copies of a $15 game that is probably upped to 1800 copies after valve and other's cuts. Even that paltry marker is hard just becsuse the market is so saturated (and not in a good way).
It's only gonna get worse as a generation that is raised on mobile games and game pass settle in. The idea of spending money upfront from a game may be lost entirely.
>I also wonder whether Nintendo's pricing does a better job of maintaining the integrity of the experiences they want to offer players.
That was indeed an explicit strategy of Nintendo. Keep a premium brand and a price thst reflects that. Sales are rare to maintain this idea of an evergreen title that is always selling.
I love the deck. Its shown us how opensource can be used for a commercial product (and how consumer products dont have to be locked down). I use it in desktop mode every now and then (work in robotics so it makes one hell of an awesome robot controller). I really wish more manufacturers followed suite rather than bundle the crapware that is windows.
> According to ProtonDB, over 5000 PC games are certified Verified on the Steam Deck, and over 15,000 games are considered playable. This means that there are tens of thousands of games that can be run on Linux in some way.
Note that whether games work well on the Steam Deck or not isn't reflective of whether they can be run on Linux at all. With desktop Linux, virtually every game ever released can be run, on any platform, the biggest obstacle being anticheat.
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GabeN called piracy a service problem. And he's right. I've received games free on other platforms like Epic or EA and I've bought them from Steam just so I don't have to use the terrible apps. If I was younger or couldn't afford it, maybe I'd be sailing the seas. I bought Alan Wake 2 on Epic since it's a timed exclusive. I plan on buying it again once it releases on Steam because Epic is just so terrible. All the effort went into the store and almost none into the actual act of playing the game which is where I'm spending the majority of my time while I'm in the app!
Most companies don't care about customer satisfaction or post sales support. They have your money, why would they. Oh, yeah, repeat customers.
EDIT: Just to add a gripe about Amazon. Their games app is so bad that if you use the back button on your mouse while a screenshot is open the page changes but the image stays until you close it. If you click on a game to view the details in a long list of games and then go back it loses your sort order and position in the games listing. It's frustrating to use even just to find something to play. Steam has its own rough edges, but they're not in the golden path of discover -> buy -> install -> play -> share
Headbangingly bad software and UI design. I've seen people from Fiverr create better UI in 2 hrs.
Not to mention there's a terrible 5-10% sale 99% of the year thats more expensive than everywhere else you can buy the game.. Just great.. What a treat to gamers, gotta feel real lucky to get -5% off 365 days a year!
I also know that Steam DRM isn't that hard to bypass. Generally just some patched DLLs. But I've never had a real need to bypass it. Steam lets you play offline with no connection. My games are, to a first approximation, mine and Valve doesn't need to be informed every minute I'm playing if I so choose.
Gabe's premise is right on. We pirate from Netflix and Epic because it's orders of magnitude easier than playing by the rules. I buy from Steam because it's easier than piracy.
As a rule, I don't pirate steam games. If it's something I'm interested in, it's probably worth my money. I do pirate from EA and others because the Sims 4 is not worth $500 in any universe. I pirate shows and movies because it's too much time and money to even figure out who has what I want this week.
You beat pirates by making your service more attractive than piracy. Steam is a better experience than free, and a better experience than all the other paid options. This is how you win.
Story time: I was pretty upset when my original copy of GTA: Vice City was intentionally broken, then the "Definitive Edition" was released a short time later. Especially in the case of GTAIII, they removed the top-down camera so it's not a 1:1 flat upgrade. I find it quaint and fun to try and beat that game using the top-down camera of GTA1 and 2, so was rather disappointed.
That's more a critiques to how software development happens today. Its a consequence of decoupling the product ownership from the developer, who only implements what's required according to the ticket/feature requested by the PO.
To be clear, I'm not saying that passing full ownership of the software to the developers they've hired to be effectively code monkeys would work. And neither do I think that the approach of having the developers be the owners of the software "scales" (teams like that will always be small and have very little space for Jr. positions).
It's very illuminating if you look at the average developer salary at valve, they're just approaching software development differently then Amazon and Epic (and rest of the industry for that matter)
I got Star Wars Outlaws free on the Ubi Soft app with my GPU last year. Haven't touched it yet - waiting for the Steam version to drop to a low enough price and some free time to open up on my calendar to warrant picking it up
Epic is so terrible, I'll pay them twice for the same game!
