Sunsetting the Bethesda.net launcher and migrating to Steam
bethesda.net
bethesda.net
I remember when it was in vogue for every game maker to build their own launcher or even full Steam clone - when EA pulled all its new games from Steam to get people to use Origin, when Ubisoft forced uPlay on you no matter how you bought the game, and so on. Now, it seems like we're pulling back from that situation somewhat - a lot of EA games are back on Steam, for example.
I wonder whether the experiment didn't work, or if it worked, but now the goals have changed again?
25% from 10 to 50 million
and 20% from 50 million on.
They might have even better deals, but at some point 20% for handling everything and supporting payments with potential of fraud, chargebacks etc. in nearly every country should start look like not horrible deal. Remembering what the retail margins were back in the day when they needed to make and ship physical boxes...
Not, if you are Microsoft.
It can't be that cheap to maintain an app like Origin or UPlay and all the associated infrastructure, etc..
Scammers are not an easy cost to estimate or an easy value to sell resistance against.
^1: I doubt reviews are ever coming since it would mean bad games would get fewer sales; Imagine how many more sales Cyberpunk 2077 has gotten on the Epic store as no potential buyer sees the negative reviews for the game.
The only people I know using it as a broad Steam replacement are doing so ideologically: they want a competitor to exist so they use it even if it's worse.
And for others it has meant that the Linux version was delayed until after the excusivity deal was over (e.g. Metro Exodus) or removed (Rocket League).
There's not much software that supports Macs, but there's increasingly little on Steam too that runs on a modern version of MacOS too because of Apple's decision to abandon the space.
the worst part of the bethesda launcher was it existed as a cudgel for Todd Howard and others to effectively silence dissent during the launch of Fallout 76 in 2018 either by flogging it as an excuse to refuse refunds, or using the platform to outright threadlock and silence user complaints and criticism. the launcher directly contributed to the wholesale review bombing of virtually every bethesda title on Steam and even showed up in the class action lawsuits filed during the fallout 76...well...fallout.
What I find interesting is that Microsoft and/or Bethesda chose to migrate users to Steam rather than the Microsoft Store or Gamepass. It would have been an opportunity to get more eyeballs looking at Gamepass subscriptions, but also would have been less popular. Or maybe all the legacy stuff being migrated is a burden they don't want?
Well, even Steam nowadays is kind of a wrapper for a browser.
I'm pretty sure the "new" Steam UI (the current one) is fully ported to basically be like an Electron app (I don't think it's literally Electron, but same concept).
This was reinforced recently when an incredibly good software engineer I knew recently got stuck with a problem. It ended up being a networking problem but his understanding of anything deeper than basic DNS settings was approximately zero. I was actually amazed given I assumed from his other knowledge that he would have a similar understanding of deep network concepts.
I think this happens just as much in companies. Yes, they may have 100s of insanely good graphic programmers who can do crazy low level stuff with shaders on GPUs, but do you know how to build a set of scalable and extendable web services to power a GUI app, with localisation, payment methods, 2FA, etc. I have seen some absolutely insane APIs written by game devs before, basically reinventing the wheel to pull a news feed in.
>I was actually amazed...
You countered your own argument there.
As a very well known figure in the React community, the creator of Redux and currently working for Facebook on the React core team, he says people often think he's an expert in everything.
A friend at a large GPU maker was mentioning that a lot of "squeezing all possible compute abilities" for games are in the driver, rather than in the game itself. Which is why you'll often see significant performance improvements with driver updates after a game has launched.
It makes sense as it's in the GPU makers' best interest to have the maximum performance, or else they'll be crushed in benchmarks.
He actually did spend significant effort optimising his shaders to get good performance on PC, but an Nvidia driver update would silently replace some of his code with hardware-optimised shaders they'd written themselves (similar to how Windows 95 had a hard-coded fix for Sim City).
This was never advertised publicly, and the only reason he found out was because he debugged the executable and noticed his shaders were never actually being executed.
I believe this is the story OP mentioned [1].
> Windows 95? No problem. Nice new 32 bit API, but it still ran old 16 bit software perfectly. Microsoft obsessed about this, spending a big chunk of change testing every old program they could find with Windows 95. Jon Ross, who wrote the original version of SimCity for Windows 3.x, told me that he accidentally left a bug in SimCity where he read memory that he had just freed. Yep. It worked fine on Windows 3.x, because the memory never went anywhere. Here’s the amazing part: On beta versions of Windows 95, SimCity wasn’t working in testing. Microsoft tracked down the bug and added specific code to Windows 95 that looks for SimCity. If it finds SimCity running, it runs the memory allocator in a special mode that doesn’t free memory right away. That’s the kind of obsession with backward compatibility that made people willing to upgrade to Windows 95.
[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/05/24/strategy-letter-ii...
Or, sometimes GPU folks will send a team over to help the game studios fix performance issues during their development.
