Steam is not healthy for gaming
polygon.com
polygon.com
Yeah, come on, you guys! They barely did any of the work! They just set up a form! How dare they expect to be compensated for that? It's not like there's a huge infrastructure powering all of that, that not only required an initial investment of money, time and brainpower, but also requires ongoing maintenance!
The article does raise some good points, but the overall raise-the-pitchforks tone makes it seem less credible - especially when most of the complaints seem to be that Valve is running a profitable business while delivering value to customers. The author forgot what installing and playing games was like before Steam - better write down those CD keys somewhere safe, or never lose the cases - or the CDs themselves. (Or, god forbid, keep the manual around forever so you can refer to line 5 on page 17, and type in the third, seventh and eight word.)
And one of the reasons people hated EA was because EA abused its employees and developers, not because they had a shitty game client; if you want to compare someone to Uber/Lyft/AirBNB, they are a much closer candidate.
Steam is not all bad. But the last thing Valve needs is people defending them, because they have been doing fuck all work for the past years. Delegating everything to the community is not work. Steamworks API is still a joke. Greeenlight is a joke. 99% the cosmetics they are putting out are done by the community. CSGO skins? Done by the community. DotA2 skins? done by the community. Team Fortress 2 items? I can't even remember the last time the game was updated with some thing they made themselves. They outsourced an update to the community, ffs. The last time Steam itself had a meaningful update was years ago. Still waiting on an actually good Big Picture mode.
I am not saying they do not deserve payment for their work. Just that the ratios are heavily skewed in their favour and as the only serious players in the market, this is bad for everyone but them. Until the day Origin, Uplay, Galaxy, etc. get better (spoiler: never), we are bound to their whims and whishes. You can be the most benevolent dictator of all time, you're still a dictator, and I'm still going to protest.
>better write down those CD keys somewhere safe, or never lose the cases - or the CDs themselves.
Joke's on you, I enjoy having cases. I actually miss having physical boxes and manuals and all the goodies that came with games.
Cool. Does your shitty PHP app tie into dozens of incredibly popular games, and hundreds more of moderately popular ones? Has it been tested for years, both by in-house QA and real-world friction?
> But the last thing Valve needs is people defending them
Sure, but on the flip side, if someone is going to attack them, they should make sure their arguments are valid, no? Like I said, this article is mostly someone mad that Valve is making money while not putting in as much effort as the author would like them to.
> Steamworks API is still a joke. Greeenlight is a joke. 99% the cosmetics they are putting out are done by the community.
I'll take your word for it - I have never really purchased cosmetics, aside from taking the random drops in TF2. I have heard bad things about Greenlight, but mostly from people upset that game devs don't deliver what they promise after taking your money (and that's as much on them as it is on Valve for empowering that sort of thing.)
And as far as offloading work onto the community... why is that bad again? It's all volunteer-driven. I'd wager that a lot of the people making these things were the type of people who would just use a modded server and load them that way, instead of having an officially sanctioned channel.
> Just that the ratios are heavily skewed in their favour and as the only serious players in the market, this is bad for everyone but them.
That's true, but how is that Steam's fault or problem? You mentioned their competitors; let them compete! What is Steam expected to do about this? Lend them some employees?
> Joke's on you, I enjoy having cases. I actually miss having physical boxes and manuals and all the goodies that came with games.
Sure, and I'm not saying it's wrong to like having physical memorabilia - but the key difference is that if you lose the physical memorabilia, you're fucked, and can't play that game anymore.
And those are just the nasty development parts. Building a CDN like steam is hard and expensive. Many geo-distributed servers, peering arrangements up to hundreds of gbits with many different local ISPs, hardware management. Some globally replicated shop database, search systems. And then operational infrastructure on top of all of that just to able to control and maintain that mess of boxes. Even if at every point in time, something is borked in a network that large.
Politics aside. It's easy to assume steam being simple, because the steam application doesn't do much. But building a system like steam is actually a lot harder than it looks.
Maybe ask yourself what happened to all of yours?
>runs the servers that do the matchmaking
For reference, once cosmetics were introduced (and it was already getting old by the time), TF2 ran a good... two years? without matchmaking servers, only with a master server to list all the public servers. While it's not something you're running on a $5 DigitalOcean instance, it's not exactly super expensive either (especially considering they were down regularly). All the servers were hosted by the community. Microtransactions are the only reason the game got matchmaking.
But I don't know, call me a bleeding heart idealist, but if I'm asking people to come build things for me, I'm not asking for a 75% claim on it because the terrain belongs to me. People didn't ask Valve to make content for them. Valve asked them to.
A game without mods is a game. A mod without a game is just digital art. It's their engine, their game rules, their store, their distribution network, and their audience that they've reached with their marketing. Maybe they deserve a bit smaller share than they ask, but who are you going to sell these items to without a game engine, game rules, a store, a distribution network, and an audience to sell them to?
If you gave 30% to an app store, and 20% for marketing, and 25% for someone to vet your items don't break the game, what would that cut be overall? 75%.
Valve's cut.