And we wonder why the game industry is in such a shit shape...
Economic semantics aside, yes. I hate Epic so much I'll pay them again not to have to use it any longer.
My friend had to go through huge gyrations to offer a discount for upgrades on a productivity app. Your choices seem to mostly be either never get paid again by old customers or over/undercharge people.
On Steam you can sort it out with a bundle discount.
They do regional pricing, including systems which make it difficult to pretend you live in a poor country, which you absolutely need if you want publishers to adopt that. They do local payment methods. They let kids (and kids and teenagers are an important part of this market) buy gift cards in physical stores, and pay for them with cash.
Mobile App Stores are a lot worse at all of these, especially Apple's.
Valve also has unleashed the scum that is lootboxes, paid battle passes, paid leveling, nft store (technically not nft, but 90% of one).
The absolute trash that especially ubisoft tries to push on its users made me hold off on buying some of their games. It's just that bad.
For fucks sake, what decade is it?
I especially hate games that work 99% on Steam, but have a 1% issue with them requiring cookie banner dismissal (fuck you Rockstar) even after dealing with the logins.
Steam is just so much better than everyone else that they can have a cut of Rockstar and Electronic Arts money.
Eh.. It seems very common for Steam users to have libraries of thousands of purchased games, 99% unplayed, purchased at steep discounts during sales. The way Steam operates does a great job of instilling Fear Of Missing Out, and getting people to buy things they never end up using.
At leastrented digital games on Steam account dont contribute to global warming, waste problems and dont use tons of electicity to mint some tokens.
I guess only major issue Steam really have to solve is ability to inherit these digital purchases if owner has died. Their license agreement dont have proper procedure for that.
This is more of a Humble Bundle thing than a Steam issue.
source?
Steam is more convenient, reliable, and affordable, so no wonder they can compete with piracy
It was an incredible idea, but at the time rather frustratingly, I think some people came down with what I like to call The Verge Syndrome, which is to judge things on whether or not they're an overnight success, and otherwise deemed failures. So, according to some people, the fact that there were fewer Steam Machines than PlayStations in the world meant that the project as a whole was a failure.
And so the Steam Machine was not successful (by that metric at least), but it got the ball rolling on increasing sophistication in developing the Linux ecosystem and the understanding of hardware that culminated in the Steam Deck, which is a triumphant rebalancing of the PC gaming universe, away from dependence on Windows. But try telling that to someone in 2016.
I'm happy to sing the praises of Valve, but I think a particular distinguishing virtue they're holding on to is being willing to play the long game and not giving up in the absence of overnight success.
Or they’d realize that the Deck is successful because it’s open and bring Steam to the Xbox.
Gamers that reach out to handelds in Nintendo Switch numbers don't care about what OS their consoles use, and won't be buying Steack Decks "because Linux!".
But also, Valve is doing a decent job of it on their own already, with the steamdeck being quite repairable and upgradeable, especially in comparison to the competition. I'd rather there be a greater number of companies all independently demonstrating that repairable hardware can be a commercial success rather than the market takeaway being "oh that's just that weird Framework thing, it won't work for us".
I think perhaps that's the goal is that there's any number of companies that we feel are pretty great that are phenomenal at serving a specific vision of gaming and computing that's oriented around Linux and that are quite happy to talk to each other in effective ways and so I wouldn't necessarily say that the culmination of that should be a merger between those companies but an ecosystem that thrives with deeply compatible hardware and software.
I do think Linux-based experience for a TV based game console is still lacklustre. There are rumours that Valve integrating either Google TV/Chrome OS. And it would be nice for a game console to also be used as a media center for Netflix and others.
I mean, there's no metric short nor long term where we call the steam machines a success. It was an experiment and some neat tech (hardware and software) came out of it. Valve is still a business at the end of the day.
But yes, a business that can salvage the good and iterate is apparently 1000x better than what we get nowadays in this late stage capitalism, where something sells millions and the company still cuts back and lays off staff, while milking it to the ground.
>a particular distinguishing virtue they're holding on to is being willing to play the long game and not giving up in the absence of overnight success.
Gabe learned it straight from old school Microsoft. I don't know what happened to Microsoft in that time.