There are some studios who push the envelope and make beautifully optimized games. There are many, many more who ineptly cobble together components and make something that runs well-enough.
Of course, after release, the biggest improvements come from outside the game dev team. The point is not to forget all the improvements very carefully and skillfully baked in before release, just because consumers don't see the delta.
Most game studios produce poorly optimized junk and are barely managing to ship a working product.
Every company has an attention budget to spend from.
Which ones are those?
* https://www.improbable.io/blog/thanos-prometheus-at-scale)
The League of Legends client (which launches the actual game) is awful too. I don’t understand how it continuously burn 20% of CPU when doing nothing.
Epic
Valve
Guerilla Games
(IMO)
Rockstar San Diego
Studios who choose/have the freedom to release a game "when it's ready", and/or have Sony/Microsoft backing.
One can hope Microsoft's acquisition of Bethesda will change their ways, but having set the release date of Starfield (11/11/22) so far ahead of time doesn't inspire confidence... hopefully they'll have the freedom to push this back if needed.
The wage slaves they've got working on the store and launcher front-ends are probably not the same highly talented designers and others that they have working 80 hours trying to panel-beat a game into a shape that they can get out of the door without too many major patches being needed in the days following release.
this is bathesda. There won't be many patches, but not because its bug free, but because its broken and will remain that way. The community will patch it, right?
I imagine that it is implemented and maintained entirely by people who are biding their time waiting for an opening on a team where they get to do something they give half a damn about, because it is pretty clear that nobody has put any love into this stuff.
As crappy as Flash is for security, it was such a good tool for interactive animations.
Here's a list of games that used Scaleform, though it often isn't used as the only UI system. Sometimes it's just main menus or world-space UI elements. Found in a quick Google so I can't guarantee it's totally accurate, but I know many on here are correct.
It's still used heavily for vector animations to my knowledge.
I think Steam has a big first mover advantage, like a user's default browser or text editor, always on or starting up, while the others were an extra step that users only did when they had to. The recurring sales and frequently updated offerings of games and updates on Steam's home page is also a plus; Origin was static, Epic is minimalistic, Steam is more of a proper website with a load of different angles - sales, recommended games, new / early access games, updates, and jazzy graphics if they have a big sale on. The other launchers are purely functional.
But how is it that on PC, where we have a mostly open field on which anyone can participate freely without a gatekeeper's blessing, Steam managed to consolidate so much of the gaming marketplace that even a titan like Microsoft is throwing the towel and bowing to Steam's cartelish 30%? I get that being the dominant two-sided marketplace of a given space is a strong network effect and moat, and consolidation is certainly convenient for users (I like having all my purchased games on a single account), but intuition tells me Bethesda doesn't need Steam's exposure to sell games or make new arrivals known (their announcement will go viral regardless), similarly to Riot, Mojang, Epic and co not listing on Steam. So I've always found it surprising they were dual listing their games in the first place, but the fact they're now entirely giving up on direct selling is a testament to Steam's might in the gaming industry.
Is Steam's product particularly good and hard to reproduce from the publisher's PoV, even one backed by Microsoft, to the extent it is hard to compete against with something like Microsoft Store? Or is this just another case of being early enough to establish the initial brand and let the self-fulfilling network effect kick in - with the userbase acting like gravity to bring in more users and developers - until it's large enough that sheer force of habit/inertia makes it quasi-"indisruptible"?
Either way, I found it fascinating how Valve turned into Steam, whether it was accidental or not, what a homerun pivot. Seems that is the way of the Internet, being first matters more than just about anything, having the superior product (not claiming there is one for game stores) is irrelevant if you're remotely late, it just won't matter how much cash you pour into a Microsoft Store or a Google+. My gut tells me Microsoft is salivating at the idea of buying out Steam, seems like a perfect fit for the conglomerate if it wasn't for the scrutiny it would bring their way while they are positioning themselves as the good FAAMG.
Steamworks SDK was one of the very first companies to offer that functionality pre-baked into their offering "free" of charge when companies chose to list on Steam. After a while, it became the default over time.
For many game companies, what usually happens is that initial investment is easy to go along with for the start when spinning up their game store (Origin, Bethesda.net) but eventually hard to maintain as it's hard to commit developers to maintain platforms.
As a consumer, Steam is a much better platform than any of the alternatives. I prefer to buy games on Steam, all things being equal.
As a dev studio, Steam takes 30% and Epic takes 12% (7% if you use Unreal engine).
They don’t really have to. They’re still private right? What are they going to do with even more money?
It actually feels good that the 30% cut Steam takes out of my purchases partly goes to improve my Linux desktop experience. Better for me as a user than if they were taking a smaller cut and focusing on Windows only.
1: Valve has been sponsoring work on Wine, Wayland, KDE, mesa gfx drivers, dxvk, and others.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/nonfree-games.en.html
Obviously kidding, Valve's efforts will IMO greatly expand Linux's target audience which is laudable. Seems to me that limitation was one of the main pullbacks for Linux adoption, especially in non-developer circles. Requiring dual-booting just for games on the Windows partition is not a convenient band-aid, and Stallman's solution never was one at all.