>20% for marketing
No marketing is being done for items aside from announcing them in patch notes.
>25% for someone to vet your items don't break the game
That is not something Valve does, considering the amount of items that clip through models after release. Notwithstanding the fact that items they select are either from modelers that they're already in contact with, or items that were voted up by the community and therefore, tried.
This is exactly where the Polygon article is right. Steam is in a situation of almost monopoly on the market, and you have absolutely zero chances of ever being able to negotiate those rates. Even the mafia takes less as a protection fee, and they do more work than Valve when it comes to their customers.
None perhaps for the individual add-on items, but there's been marketing to get people involved in the games for which the extra content is made. The audience is there initially because of the game, not initially because of the extra content.
> That is not something Valve does, considering the amount of items that clip through models after release.
That's a shame. I would expect that for the amount they keep they'd do some quality control.
If you want more control and a bigger share, make assets for a non-Valve game. Find an engine, some programmers, a musician, a level designer, and a couple of testers. Publish your own game. Of course, then you'd be splitting the game development share across all of those team members. So depending on the size of the team, 5% to 50% of the game team's share from your 70% from the sale of the game through the store would be that alternative, unless you're prepared to do it as a solo project. That, though, is for the sale price of the whole game rather than a single downloadable item. Then you can do the same with DLC packs. Indie games do tend to sell at lower prices than AAA titles, though.
i don't know how many times i've deleted games just to redownload them some time later. i could even continue with the same playthrough because steam kept backups of my save files on their servers.
I always first check GoG and itch.io for any game I'm interested in. Maybe it's my taste in indie games, but quite a few authors actually want to have DRM-free release, while Steam will probably never support it.
If you consider being required to login into Steam once to download the game and run it the first time in Steam to be DRM, then yes I suppose Steam will always have DRM. That's not much in the way of DRM though.
But yeah, any official branch of "journalism" that directly courts advertisers and hires desperate writers fresh out of liberal arts schools who have few job prospects that their communications or journalism degrees are marketable (and may not even be that in to video games when they start) come packaged with the political opinions and agendas shaped by said institutions/departments that really have zilch to do with gaming consumerism or considerations when making a game beyond is this fun and will it sell, but they feel they have to make a difference somehow and use it as their soap box or some grander form of social commentary when most people just want to play Zelda and the creators probably had none of the intentions they project onto it.
In the case of Steam, it solved a problem. In the case of Origin, the problem was solved and it introduced more problems.
Anyway, Steam users are also paying to consume the game, even if they don't own it. And I really doubt the 2% of their users read even the first paragraph of the EULA contract (where they do specify the above, yep I read it.)
You wouldn't lose much by rewriting the definition of "malevolent" on the dictionary with those words above.
They enjoy a massive network effect plus the key handling helped increasing the switch costs, but they should go down. Platforms like itch.io are much better, and GOG.com at least keeps improving.
Things like music licenses expiring and having that retroactively applied worry me [1]. Steam strikes me as a bit of a monopoly at this stage, and a 30% cut off all sales seems like money for jam - I'd be a bit less bitter if they offered excellent customer support or I felt they were doing something interesting with all the revenue.
[1] https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20141110/09535529096/hoora...
Edit: I guess there's nothing to stop GoG disappearing either, but at least I have standalone installers if needed.
Also, it doesn't even have highdpi support, so it's already small fonts become illegibily small.
That also means the experience is similar. When it works, it works well and you don't have to think about it. When it doesn't work, be prepared to lose hours-to-days of your life to a system that seems to be as kafkaesque as possible.
I have noticed that they don't screw with the UI every 2 months (Spotify et al.) and stick with what works. That seems to be a negative these days though.
The client is really heavy, and if it's out of date, you're in for a long wait before being able to launch a game.
>It even makes it pretty straightforward to buy them,
Yeah, it opens the webpage inside the app. Any browser would do the same.
> and keeps them up to date in the background.
The steam client has no such feature: it only updates games IN THE FOREGROUND. There's no service or deamon that does anything in the background.
This, a million times over.
Now I never pirate games.
This is the same Polygon (a video game site) that put out an article complaining about how unfairly they were treated when they released a video showing that they don't even understand the basics of video games. The whole site is problematic.
It probably took 10-15 emails, being bounced between steam, the publisher, and the port developer to finally get steam credit "as a courtesy".
The game crashed, but it turns out that steam kept the counter going after it did, so not only did it not work: it also meant no refund.
Steam is extremely successful but it is not a monopoly. All the smart developers I know use Steam but also maintain alternate points of distribution for all kinds of business reasons. If you don't like Steam, don't use it. There are many alternatives.
This is how Linux repositories got it right.
Also you can see how effective the model is for indie games. Take Stardew Valley for instance. A hugely successful indie game that's made the author a ton of money. And it still sells for less than Harvest Moon/Story of Seasons.
At least in current society there isn't anything overtly wrong with "the Wal-Mart model" as it stands, but recognizing a Wal-Mart model is the first steps towards trying to figure out if it is long term healthy for the community. (Which brings us back to the article at hand, questioning the long term health of the community in the face of a Wal-Mart like Steam.)