My only complaint is console exclusives like the nintendo games. I don't want to have to purchase Nintendo's universal turing machine just to be able to run their software when I already have a perfectly capable universal turing machine. It would just lead to more e-waste and wasted closet space.
Sure I can pirate and emulate the games, but I am an employed adult, I want to give you money for your games. Release your games on Steam so I can do that without burdening the world with more e-waste.
I bought a switch. I didnt think I'd buy a switch 2 but damn it if I didnt just see the new mario kart and think, "Maybe I should get a switch 2". I would never buy another nintendo device if they released their games on other system. So they likely never will.
It's the same reason they will never put a mainline pokemon, a game that is basically made for mobile phones, onto ios or android.
Also getting a Switch 2, if nothing else than for all the first-party Switch 1 games I haven't had legal access to.
Same here, I already had a keyboard and mouse plugged into it and it served excellently until the replacement part for my daily driver arrived.
I really think Valve have become the de-facto owners of the “don’t be evil” motto nowadays, even if they don’t advertise themselves as such.
They got and have maintained that monopoly (I'll let others debate the merits of that wording) by being very very good to their users, which doesn't make the existence of the monopoly evidence that they aren't saints. If they were maintaining it through anticompetitive means, sure, but I've never seen anyone claim that they are, even Epic (who would definitely be making noise if they thought they could get anyone to listen).
The desktop video gaming ecosystem is in perhaps the best shape possible: there's one clear winner at the moment who makes all customers very happy, with a few runners up hedging against that winner becoming abusive after all. If Steam became worse than Epic it wouldn't take long for Epic to overtake them, but as long as it's not worse it's nice that everyone has agreed on a standard platform.
For example, I still don't use Epic. And I've probably even paid on Steam for games that Epic gave away for free.
What's worrying is Steam has enough mass to preclude me from buying games on GoG to a point. Linux support, for one. Frictionless playing on a Deck if i choose to get one in the future, for two. Steam built in streaming, for three.
I bought GoG first for a couple years, but now I'm agnostic again. Esp with games that have Linux versions.
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Still, the only games you really own are those you've downloaded the crack for. Unless they're from GoG and DRM free.
And only if you have a good backup strategy :)
Helps that they don't have to be very very good to shareholders that don't give a fuck about games and just want money. I'm not really looking forward to find out what happens once Gabe passes on control of the company.
They did get sued for having "anticompetitive restraints on pricing" and "Federal Judge John C. Coughenour ruled that those claims were credible and that Steam gamers can claim compensation for Valve's illegal monopoly, but gamers, unlike developers, must file individual arbitrations to do so."
So, yes, it's been claimed and legally found that they have at least some anticompetitive practices, at least in the USA.
(Quoted text is from https://www.bucherlawfirm.com/steam-case-explained)
>If they were maintaining it through anticompetitive
Well we know they are now thanks to the lawsuits shedding light in the long known pricing parity clauses. Anyone asking "why isn't this game cheaper on Epic if take take a smaller cut" now has their answer. Without risking any dev's NDA.
What's also interesting is some games will unlock for you if you buy them from their own stores, like the Elder Scrolls Online MMO will unlock on Steam for you if you just link your Steam account.
My only annoyance with them is with Valve for not making new games / franchises. They clearly have a good talent pool, but they're so much slower than Nintendo it feels like in this regard. They're finally adding a new game, but its just a Team Fortress spiritual successor.
Im sure at thst point it's more worth considering.
Gog is the only one I would say is on par with Steam, but they have a different niche. Still, Valve is on top and not because they hinder the competition, but because the competition likes to shoot their feet. Often.
Both Steam and Band-Aid are brand names.
There's not much "lock-in" apart from the games one owns on the platform; and the social aspects of steam are mostly negligible or niche - sure there's the friendlist, but no gamer I know uses steam voice-chat so the friendlist is mostly replicated in discord and similar anyway.
I have 3 different non-Steam game stores and another 3 or 4 non-Steam game-specific launchers on my PC.
If you're a game dev, small or big it doesn't matter, and your game isn't on Steam, it might as well not exist. The sales and exposure of a game on Steam dwarf all other alternate PC storefronts. Even Ubisoft caved in and released their games on Steam.