Steam's value proposition is a single place to conveniently manage all my games, and it works very well as such. It's unobtrusive, comprehensive, manages installs, pre-requisites and updates nicely for me and then gets the heck out of the way.
No publisher-oriented launcher has such proposition. In fact, I put forward that no publisher-made launcher has value proposition of any kind for the consumer - why do I need Uplay, Origins, Bethesda launcher, any of them, let alone all of them? What purpose do they serve, other than an annoying mandatory layer? Why do I need Battle.net for the one game I play on there?
Given the lack of positive value proposition, even seemingly minor annoyances are perceived as massive friction. For example, I find Microsoft's offers infuriating - I cannot understand their subscription tiers or services at all, they all have meaningless generic Xbox names that change every 6 months to a different meaningless set of Xbox names, and completely mangle what one can expect as a PC owner, or Xbox owner, or both. I have no idea which Xbox-named offering or app does what and how they relate. It's like IBM naming everything "Watson". I inadvertently committed to a multi-month months subscription thinking one of the games I wanted is available on the cloud, only to discover I was completely mistaken - and it took me a WHILE to confirm that to my satisfaction. I don't know if they are confusing out of ineptitude or intentionally.
Geforce Now, on the other hand, has a meaningful value proposition to me: it lets me play games on the cloud, on any of my devices, and when away from home. That has benefits and value to me that I can clearly understand. It's seamless, it provides clear value to ME, the consumer, and then gets out of the way.
Same with GoG - it lets me download games DRM free onto my machine and save them for the upcoming apocalypse.
Everybody else is just a pain in my kiester :-/
I generally trust Valve to treat me fairly, but EA, Ubisoft, Konami and Bethesda (ZeniMax) have not earned that same trust.
I never shared the key anywhere, and only installed it on 3 machines over 5 years.
For others: kuna means "pine marten" and lipa is "linden tree" in many Slavic languages
- Steam was first, and because of that;
- They have all the features (both for users, and gamedevs)
- They have all the Games
- They have all the Users
In particular, in the Gamedev side, Steam is not a Storefront, they are a platform, much like say, Xbox Live or PSN. For example Steam provides:
- Friends
- Leaderboard
- Chat (Text and Voice)
- Multiplayer/Network api, which handles routing and NAT punch through
- Update/Install delivery globally
- Savegame cloud sync
- etc, etc
Steam docs are actually public, so go take a look: https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features
If you develop your game for Steam, then Steam does a lot of heavy lifting for you.
The features you listed on the API side have almost all come in before competitors have tried to offer similar features - it's seriously impressive.
Indeed, the prevelance of Steam API is such that competing game markets have to make their own replacement Steam.dll, so that the gamedevs dont have to change anything.
Also Valve was a game company first, and i believe developed the first of these technologies for Half-life 2.
- Valve used Half-life 2 to bootsrap Steam (HL2 install disc came with steam)
- Use Steam to provide online services to HL2
- Then the users of HL2 become Steam users (or the sosial network of Steam, as we say today)
- Expose API to other game companies, which brings more Games, and Users
- Add features and keep ahead of competition
- Alot of the features also come from the fact that Valve develops games, and makes the features for themself first, and then exposes them to everybody through Steam API
And I’m not even talking about Counter Strike: Source, quite a few other influential titles including CoD:MW2 required steam for play on PC.
"They have all the features" isn't the case for game developers. Steam backend for developers and statistics is still pretty terrible.
The Microsoft store was obviously not designed by the Xbox division and was hostile to gamers wanting to enable modding or customize the installation.
Likely because Microsoft wanted a locked down app store to sell their Surface devices to schools and business.
Steam does things like converting Ps4 and Nintendo Switch controller input to Xbox 360 input, offering forums where people discuss patches and mods, and other features Epic seems uninterested in offering for whatever reason.
steam sits in my tray. it asks me to hit the update button when there's an update, and then it updates itself and I don't need to go somewhere or else or get hassled to find out why the heck there's an update to "Your Phone" app that I didn't know was on this computer and why microsoft thinks I should install it.
at least they've managed to get the windows store app itself to run a little better than the last few years. It was as guilty as any app of being a slow unstable POS.
steam just kinds of win by default by not being a massive pile of shit.
I'm not much of a gamer - but my five kids are, and I can see the difference. It starts with being multiplatform. Buy once, run on PC, Mac, Linux. Steam's promise isn't cheap subscriptions, or trendy titles. I can buy games with confidence and know they will run - even if school requires a Mac next year or the only machine around is Dad's Linux laptop.
Steam also does a much better job of exposing new titles and player feedback. Shopping Steam is a better experience - even if it isn't as pretty. You know what you are getting when you buy, and the return policy seems fair enough.
