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Comment by johnvanommen | Hacker News Reader

> "Portal 2," he explained, had only made $200 million in profit and that kind of chump change just wasn't worth it, when you could make 100s of millions a year selling digital hats and paintjobs for guns (most of which are designed by players, not the employees!)

All of the most successful tech companies are platforms:

* Facebook is a platform for it's users to make posts

* eBay is a platform for it's users to sell items

* Amazon is a platform for retail companies

* Even Google is a platform, because it's taking the Internet itself, and re-packaging it

From that perspective, you can see how things wound up like this at Valve.

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* Google also owns the Android platform and the YouTube platform.

* Apple owns the iOS and MacOS platforms.

* Microsoft owns the Windows platform.

It seems to be a very common pattern. I remember being convinced on the matter by an Economist article on European tech: https://www.economist.com/britain/2011/08/06/start-me-up

Don't forget Microsoft also owns the Azure, GitHub, Hololens, LinkedIn, and Xbox platforms.

Google and Apple can control what software is running on their platforms. iOS is complete control, macos less, Android more or less complete control.

But MS doesn't control what programs are running on the Windows platform.

Microsoft still has soft power, but the benefit of the platform goes beyond just control. Consider that millions of people who wanted to play Valve's games had to buy a copy of Windows first.

If those people would have used their PC only for that game, yes. But that's not the case. People didn't have a PC just laying around thinking "oh crap now I need an OS".

On the other hand, if you didn't have a PC back in 1998 you bought one and Windows came with it. Or you already were advanced user, built one from components and installed Windows. Either legally or not, didn't matter much.

I understand that. Most people bought a PC with a bundled Windows license as a prerequisite to run the many applications they cared about. Those are still people who bought Windows, and some of the applications that justified their purchase were likely created by third-party developers like Valve.

I was trying to highlight one of the great benefits of owning a platform: your platform is made more valuable by the work of third-parties who build on it.

they've made a huge mistake, their competitive advantage, somewhat like Nintendo, is that their platform has / had valve games on it.

This right here... There are game studios that can keep churning out enough games to create their own alternatives to Steam and they have and they will succeed without Steam. What will be left is microtransactions and indie games if they arent careful.

Valve has the network effect being both a top-of-mind store, distribution platform, and friend network.

I think discord has taken over as friend network #1.

Just wait until Twitch and Discord find a way to merge.

Well, given that now Epic is trying to cut into that with Fortnite as the killer/gateway app that gets the Epic marketplace on your system, maybe Valve will be forced to focus on shipping some good new games to retain their position? If that's the case, yay for competition! :)

That said, I think part of what people are missing about Valve is that they are also seem to be focused on what they see as the next big thing in gaming, which is VR. They're supposedly shipping their own VR hardware (headset plus new hand controllers) soon (Aug 1st), and have publicly committed to launching a "Flagship VR" game this year. Probably not what most people want, given the cost of VR equipment (not mentioning the cost of the computer hardware to run it).

Personally, I'm kinda amped up about the Occulus Quest. A hands free (~3 hour charge, can play while charging), self-contained (no PC required), $400-$500 (depending on internal storage) device? I might actually be willing to pay for that as a first VR device. That the games are all $30 or less is a bonus.

> Well, given that now Epic is trying to cut into that with Fortnite as the killer/gateway app that gets the Epic marketplace on your system, maybe Valve will be forced to focus on shipping some good new games to retain their position?

We'll see. There have been a number of game marketplaces over the years that have tried to compete with steam. For the most part, they're all gone, and the games they hosted are gone too.

At this point, it would take something pretty unusual for me to spend any money on a non-Steam game. I just don't believe other platforms will be around in 5-10 years.

FWIW I'm a diehard steam user from the beta in 2002, and the Epic store is every bit as good at this point. Absolutely disappointed in Valve for resting on their laurels for this long.

Frankly I'm almost in the opposite camp now - why would I buy anything on Steam when it's clearly being left to rot.

>the Epic store is every bit as good at this point

So it has cloud saves and you can buy games to send as gifts?

They have the “Buy game > download game > launch game” flow working, but there’s a heck of a lot of catching up to do. Frankly I’d say that cloud sync for game saves is table stakes for a game store in 2019. If Epic weren’t throwing around millions of dollars on exclusives and discounts, no one would use it.

I’m sure there are other missing features, the ones mentioned above are just what came to mind from when I looked into EGS after Borderlands 3 was announced as an exclusive.

They might be on track to catch up to Steam sooner or later, but it’s far to early to say they’ve done it.

Maybe most of the monetization "features" are regarded as a CON by most players? Just because sb develops this and his lifelihood depends on it, does not make something good or important in the customers 's eyes.