Monopoly doesn't mean being the only game in town, you can have 100 other competitors, but if your competitors have <10% market share and you have >90% then you're basically a monopoly.
It’s not just factually wrong to call them a monopoly, it’s uncharitable given that they are not engaging in anticompetitive practices despite being in a position (and arguably having the right) to do so.
It's also so clear to me in retrospect how long they've been building up to something like this. Investing in Wine and developing proton to make running Windows games on Linux as frictionless as possible, dipping their toes in hardware with much less ambitious projects like the Steam link and the controller for it so that they weren't going in without any experience as a company dealing with physical products...I can't imagine that this would have been able to pull for for most companies due to how much they had to be willing to invest in long-term endeavors that couldn't be guaranteed to succeed. I don't think it's that much of an exaggeration to say that they might have single-handedly lifted up Linux gaming to the point where I'll never end up using Windows on a personal machine again, and that's because they put so much time and effort into the tooling for running the games independent of their distribution network. At this point, I probably would have been willing to forgive them for releasing the Steam Deck as a locked-down device, but instead they went ahead the made it pretty much indistinguishable from my laptop and desktop in terms of how much I can change or remove things. There have been so many discussions about whether the App Store should be considered a monopoly or not on iOS, and if there's not consensus on that, I can't even fathom how someone could make the argument that Steam is.
Well, not quite. They did get sued for having "anticompetitive restraints on pricing" and "Federal Judge John C. Coughenour ruled that those claims were credible and that Steam gamers can claim compensation for Valve's illegal monopoly, but gamers, unlike developers, must file individual arbitrations to do so."
(Their ToS wouldn't allow gamers to form a class action, but developers were apparently allowed to.)
So, perhaps not all good.
(From https://www.bucherlawfirm.com/steam-case-explained)
Valve takes 30%. You can’t, in practice, sell your game on Steam and on another store at a lower price. That’s anticompetitive.
Downvote me if you want. But I recommend reading the transcripts from the Wolfire Games antitrust lawsuit against Valve before you do! They’re not a good look for Valve to say the least.
Dead Comment
They are a monopoly, but it doesn't look to me that they are taking particular advantage of the position. I buy mostly indie games, so I may be out of the loop, but what are they doing that makes them "not saints" ? (Expecially in relation to their market share)
Break the network effect, and incentivise things that work against it. Implement open protocols rather than walled gardens.
Allow other platforms to truly have a chance.
Saints sadly have no place in the capitalistic world we live in though. If they exist, they are quickly outcompeted.
Anecdotally I've heard it really does help to get on those Steam lists.
Mobile games, especially Roblox, are a lot worse because they target much younger children with less parental control.
They have no morals with how they make money. No morals in politics. They are running a monopoly with a 30% cut.
How is that a "do no evil" company? Because you can install an app from Epic? Give me a break...
Others have suggested the Switch 2 is one of the best endorsements for buying a Steam Deck.
(Not really a gamer, despite having written games, ha ha, but I picked up a Steam Deck a couple years ago to test a game I ported to it — and was duly impressed.)
Nintendo has lost it's way in regards to sandboxing a child in a safe environment. I looked at the new console and all I could think about is "another button I have to teach the kids to avoid"
Call me old fashioned, but I have purchased Nintendo DS lites for each of them as that is the last handheld I could find that doesn't introduce a browser or storefront with internet connectivity.
If Nintendo charges $80 for games, this will normalize it, so everyone else will too. It won't be a difference between the consoles for long. The console, from the footage they've shown off, seems more powerful than the Deck, if the Cyberpunk footage is authentic.
Meanwhile, a detachable controller has already been their single leg up on Steam Deck, and now it's also a detachable mouse. This will actually be a better experience than the Deck (assuming the mouse doesn't hurt your hand). The Deck has best-in-class controller support as well as touchpads, but if the game does not seamlessly support simultaneous controller and KBM inputs, then you have to either map the touchpad to a control stick and deal with curving which sucks, or map all the buttons to keys and the left stick to WASD, and sticks for non-analog input also sucks. Whereas on the Switch, the mouse is just a mouse.
Author here. Not really, it was a coincidence. I wrote this post around 8 months ago, and posted it on HN before but people didn't notice: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41151392
Even with a steam deck, I am probably going to get the Switch2, mostly because I can lower my head on in-game profiteering, which is increasingly prevalent on steam games.