It ends with simply working better. For example, last night I loaded up Steam and some PC games from a XBox Live Ultimate subscription. The Steam games worked. None of XBox games would even launch... on a brand new Lenovo gaming machine on Windows 11. Eventually the Xbox app volunteered to fix the messed up installation and ended up leaving 130GB of disk filled with old, inaccessible downloads.
Epic's store shows some promise, but there's a lot of rough edges where it installs some other studio's installer which installs the game. But, the free game thing is pretty nice.
This hasn't been my experience. Plenty of Steam games have fallen by the wayside as operating systems evolve. GOG is slipping in this regard as well, but began as a way to buy and run older games. It also provides some nice pressure for Steam and its publishers to compete and reduce DRM.
Then there is Mac dropping 32 bit support, to which Steam seems to have thrown up their hands.
Steam's copy on a 32-bit title is much better than GOG. It's big, it's in red, it's clear that this title is limited because its 32-bit.
On GOG, you have a small line of text at the bottom of the Mac system requirements. That's way too small a warning (try to find it on this page: https://www.gog.com/game/darwinia)!
It's what I want for the Apple App store, too. Don't charge any less, just make it worth it.
It's less bad than the App Store since game devs technically have a choice, but in effect it's often the same.
That said, I did forget until now that GamePass exists - Microsoft isn't really challenging Steam anymore, they're doing kind of an end-run around them with their games subscription service, and it frankly kinda rocks. But for those who still want to outright purchase games, they still sell on Steam, because, again, Valve have made it worthwhile to pay the 30% to at least get the userbase and marketing bump.
* Just works
* It's simple
* Cloud saves all of my games (with a few exceptions when the game developer doesn't enable it for whatever reason, this has only been for a few games so I'm not sure why)
* Family sharing - this is HUGE for me. I can't re-buy every single game for my kids, so the fact that they can just play a game I purchased on their own account when I'm not online is an insane life saver.
* Steam sales- yeah maybe they aren't quite as good as they used to be.. but still, before steam started doing sales I was buying $60 games. Now I generally just wait 6 months and never pay more than $20 for a game, usually even less
* You could argue the indie game world would basically not exist without them. Indie games are basically all I even play on steam- and I buy a lot of games
I could keep going on.. but honestly Steam just works. It's not the prettiest, but that's fine. Steam is like a web 1.0 site that does everything you want it to, and anything since then has been web 2.0 pieces of garbage that try to do all this fancy stuff but are unusable or annoying as hell.
Epic Games Launcher is garbage. Microsoft store is garbage.
So yeah it's weird, I am 100% OK with Valve getting the premium whereas I think it's sickening that apple/android do what they do. They are basically a walled garden. Steam is not, there are infinite ways to distribute a PC game.
Probably the oldest tech company that can really say "we are not evil" and instead are actually helping both the consumer and developers.
Awful search, awful review system, confusing interface and.. that's it? I don't see how the app store even compares.
Biggest piece of the puzzle is there is no alternative. You are 100% forced to use the app store.
No one forces you to use steam. There is generally always another way to buy a PC game, and if a developer chose to put it only on steam.. well, then that's the developer's fault and not steam's fault (I get that steam is mostly a monopoly on PC, so that's not entirely fair to say, but still.. the developer can always just throw their game on GOG or itch.io etc easy enough).
So Apple's entire store is built upon forcing you to go put your product there, offering no alternatives, and then taking a large cut. Not to mention almost the entire mobile market is a hot piece of trash creating apps/games that are only there to suck up your money in microtransactions/ads or whatever. And Apple encourages that because they want the cut of all the bullshit money they pull out of people.
Steam doesn't do that. Sure you can find some little garbage people put on there, but that's few and far between and not the norm- I pretty much never see that on my daily use.
Steam still operates in a way that provides a great platform for people who love to make games and people who love to play games.
Any comparison to the mobile market of ios/android is entirely disengenious.
I don't game very often, but the way Steam "just works" can't be understated enough.
It's not perfect. I've run into weird bugs occasionally, though they were likely the fault of a specific game.
However, it's miles ahead of other game launchers I've dealt with. I'm a casual gamer, so if I end up fighting the game launcher and update mechanism for more than a few minutes, I'm just going to give up and do something else. Steam has come as close as I've seen to streamlining that experience for me.
Untitled Goose Game got me back into piracy after 15 years of abstinence because of the anti-Steam launch. I would have gladly paid were it on Steam.
It just sets up everything for me so I don't have to mess with lutris, various wine versions and whatnot.
I've found that using the libraries included in steam also removed all manual "fiddling" compared to running it with native arch linux libraries.
I never got a fondness for stream as a result and avoid it whenever possible.
On that note, i was really surprised to find out that epic let's you start plenty of your games without having to open the client. That's a killer feature for me. Family sharing is too.
