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Can anyone overthrow Steam on PC? "As long as Valve is independent and not a publicly traded company," analyst says it looks impossible (www.gamesradar.com)
submitted 1 week ago by to c/pcgaming@lemmy.ca
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[–] 60 points 1 week ago (24 children)

These guys are so privileged they think they are entitled to success without innovation.

THERE WAS NOTHING LIKE STEAM AT THE TIME.

If they want what Gabe has they need to do what he did: INNOVATE.

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  • [–] 24 points 1 week ago

    I cannot emphasize this enough. This is the entire modus operandi when it comes to venture capital and "entrepreneurs" in industry.

    They have a singular talent: exploitation. Be it a mineral rich vein under a mountain, an oil/gas field, middle-class folks with spending cash, gig workers, or information economy workers (e.g. programmers), it's just one more resource to convert into wealth. Left unchecked, all the social evils we see from this thinking come into play: inequality, slavery, usury, fascism, and so on. The above even applies to their own employees, as there is no distinction in class of human being outside of the status of "owner". There is no higher calling, no alternative focus. There are only resources and money.

    The instant you make "keeping the company alive", "make a product people actually want", or even "employ people"a focus, the goal is no longer exploitative. It's arguably more socialist, even if the overall goal is to continue to thrive as a for-profit business. As a result, it's not useful to these jackals as-is. It must first be converted into parts to be exploited.

    Such a thing is also a pariah in capitalist circles. They fucking hate it. The bigger Valve gets, the more hit-pieces we see in the media. Also, the more we see CEOs circle the wagons when the likes of Epic attempts to topple their market dominance somehow, and it always fails. Socialist corporate ju-jitsu appears to be a winning strategy, and thank goodness.

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  • [–] 8 points 1 week ago (9 children)

    If Valve just made using Steam as soul-crushingly painful as we imagine it must, we might have a chance! Imagine what could be if the wizards behind the Google Play Store took a shot at making Steam!

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  • [–] 8 points 1 week ago* (7 children)

    when it first release, steam was ASS

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  • [–] 5 points 1 week ago (4 children)

    Steam was ass because it was just a an update platform, and most of us still had 56k or isdn as their means to the Internet and gaming. Yea it sucked when updates came out and you had to patch, it was a new thing to get patches like that vs buying a physical disk and the game just worked and didn't require a day 1 update.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 week ago (1 child)

    the game just worked

    That's not how I remember it. I remember plenty of games being buggy as hell, or outright not working. When a patch did come out to fix it, you had to find and download it from the developer's website and manually install it. Then keep track of that patch file in case you wanted to reinstall and play again later.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 week ago

    Most games on PC worked first release, because most people didn't have good enough Internet to get a patch. What games are you thinking about that were buggy or didn't work pre-steam?

    I can't think of a game pre-steam that didn't work or was so buggy it required a patch. They had to ship working products back then. There was no send it and patch it day one like there is today. Consoles %100 had to work day one.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 week ago

    Then they listened to feedback and changed it to be the leading and most preferred pc gaming platform. How something originates isn’t a constant standard to judge them by. The fact that they were shit at first kind of shows why they are successful now, they accepted that they needed to improve due to customer feedback and did, they didn’t decide what their customers needed and try to force it to be like that, they listened to what their customers were wanting and made themselves into a better product.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 week ago

    In some industries and markets, copycats can come along and undercut the original without actually improving things, but just offering a better price. For whatever reason, nobody else seems to be able to meaningfully compete with Steam on that front, either.

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  • [–] 10 points 1 week ago* (5 children)

    His innovation was to create the modern online verification bullshit that plagues the industry. Before Steam, you bought a game, put in the disc, and played it. If it HAD and online component, you may have had to type in a CD key.

    No extra launcher to access your library. No having to reconnect to the internet to renew your license. I had a dedicated gaming PC that didn't even have a modem. And no mandatory updates. It's unacceptable that any time I want to play a single-player game I have to hope there hasn't been some 140 gig patch that I have to install because the multi-player suite I'll never open added a new $30 outfit to a character and they just make everyone reinstall everything.

    If Half Life 2 had come out a year earlier, I wouldn't have been able to play it because I didn't have internet connected to my gaming PC until college.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 week ago (3 children)

    All of those problems are easily avoided by not playing AAA slop

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  • [–] 1 point 1 week ago* (2 children)

    If you're installing a game through Steam, you're dealing with DRM, a third-party launcher, and online verification, and Steam is taking a 30% cut to insert those features into the process. It doesn't matter how "indie" your game is.

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  • [–] 14 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

    Valve will take the cut from the sale no matter what of course, but the DRM and even the in-game Steamworks integration is actually optional. You can publish DRM-free files on Steam which do not require Steam to run at all if you want. People might get grouchy if you skip achievements and save sync or whatever, though.

    ETA: https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/The_big_list_of_DRM-free_games_on_Steam

    And to further clarify, you do not need to eschew achievements and that other stuff if you want your game to work without steam. You can make your game check to see if steamworks is working and then provide those services if if available.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 week ago

    I hardly deal with online verification. I travel a lot and have a laptop with singleplayer games I downloaded through Steam and play them with no internet connection whatsoever all the time

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  • [–] 7 points 1 week ago* (4 children)

    A lot of people don't seem to understand that Steam is DRM.

    No one wanted to use Steam when it was released and the only reason anyone did is vendor lock-in on copies of Half-Life that were purchased at retail with no mention of Steam until Valve altered the bargain.

    Some "innovation" to force people to use your service to keep playing a game they already purchased.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 week ago (2 children)

    I'm surprised that people are so pro steam here. I guess more younger people than older people that remember how garbage it was. It was GameSpy arcade with extra steps. I'll get down voted all day but this is how steam was looked at. No one wanted it and it was a complete disaster for a long time. Like let's add a monstrous background task when everyone had single core cpus.

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