Origin, steam, battle net, uplay...
And now gameroom.
Is steam so profitable this makes sense? What possible motive does FB, one of the largest companies in the world, have to compete? The revenues should be paltry.
And now gameroom.
Is steam so profitable this makes sense? What possible motive does FB, one of the largest companies in the world, have to compete? The revenues should be paltry.
If you assume Valve gets 30% of that number, and remember Valve is a privately held company of about 360 employees, that is an impressive figure.
We don't have the numbers obviously, but Steam must be so profitable that Valve is primarily a software distributor these days. Over the past six years, they've released only two titles (Portal 2 in 2011 and Dota 2 in 2013), and Half-Life 3, a game that is guaranteed to sell millions upon millions of copies, isn't even on the horizon.
On the other hand. Others like battle.net, origin, uplay are just other game companys trying not to give away 30% cut of their new hot game by selling at valve's platform. They will probably lose more from the 30% cut, than the potential customer they would lose selling only on their platform. I totally understand them, I just couldn't be bother to buy them (except blizzard)
Nevertheless, it's just PC games, not a big market. Nowhere compare to apple's iphone games or facebook's web games.
Yeah, only estimated to be about 27 billion in 2015[1]. Chump change. (I'll include this aside as a definitive indicator of sarcasm, for those incapable of detecting it accurately on their own).
1: https://newzoo.com/insights/articles/global-games-market-wil...
Think parents of Steam players, if not Steam players themselves. Sure, there will be some bleedover - after a long day of ganking noobs and insulting moms, some people think it's nice to sit down to a casual game and buy a vowel or a cow.
If FB can make Gameroom stick around, it will be profitable. Farmville has stuck around for 7 years now and most people would snerk at the idea that it's "a real game". But it's target audience doesn't care about the snark. They have fun.
The real worry here should be how FB is losing it's focus with the shopping pages and the social pages and the game hub and the blah and the blah.
You know, just like what happened with AOL and Yahoo. They were big for a long time, and then they suddenly don't matter much anymore.
1: http://www.forbes.com/sites/oliverchiang/2011/02/15/valve-an...
2: https://medium.com/steam-spy/steam-sales-in-2015-2e81a6bb0f5...
I guess that it is a long term play to try and get some of that control back.