I have the same experience with Steam. After not using for a few days, it begins downloading hundreds of megabytes of updates and has to restart itself before you can do anything with it.
A reasonable price has to be found by buying steam keys from [HumbleBundle/GreenManGaming/etc].
I don't play the latest anymore. I will wait a year or two and get it on sale. I get a patched, solid game with well known reviews and the community wiki already filled out(so valuable in many modern games!), for much cheaper AND with that much cheaper price I don't have to worry so much about being gouged because my digital download has to travel further...
But while your point is relevant to the marketing person, it is irrelevant to me as a consumer.
As per most humans of course, I never feel like I have enough. Like many, I have a mortgage and so am required to work until the day I die to keep a roof over my family's head. Not a glamourous roof, but ours.
So when I have friends overseas getting the same digital files as I am for less money, I feel ripped off.
For physical items in Australia you could argue the large distances for transport explain the cost/convenience difference.
But on the internet where the cost of information transport is negligible, a minimum 20% mark up is too blatant for the exact same convenience.
On other hand Steam is just a software that works across multiple OS.
In Sweden we pay a tax on each harddrive and other storage media to cover this sharing. It's alled Private sharing tax. It's distributed between creators by some organisation. Steam and other online stores prevents this law from working as intended. This has put me off Steam from the beginning already.
I believe Steam got so big because they were first to deliver what everyone wanted, buy games without having to wait until release in your country. In Sweden we often had to wait half a year or more before the games showed up. I did not buy games on Steam for years because of the sharing aspects. I wanted to be able to share the good games with my kids or friends. On steam you don't own the games, you only rent them for a one time fee. Steam can take them down at any time.
> Privatkopieringsersättning är en lagstadgad kompensation för det inkomstbortfall som kopiering för privat bruk av musik, film och tv från en laglig förlaga medför för kulturskapare med upphovsrätt i de kopierade verken. Ersättningen betalas av tillverkare eller importörer av sådana lagringsmedier som är "särskilt ägnade för" privatkopiering,[1] som tomma CD, DVD, externa hårddiskar, USB-minnen och mp3-spelare.
I think the takeaway is that on Windows there is a choice, and people (users and developers) actively choose Steam, whereas on iOS there just is not that choice. The market cannot exercise a preference.
I think it's worth adding that Steam's (more recent) refund policy is also a big deal. Even if you don't need it, knowing that it's there can influence buying decisions because it feels more like you can "try before you buy" (although this actually involves paying before you get to try and then putting yourself in a situation where Steam could refuse to give you your money back).
After using Steam almost exclusively for years, picking up a Nintendo Switch was jarring because there's pretty much no way to walk back from a purchase even if you have only played it for a few seconds (or just downloaded it). This also goes with games perpetually sitting at AAA release day price points, release dates often being unclear or promoted more than the actual release and sales affecting your wishlist being undercommunicated in comparison to Steam.
Steam simply lures you back in by sending you that e-mail that the game you wishlisted five years ago is currently on sale at a 90% discount.
In fact Valve has recently decided to shorten the big sales cycle to one every 28 days (plus the small weekly flash sales).
For most games most of the time, buying and launching a game via Steam is less hassle than pirating it. It's not the DRM or the price that most people really, really hate about buying games. It's that lots of DRM made the game absolute shit to try to play.
Code wheels, flipping to a particular page of a printed manual to search for the fourth word on the eighth line, putting a CD in a drive to play a game fully installed to your internal drives, rootkits in your games to keep you from copying them, tricks in the disk formats to make it impossible to make a backup, and other industry asshattery made it easier in many cases to pirate a game than to play one you'd actually bought. Valve came onto the scene with a service that would collect your money rather than sending your CC info to every little indie game web page, let you download things on the new higher speed connections, not have a limited number of times to download and install, and will do tech support for the launcher. Then they added features for developers like achievements tracked outside the games, friends lists that work across games and game studios, network saves, and more. First mover advantage can't be discounted here, but making the experience of buying and maintaining your game catalog user friendly was the big selling point.
You cannot release an app for iOS absent iOS app store.
That's the problem. Apples becomes the gatekeeper instead of your own technical prowess
Sure, thats needed for Steam Deck these days, but other vendors basically not support Linux at all, let alone contribute back!
Plus, I think Steam is a superior product.
That being said, I also try to buy on GoG as much as possible, since I really prefer to have DRM-free games and I want some competition in the market.
I have an Xbox Game Pass subscription, but will never buy anything from the Microsoft store because their products are bundled into encrypted archives (so no modding/changing games). Plus, it has a nasty habit of leaving 40+GB binaries on my system that can't be deleted from within Windows.
Unless the publisher pulls it or pushes an update cutting music because of license deals expiring. Or gets a stealthy replacement with a worse remaster. Or your OS drops 32 bit / x86 support.
Steam provides the game. It "will be around for a long time."
It is not Steams job to ensure the game runs on every device or OS version for eternity however. That is up to the publisher of the game.