My impression is that the general quality of games on the Switch (or Switch 2 or eShop) is sub par the quality of, e.g. Zelda. This is obviously because Zelda is a landmark title and it doesn't make sense to compare it with "the general quality" of games on Steam. It would make more sense to compare it with the quality of other landmark titles on Steam e.g. Baldur's Gate 3.
You can compare the general quality of games on Steam (which includes games like "Hentai Waifu 5") with the general quality of games on Switch (which includes games like "Hentai Waifu 5"), though I'm not sure it is that interesting of a comparison, since no one buys the "average" game but what they consider to be the best games on the platform.
I'd suspect that any attempt at an "objective" comparison (obviously, an impossible task) would land in favour of Steam simply because it has basically all of (core) gaming for most of history on it. Though obviously such an "objective" comparison would be meaningless for something like this where literally your subjective opinion should matter the most for your choice.
I don't know how you get from there to "games on steam are sub par quality" because at this point, everything else is on Steam, so calling the rest of the Steam library "sub par" is effectively calling the entire rest of the industry, from top to bottom, "sub par", and I'd have a hard time with that one. Nintendo has a pretty good track record but they're just one company. And not because I love AAA, I'm pretty much out of the AAA loop entirely at this point, but because it's literally everything else. In particular, the XBox exclusive and PS exclusives are, if not dead, on life support. PS may still have a sort of "Japanese game that doesn't appear on Steam" niche, but even that's getting eaten into; every major Atlus release lately is showing up on Steam as a first-class citizen, for instance.
An impossibly high bar given that the Zelda games are some of the most critically acclaimed games of all time.
Just because steam sells games that do in-game profiteering, doesn't mean you need to play them?
What? Given that 99.9% of all games are published on Steam, what you are comparing is Zelda against gaming as a whole, not “the quality of games on steam”
Zelda is good, but it’s not better than literally all of gaming. If you are not a die hard Nintendo fan, I’d rather use Steam and enjoy saner pricing. There is always emulation for Nintendo.
The Store UI is disgusting and intrusive compared to all other competitors who actually have a decent overview and design..
You can collect gems, cards and other misleading virtual currencies.. Tons of misleading business practises and time-consuming bloatware distractions hidden behind that terrible UI.
Steam is first and foremost DRM. A game-prison. You don't own a single thing. Gamers have totally drunk the kool aid.. They forgot back when Steam was bloatware forced on Half-Life and Valve games and it was despised for a decade before they became complacent little worshippers.
This is neither here nor there, but you can emulate a good amount of Switch games on the Steam deck which I find pretty comical. Better hardware was sorely needed.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAu7L1hezJA
It's surely healthy for Valve's bottom line, but it introduces an element of unpredictability into pricing, creating an inconsistent reinforcement regimen, which is the kind that most effectively reinforces a behavior (namely the purchase of games).
Discounting also debases the perceived value of something, which, in addition, I suspect, to reducing the joy of ownership and use, should further encourage consumption.
I find myself more and more bored of video games, and I wonder whether this is partly because Steam and Humble Bundle's discounting practices have ruined the experience of acquisition and ownership, reducing it to a kind of gluttony and buffer-style gorging.
I also wonder whether Nintendo's pricing does a better job of maintaining the integrity of the experiences they want to offer players.
And when I say "sustain in western countries" I'm talking the bog bottom line of "us federal minimum wage", coming down to approx. $15k/year. That's 1000 copies of a $15 game that is probably upped to 1800 copies after valve and other's cuts. Even that paltry marker is hard just becsuse the market is so saturated (and not in a good way).
It's only gonna get worse as a generation that is raised on mobile games and game pass settle in. The idea of spending money upfront from a game may be lost entirely.
>I also wonder whether Nintendo's pricing does a better job of maintaining the integrity of the experiences they want to offer players.
That was indeed an explicit strategy of Nintendo. Keep a premium brand and a price thst reflects that. Sales are rare to maintain this idea of an evergreen title that is always selling.
Note that whether games work well on the Steam Deck or not isn't reflective of whether they can be run on Linux at all. With desktop Linux, virtually every game ever released can be run, on any platform, the biggest obstacle being anticheat.