Can this business model survive a recession?

Are non-Steam gamers not also hoarders? Because if they are, that whole argument falls apart.

A bunch of drunken sailors who spend money irresponsibly?

So... pirates?

Hey....

Fuck you

He doesn't consider game bundles like e.g. humble bundle. There you can get loads of steam games which you might activate but only play a few from.

sips rum

You've got a lot of nerve being right

Funny enough, the link to Rich Shanton, the one who wrote this, throws a 404 error.

So basically "Valve discovered a gold mine by selling you so many games" and "it's your fault for spendijg money on games". Yeah wait wut? As if it's someone's fault that so many games are getting released. Also ending with "beware, not every customer is a die-hard fan". Wow.

Go crack the F2P business model next, Sherlock.

Walled gardens create digital plantations

I don’t think I can speak for everyone, but the majority of the games I have on steam that I will never play are older big name titles that I got in bundles on sale with other games I wanted to play.

I have a lot of indie/smaller studio games on steam, and I’ve played all of them a decent amount. I think the reason games from smaller or independent studios do better on steam is because they actually get put forward and highlighted by events. Like, there are mechanisms in place to promote them to people who wouldn’t have heard about them through word of mouth.

I think the larger issue is that other storefronts are just… bad about highlighting games that aren’t from huge studios and massive publishers, obvious exception for GOG who is more focused on game preservation and older niche games, but even there I rarely see new stuff from small/indie studios getting promoted.

Like, sure on epic they’ll get a 80% cut, or what ever it is, but 70% of 1000 sales is a lot more than 80% of 10.

Also, like, the comparison to Netflix is absurd. When you pay for a Netflix subscription, you are paying for literally all of the content they have, and I’m pretty sure it would be impossible to watch everything on there. It also sucks because if I want something niche or novel, there is no incentive for that to be produced because my payment is spread evenly across everything Netflix is producing.