If you install Steam on an older version of the OS that does have 32bit/x86 support, Steam does its job.
I do think however that Steam should add clarification to the "game requirements" to specify OS version or hardware however.
So even if your game is 64-bit, you still need 32-bit libraries and OS support to run the DRM. Sucks when either your OS doesn't support 32 bit (MacOS, OpenBSD), you don't want to add 32 bit multilib, or you're doing funky emulation on a non-x86 machine where you can only effectively emulate x86_64 (see: ppc64le).
These are all niche situations (the last one almost facetiously so), but the point stands. I really wish valve would release a 64 bit client on Windows and Linux :/
That's not true. I have a game that was pulled by the publisher (legal issues, don't know the details). But everyone who bought it can still download it and play it. Pulling it in this case just means no one can buy it anymore.
It was actually shocking to me when I found out that stuff I bought on other online stores wasn't available anymore for whatever reason. For this reason I still buy stuff on steam but I don't have enough trust to buy anything in another store.
The music cutting issue is valid. However, it can be overcome by leaving the game downloaded and turning off updates for it. Plus, the game will always be available, which was my point.
But the flip side to that is Steam also automatically moves games up a tier. So a base game bought at launch might get automatically updated to a special addition which includes all the DLC and/or texture pack updates.
> Or your OS drops 32 bit / x86 support.
I can still download the game, which is all steam promises. From there, I can make it work via VM.
Apple obsoleted all 32 bit iphone apps a few years ago, so not even remotely comparable to steam in this area imho.
They simply started out well and managed not to loose their lead.
Valve uses its 30% cut extremely effectively by continuing to invest in the happiness and convenience of its customers and, just as importantly, its developers. For instance the profits of smaller developers dramatically increased after the new discovery/search features landed, enabling exactly the kind of people who would love your game to find it easily. Contrast that with every other store where it's basically impossible to find anything but the most mainstream top sellers.
Maybe Epic could afford to actually make the Epic Games Store a useful product if they took a higher cut of sales?
The lock-in cost is real and literal. It's far easier to migrate to a different voice comms system (which is free, usually), since you only have to convince your existing social network to create an account on the new thing.
That said, buying certain games can lock you into using Windows. So there's that. But it's far better than buying games on modern consoles, which force you to use some special-snowflake hardware just to access the game you bought.
It's impossible to completely prevent all classes of lock-in, but it can be minimized. I would argue that my personal lock-in is minimized, across the axes I care about, by buying everything from Steam and GOG. No hard Windows dependency, no silly hardware dependency, and I'll almost certainly still have access to my games in 40 years.
And as long as Valve does not burn that trust (there have been a few hickups in the very first years, but quickly forgotten), their lead can only grow. You can't throw money at the problem of potential customers wondering what the chances are that the service will still be around in five years. I'd even say that throwing money would only increase doubt: the more money invested, the higher the threshold of success required to be considered worthwhile of continuing.
FWIW, I did not mean that Steam is necessarily the literal first game marketplace, but to my (limited) knowledge it was the first one that got large enough to become the "default" option.
There is no option to force consumers to use the other products with regulation. They will only be driven by the competence/exclusives/network effects of other platforms. Maybe the end outcomes of having multiple options will simply be a partial result of how competent the other development teams are in comparison to the larger and objectively better platforms, in spite of the fact that consolidation is considered bad in principle. It seems to be getting harder and harder for even large entities like Bethesda to create successful alternatives in spite of all the resources they have.
The blowback that multiple companies have gotten for choosing to release games as Epic Game Store exclusives and Discord becoming gradually ubiquitous are what I would consider examples of this phenomenon. Average people simply want to use the larger, better platforms, and they aren't convinced to move when alternatives exist.
Because of the sheer size of platforms like these, success might just be defined in terms of momentum and ubiquity by now. You would be up against convincing a subset of millions and millions of people that you can deliver a functionally superior platform, and if their friends decide not to move, then they would have good reason not to move also. Developer cuts tend to be criticized, but I would think that most users of Steam wouldn't even be aware of such issues since they stay local to the development side and don't impact their experience, and so they keep using Steam anyway.
First mover, just works, not too bloated, all your games are on it.
It's possible to build a better storefront/launcher, but for some weird reason, every competing one except GoG fails point #2 or point #3.
But the real thing is... I've been a Steam user since I needed to go legit with HL1 to play NS1 on public servers, over 20 years ago. Valve has never screwed me over in that time. Never. They treat me like a valued customer, like they like my business. I mean, not like I'm a VIP. Just like they actually like their users, and want them happy.
I guess the lock-in of my over-600-game library doesn't hurt. But the reason that number keeps climbing (that's an average of 30 games a year!) is because Valve keeps redeeming my trust, better than literally any other business I've dealt with, ever. I've abandoned my accounts with other services because the $20 or $200 of games wasn't worth the hassle of dealing with companies that were obviously actively trying to fuck me short-term and damn the long-term.
