But does it still provide a great experience for gamers and creators? I'd wager so say they can do a lot better, but they're letting their success stagnate them. Buggy mobile apps, questionable revenue share on Workshop items, no strong answer to the discovery of good games ever since Greenlight came out, IMHO Valve isn't doing enough with their platform on their own. I'd welcome competition to get them to perk up their step a bit.
I'd even go so far as to say Valve not caring is a good thing. They don't try to interfere too much and when they do and it blows up they walk it back.
Ridiculous statement.
Waiting weeks for a support request is not a good thing.
Waiting weeks then getting response in russian is not a good thing.
The app being a generally slow clunky experience is not a good thing.
Piss poor preview games is not a good thing.
CS Go gambling is not a good thing.
DotA2 is not a good thing. :p
A lot of things were even worse before Origin arrived and Valve started at least a half-assed attempt to make things better.
Obviously.
I guess the mobile app is kind of crappy. I've never really cared as I don't see any reason to use it.
I appreciate Valve pushing for better security, but with the authenticator app the only option this really sucks if you don't have a smartphone, or do have a smartphone, just not with Android, IOS, or Windows Phone on it.
Now I understand this for the interim (people were losing their digital items due to poor security), but it is damn near impossible to contact Steam with suggestions or comments (on the Steam forums your voice is drowned in a sea of despair, and I can't seem to get a hold of anyone with a technical background at Steam's help-desk). Perhaps if someone at Valve is reading HN: please consider using Fido U2F as an alternative to a smartphone app!
Already have steam, gog galaxy, origin, and uplay for various things. I use only the former 2 as much as I can.
If I recall, it was optional for CounterStrike1.4, but then required for CS1.6.
The PC bunch were crying that they'd never use this DRM'd buggy POS.
That must have been 16+ years ago. Steam has come a long way since then, and has been credited [0] with helping reduce PC game piracy over the years. Likely because steam just works for the most part, and is as easy if not easier than the alternative.
I just don't see how Facebook can really disrupt this given Steams head start and positive mind share (not to mention the libraries of games that users have likely accrued over the years)
0: http://www.digital-digest.com/news-62904-PC-Gaming-Piracy-On...
Their sales definitely had something to do with this as well. Before these kinds of sales, PC games were fixed at a certain price point and would take a long time to see a price drop. Now, I'll see fairly new games that may be marked down anywhere from 10% to 25% and, at least for me, I feel much more inclined to purchase it if I like it.
Granted I have a backlog of games to get through, but still it made purchasing games much more approachable as I know I won't be breaking my wallet over one game.
1.6 was the only version on Steam, 1.5 used the WonID servers, which they shut down a few years later.
The largest issue with Steam when it was released was the fact that the client was slow as molasses, and plenty of others had resource issues since you had to also run the client in the background along with whichever game you were playing.
Hidden object games, educational games for children, iOS and Android ports.
In the case of the former two - with no real marketing, and with a great deal of competition, these still fly off the digital shelves, and are not expensive to produce. There are people who want these games, and Steam honestly is not doing the best job of getting in touch with these people. Integration with the rest of the Facebook ecosystem would really really help push these games towards the people who want to buy them.
For the last option, people often buy these games when they felt good about playing the iOS/Android game and want to continue the experience (or in rare cases, play a more full-featured version - usually the PC port is incomplete, but sometimes it does contain unique bonuses). I imagine Facebook would have a killer app if it could sync your iOS/Android saved games (or even just achievements) to the PC version of the save game.
TL:DR; I think there's a huge opportunity for a major casual gaming platform, and I think Facebook's pretty well placed to be that platform.
There are plenty of people who play games who've never heard of Steam, and whose friends aren't on Steam, but who are on Facebook.
A lot of those people might be ripe to get sucked into the hobby if Facebook manages to advertise the right game in their feed.