Valve has an almost 2-decade head start. I’m sure Epic will continue to improve their store/platform at a fair pace.

If it doesn't take several seconds to load up a game's page, and if it gives me a way to look at multiple games from a recommended list without having to go one at a time, then it's already ahead of Steam in the ways that matter to me. Steam's store UI is astonishingly slow and cumbersome for what's essentially an embedded web browser. It reminds me of iTunes on windows.

You're completely correct. Epic store is just a bare-bones program, it lacks features which we consider completely basic and natural in modern online marketplaces, such as a shopping cart. Yes, you have to buy and pay for games one by one.

There was this amusing incident not long ago, where the store's fraud prevention mechanisms were blocking users who bought five or six games quickly in a row. There were many, many blocked users, because at that time, the Epic store happened to have a "mega sale" event going, where many games were discounted. In a store without a shopping cart feature, that translates to lot of purchase transactions, one following quickly after another.

https://www.pcinvasion.com/epic-store-blocking-users-purchas...

If only they invested slightly more money into their store implementation, and less into buying expensive exclusive game releases, right?

I have faith that the developers at Epic can improve their store. It's a purely technical problem, and an easy one compared to creating the Unreal Engine.

In a few years, if the store is good, nobody will care about the growing pains. The bad old days will be forgotten like Diretide.

> There was this amusing incident not long ago, where the store's fraud prevention mechanisms were blocking users who bought five or six games quickly in a row.

That's funny, recently numerous users were also blocked from purchasing the Valve Index VR system on Steam because of fraud prevention mechanisms.

To their credit Valve did later offer an opportunity for people who ran into this to buy a kit in the first wave of shipments.

The killer feature with Steam for me at the moment is a combination of,

a) some 300-400 games in my library, picked up over more than a decade, and probably 95% purchased on sales. There always seems to be a sale. This offsets the price of a computer as opposed to a console.

b) Steam Link, which lets me play those games in the living room using a regular Xbox One controller. The Link has recently migrated from being a hardware device to being software that runs on your TV (I have a Samsung TV) and now recently on iOS (iPhone/iPad/Apple TV).

Link works very well and has effectively moved me to the living room for enjoying games.

It has also made my game library available to my wife, who wasn't going to sit down in front of a computer to play games any time soon, but who has found some games she really enjoys playing by virtue of the simpler, more direct interface that is Steam's big screen mode.

While Steam the desktop app is a horrible, ancient mess, the big screen interface is surprisingly decent.

"The Link has recently migrated from being a hardware device to being software that runs on your TV (I have a Samsung TV"

Wait what? I have a hardware Link and a Samsung tv. Are you saying I can dump the hardware? How do the controllers connect?

Steam Link seems to work on 2016 and later smart TVs: https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=5613-TAD...

Amusingly, there's also a version for the Raspberry Pi 3B: https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=6153-IFG...

Like the sibling says, 2016 and forwards essentially. I'm running it on a Q7F (I think it is). If you can get it to work, it's excellent. Supports 4K, whereas the physical one does not. I'm guessing the Apple TV 4K should support 4K streaming as well.

Yeah, so due to how bluetooth works on the Samsung, some controllers work well and others don't. I set up VirtualHere[1] on the router (which is pretty close to the TV), and connected a USB bluetooth stick to the router. I have a wireless Apple keyboard, a Logitech mouse, and two Xbox controllers connecting through the bluetooth stick, and it works flawlessly. No discernible input lag.

1: https://www.virtualhere.com/

> At this point, it would take something pretty unusual for me to spend any money on a non-Steam game. I just don't believe other platforms will be around in 5-10 years.

I agree, but I think it's important to consider that they can succeed even if they don't get you or me. There's hundreds of millions of people that have installed it (approaching 250 million a couple months ago), tens of millions playing each month (almost 80 million as of a few months ago) and over 10 million people playing concurrently.[1]

How many of those are young players that might want to try a new game they see some youtuber play, and see it on sale in the epic store they might use to launch Fortnite? That's a hige captive audience, and this battle won't be won by swaying you or me, but by swaying the huge number of new gamers coming onto the market, which are mostly our kids. I know my son who's 9 probably wouldn't care about Steam if I wasn't sharing my library with him. Then again, his computer can't play much and he plays Fortnite on the Switch.

Steam is entrenched, and does have it's own user base, but given that Fortnite along as of a couple months ago has ~66% of the concurrent users of Steam overall[2], I wouldn't count it out. That's a lot for Epic to make something out of.

1: https://www.pcgamesn.com/fortnite/fortnite-battle-royale-pla...

2: https://store.steampowered.com/stats/

I buy something from Steam only if it's not on GOG. Games from GOG let you play them without the headaches of the launcher.