Praise be to St Gaben. The crazy part is, I actually mean it.
Valve is just simply the only company you CAN trust, and that's their massive competitive advantage and something Microsoft and Apple and Google with their trillions of dollars can't buy. When they make a decision that makes people upset, the CEO will directly talk with customers on sites like Reddit. They've been a force against the imposition of heavyweight DRM. They've voluntarily introduced liberal policies like family sharing and offline play that other companies refused to implement. Valve is an honest company in an industry full of conmen operating at a loss.
It's probably wishful thinking, but I like to think Steam is such a force because Valve have earned and kept the trust of many (initially very skeptical) gamers over the course of _decades_ at this point. I'd rewind the clock to the Before Steam times if I could, but short of that--if I have to pick my poison and choose _some_ platform--it's Steam with zero hesitation.
Just imagine, alternative app stores, you keep almost all the convenience of the apple one, for free.
You can also give keys away, but if you do that too much, they do apparently limit you ;)
Another thing: The store app is not a disaster. Compare it with Windows, Epic… Those are all horrible apps that mostly behave like browsers, but then differ in some ways (in addition to the often bad performance). Hell, for a long time, the back button did not work in the Epic store. Steam managed to have their store not be a disaster pretty much since its existence.
And Windows/Epic are not even the worst examples. I remember when Origin started, they had no language setting and forced you into whatever GeoIP decided. I don’t even remember what my issue with UPlay was, but the experience was bad enough that I would never again play a game that uses it.
I would be quite surprised to hear that Microsoft didn't cut some sort of Very Good Deal with Valve.
It does help, but not because of the internet. From memory they were the first digital game shop. They basically invented the market for shops for digital content. Apple would copy it some years later with the iPhone app store.
Also services like steam are naturally sticky/monopolistic because there's a network effect with the games. Consumers don't want to have multiple services that do the same thing, so if you have a handful of games on steam, may as well use it for all.
There really needs to be protocols for ownership etc, such that the UI is decoupled from the ownership aspect. otherwise network effect makes it monopoly-esque. It's a principle that promotes greater competition across many types of businesses
I also believe, that over long Steam might me sold by Microsoft. MS and Google are building a different stack/ecosystem.
From the dev side they also make it easy to have a game on steam and still sell it elsewhere. Steam keys are free to generate, so you can sell for any price or anywhere, but it keeps users stuck to the steam platform.
Steam has also never not let me play a game just because some service is down. Yes it locks you out after an extended period offline, but I'm not crashing out of a game because I lost internet for a second or some DRM server crashed.
It just works and doesn't get in the way. In all my time using Steam, I've never had a case when it wasn't maxing out my bandwidth during a download. The only friction I can remember is with Half Life 2, which required you to use Steam to decode the files installed with your physical DVD and that took ages. But that was the first real game ever shipped on the platform. On the dev side, Steam seems pretty easy to integrate.
If I were in the market for a PC gaming rig today, I'd either use Xbox Cloud Gaming or buy a gaming laptop. As someone that always maintained a desktop gaming PC for 40 years.
As a selfish consumer though, I hugely wish we just had Steam and Netflix:
The Origins and Uplays and Battle.nets of the world exist solely to make my life difficult, refusing to play my game when I want it due to obscure update required or forgotten password or old email account (especially when they are an overlay on top of Steam), and have zero repeat zero positively zero benefit to myself as a consumer. It is blatantly anti-consumer, and not made with customer view in mind.
(Gog.com gets a pass because it allows me to JUST download the game, with no launcher and crap, so essentially going into opposite direction from all publisher-owned platforms and provides a unique value proposition)
Same for Netflix. It's fine. It's good. It's great! Over the last 5 years, proliferation of Disneys, Amazons, HBOs, Hulus, CBS All Access, Paramount Ultra Plus Exclusive Diamond Platinum... the whatEVERs, all they do is make me have to guess which service is content I want to play on. All they are, at any level, is "we want more money for less consumer convenience, and we think we can get away with it due to exclusive content lock-in we refuse to license to the convenient platform".
I understand I'm supposed to vote with my money, but with exclusive lock-in that's difficult. My kid wants their Octonauts and their Stinky & Dirties, dammit :D
It’s not really a matter of principal though!
> [the competing platforms] have zero repeat zero positively zero benefit to myself as a consumer.
The reason Steam and Netflix are so good and continue to exist in such a good state is exactly because of the competition. However, because of exclusivity, licensing, ownership, et cetera, that also means you eventually may want to deal with said competition.
On the other hand, my Steam account now represents a very expensive point of failure should it somehow get hacked or Valve decides to robo ban me.
It might be a better business _for the the business owners_ with less licensing fees due to less third party content and higher prices, but that's not the same as being better for the users.
It doesn't matter if it's better for the users if it is not sustainable. That's how you go out of business, which is no good for anyone.