So on one hand: Isn't it great that there is this easy way for almost anyone to distribute their game; and on the other: isn't it terrible that so many people are distributing their game and driving down the price?
I'm surprised by the concerns over refunds. In my experience, brick-and-mortar stores that sold computer games were generally not too friendly about refunds. GameStop's website says downloadable PC purchases are not eligible for refunds at all.
I was going to say that Steam's monopoly status is overstated, since there are a few (much smaller) competitors. But in fact it looks like the games I bought on Impulse years ago have vanished; GameStop bought Impulse, rebranded it, and later shut it down. As far as I can tell, my licenses have disappeared into the ether. Motivating just about any former customers to avoid GameStop in future, I would think. Boggling.
Steam has both pros and cons. For me, the benefits greatly outweigh the cons.
Stopped reading here, what retarded nonsense.
The whole article seems like the author just woke up from a 15-year coma and is having trouble coming to terms with modern commerce.
Seems more like a Games Journalism article written by someone who isn't "a gamer". Which is par for the course nowadays.
I'd be hard pressed to find any PC gamer who doesn't think Steam improved upon the way things used to be done. I do know one person who is an exception but their issue isn't the gaming side of things but the fact they liked to collect boxes for the box art. Fewer games being released as a box = fewer box arts for their collection.
The article admits Steam improved the way things had been done before. It simply asks us to question our relationship with Steam today, if it's continuing to do real good. It wonders why so many people are still adamant Steam is a Mom & Pop shop when it's the PC gaming Wal-Mart today.
I predicted this would be a response (or, similarly, "gatekeeping").
"Gamers" in the literal sense? Sure. But most people mean "gamer" as in "gaming enthusiast". There's a certain level of skill or knowledge expected of anyone calling themselves an "enthusiast". If you lack both of those things you'll find it hard for anyone to take you seriously. Just like an "artist" who is both untalented and ignorant (eg. no knowledge of common terminology, history, or popular figures) wouldn't be taken seriously as an "artist", regardless of how much time they spend on it.
Polygon infamously released 30 minutes of gameplay footage of Doom that was mocked for the player being so bad it's like they've no experience with an FPS game [0]. Polygon in general has a long track record of being ignorant of entire facets of gaming culture, to an extent that many enthusiasts say "Bullshit. You don't know what you're talking about." Their reputation for being ignorant and clickbaity wasn't earned because they're good at what they do, quite the contrary.
Gaming is a giant spirograph of a venn diagram of interests, skills, knowledge, cultural touchstones, etc. You may be comfortable picking some very specific section of that Venn diagram for what criteria you think counts as "a gamer", but I hesitate to. I'd rather celebrate how wide and interesting the hobby can be than lock myself in an ivory tower or boy's club treehouse.
Compare game genres to musical instruments. Guitarist == FPS gamer and Pianist == RPG gamer
Both guitarists and pianists are musicians, just like RPG players and FPS players are gamers. Feel free to expand this analogy into as many genres and musical instruments as you like.
Now take someone who isn't able to play the correct notes, cannot read sheet music/tablature/any form of music notation, has no knowledge of music theory, hasn't heard of The Beatles (or whatever cultural/genre relevant artist would be the equivalent to The Beatles), but still practices for hours every day on their 8-note plastic recorder they got in 4th grade [0]. They call themselves a musician, after all they spend so much time with their hobby!
Nobody but that person and maybe their mother - being nice - would call them a musician. Is there a hard, defined line for when they'll "become a musician"? No. There is a grey line of necessary skill/knowledge that one needs to have for others to consider them a musician. Every amateur hobby has that grey line that needs to be crossed before you'll be taken seriously.
ps. The dictionary definition of "musician" only mentions "plays an instrument" and doesn't indicate any level of skill. This is the difference between "dictionary definition" and "actual usage of a word". By the dictionary's definition our untalented individual is a musician, even if nobody else would consider them one.
I think the dictionary definition is accurate/adequate enough and you may have an implicit "good" or maybe "professional" somewhere in your usage of musician, that I don't. One is a value judgment (history is also littered with "terrible" musicians that were still musicians, or contributed to the craft) and the other an economic judgment, neither of which I see as necessary to describing who is or is not a musician.
By definition a pilot doesn't need to successfully fly - only operate the controls. So a drone pilot could crash every drone and still be a "pilot" by definition. Nobody would recognize them as a drone pilot because there is an implied "successfully" that isn't found in the definition.
Yes - there is an implicit "at least to some level of success" in my definition. "Professionals" meet that criteria by being good enough to be paid for what they do. Amateurs come at many different levels but I don't call myself a photographer just because I've taken a few (hundred) photos. This is where we disagree - because you would consider me a photographer for having taken any photos.
Fandom/enthusiasm don't really have success bars. It's something you are either enthusiastic about or you aren't. You can be a fan of something and never be successful at it, however you define success. A baseball fan doesn't have to be good at actually playing baseball nor devoted to a deep knowledge of the sport to be a fan of their favorite team.