I don't play very often and when I finally find time for it, it looks like this: - clicking on the game icon - the launcher starts updating - the launcher restarts and asks for my account, because why not? - the game starts updating, often downloading patches above a GB ... and so on. And that applies for Steam, Bethesda Launcher and the rest of the bunch. And don't let me get started on the Bethesda Launcher because that thing alone takes 500MB of memory.

GoG is amazing, my preference is GoG, Steam, and piracy is a distant third to the point where I haven't pirated a game in a decade.

Totally agree. However, one major selling point of Steam for me is the practically seamless Proton compatibility layer (while acknowledging the philosophical disconnect between running Linux and buying DRM'd games...)

Before Fortnite was Minecraft and Pokemon Go and Angry Birds... It's in the nature of video games to come and go like fads.

More telling (to me) is that Epic started making a game very different from Fortnite but was both flexible enough and perceptive enough to change the game.

The difference is that Epic is leveraging their current popularity to turn into a platform. Pokemon Go and Angry Birds were already only really available through platforms, so that wasn't an option for them. Minecraft maybe could have, but it seems somewhat opposed to the idea of the program, which is all about user control and users creating an ecosystem. Now that Microsoft owns it, there's already a platform for it, and it's not game specific (the Windows Store).

Fortnite has as many or more monthly players as Minecraft (which is huge), but much more control over the ecosystem and content. As the controlling party of what's (by this point most likely) the most popular online game in history in it's peak (until next month, most likely), that gives them a somewhat unique and powerful position, which they seem eager to exploit.

Will that be enough? I don't know. I definitely think the situation is different than the examples you cited though.

I'm on the Epic store because they have been giving away games I had wanted to play, specifically Transistor and What Remains of Edith Finch. It remains to be seen how much money I'll spend there. Most of my purchases these days are on GOG.

I think this is a good point: Valve doesn't make games, but it definitely seems to be trying out other gaming-related things.

Examples:

* Steam Machine [0], an alternative to consoles

* Proton [1], incredible boost to gaming on Linux

* Continued development of the Source engine [2], that, albeit not a first choice for the majority of game developers, is still being used

* Going heavy on e-sports with Dota 2 and The International [3], which, I believe, is also beneficial for gaming as a whole

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_Machine_(hardware_platfo...

[1] https://steamcommunity.com/games/221410/announcements/detail...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Source_(game_engine)#Games

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_International_(Dota_2)

Halo for PC (all of them, via the Master Chief Collection) is coming to the Steam Store soon. That might be exciting for some people.

Don't forget their contributions to Mesa: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/commits/master?utf8...

This was Steams initial competitive advantage and it's still a benefit, but now Steam's advantage is that most commercial PC games are on Steam. Although many people still dislike Steam for various reasons, it's still overall the best game platform available on PC and is better than console and mobile platforms in many ways. One thing to thing about is that many of the biggest games (LoL, Fortnite, Minecraft, Activision Blizzard and EA titles) are not available on Steam.

this goes far back. most successful entrepreneur in the gold rush where the concession holders and the ones that sold picks and the likes

>All of the most successful tech companies are platforms

This is silly. 4 rather recent internet companies are meant to prove your point that the way to success is as a platform? This post ignores the vast majority of tech companies.

Depends on your definition of "success". As a percentage of total market capitalization, these 4 companies comprise a significant portion of that, though by percentage of total companies, it's a low figure.

> rather recent internet companies

As opposed to what, ancient internet companies? Amazon, Google and Ebay were all started in the mid to late 1990's. They are all over twenty years old. Facebook, as the youngest, is about 15 years old. How many people were even on the internet in the mid 1990's?

Edit: Or perhaps you meant tech companies pre-internet. But I think the fact that relatively young (although not really, even non-internet tech companies aren't that old) companies quickly rose to supersede non-internet companies (or those non-internet companies shifted to to be somewhat internet centric to not be left behind, like Microsoft) points towards more evidence for platforms (since the internet enabled platforms in a much easier way).

> How many people were even on the internet in the mid 1990's?

I know that was rhetorical, but just to answer the question literally since I was curious, the estimates across multiple sources from the first page of Google results for “internet usage 1995” show it was double digit millions, somewhere in the 10M-50M range, and separate percentage estimates seem to say about 0.5% of the world’s population. Today, by contrast it’s over 50% of the planet.

Holy crap. Of course the usage in 1995 would be super low. That’s around the first time I used the Internet. It was a vast ecosystem to my young eyes. So the number makes complete sense but still shocking to me. I’m guessing by Napster peak time the number was relatively much bigger.

the vast majority of tech companies aren't most successful.

IBM was a platform company. System/360, the PC (which they botched by opening up).

> All of the most successful tech companies are platforms

During a gold rush - sell shovels.

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