I don't believe in this case that is demonstrably true. What has improved for me as a consumer with either platform since competition came - other then less content?
In particular with Steam, I don't believe there has been a single improvement relevant to me. Uplay, ea origin, battle.net are purely net negatives to me, in their own right and in their impact on steam.
Big Picture Mode only came about because they tried developing Steam Machines to compete with Microsoft potentially locking everything into the app store.
I don't think UPlay and Battle.net have caused any changes though, lol. Their only attempts at competition have been game exclusivity.
Didn't the refund policy come after they lost a court case in Australia [0]. Sure they could have made it country-specific but that would a) have been an incredibly bad look and b) promptet similar lawsuits in other countries with a semblance of consumer protection laws and c) probably doesn't actually lose tham that much money as it also means that people are less reluctant to purchase.
[0] https://variety.com/2018/gaming/news/valve-australia-fine-12...
I agree with this in principle but I think it's only necessarily true when production and distribution are separated from each other. As it stands now, I don't see much actual competition or innovation in any of the streaming services, but rather the contrary: the experience is worse now than it was 10 years ago. The only thing we have is a never ending arms race of new stuff to watch being kept exclusive (which you mention) while the UIs move backwards and prices creep up.
What we have now is akin to the studio system and I don't see why it shouldn't be broken up in the same manner.
Games, tv shows, films, these are the content we want. Netflix, HBO go, Hulu, steam, battle.net, these are content access systems.
What consumers want is legal access to all content they desire with competing offerings for the way in which they access the content. Competition drives quality, innovation, consumer value.
The problem is that we have a system today where the content access systems have monopoly control over subsets of the content. So there's no competition around the access system- if you want that content, it comes bundled inside that content access system. You have no choice if you want the content, so why would anyone invest in making theirs the best?
I use Netflix and Disney. They are mostly pretty equivalent functionality with different shows. But Disney+ seems to be a faceslappingly appalling waste of large Disney franchises.
Mostly I am screaming for canon watchlists. Whether it is in release order, or universe-timeline order, or "makes most sense watched this way" order. Or all of them as options.
So many friggin' Marvel movies and TV shows and yet I have to google some random page to find the order I should watch them in?!?
Same for Star Wars!
Come on Disney, kids keep growing through teenagerdom into adulthood all the time. Why not make it easy to hook them to watch your stuff?
end rant
It's definitely there for the Marvel movies. I'm watching them in release order. If you go to the Marvel screen on Disney Plus, you'll see lists for "Cinematic Universe Phase One," "Cinematic Universe Phase Two," etc. They also have one for timeline order.
Battle.net on the other hand predates Steam and they made some of the most significant PC-only games of all time.
Having said that, I think you might be right for a different reason. Blizzard will likely eat a massive amount of humble pie post-2021 and Steam releases would seem like a reasonable gesture of to restoring community goodwill.
That is to say, yeah Battle.net today has far more users than the Bethesda launcher, but it still predominately suffers from the "users don't want to be here, its just where the games are at" issue that the Bethesda & Rockstar launchers suffer from.
I think it's likely that the Xbox acquisition will result in a sunset of Battle.net as well. It'll probably resemble a long-term plan like: deeper Battle.net/Xbox account integration to share purchases and social state, release of all titles on Steam & Xbox stores, forced migration of Battle.net accounts to Xbox accounts, deprecation of the Battle.net launcher; 2 years minimum, probably closer to 3.
All other launchers are garbage. Origin doesn’t even render text properly on my 4k screen, and pretty much all of them forgets my login each week.
I'm actually surprised this hasn't been rolled into the Xbox launcher, which still exists right (on PC)?
Microsoft did this to themselves by not having a standard package manager installed by default.
But the Microsoft Store is pretty bad; ie. I still cannot install games to my second ntfs hard drive due to some weird error, so I don't use it.
For the record, I have no issue with Steam's launcher because it basically works (although it gets slammed on big releases, which is an issue) and it doesn't force you into a nonexistent social network.
Doubt they'll drop it, but who knows.
This makes absolutely no sense to me. * first of all they could reduce the patch size * second, what need is there to update a launcher this often, why not pull the required info from some online database
This thing is wasting internet traffic without any apparent good reason.
It'd be the same if you were to open Chrome once a month and it wasn't autoupdating itself in the background. Steam doesn't have an autoupdate background process like Chrome does.
Not only with proton or the controller db, but save-game sync, multiplayer invites, their server browser, and everything being tied to my login.
Even managing my game library on steam is pleasant! And the social features they have are.. actually pretty useful. Having a friends list of people who I game with is nice, as is the ability to have low friction conversations.
I’ve even gone to the steam discussion forums for games that are on Steam but I own elsewhere.
What's the better way?
Downloading games off Steam is easier than pirating them. If that's not progress, I don't know what is. Definitely not the same with movies and music which tells me they don't want it to be that easy.
It actually is, it's just called "streaming" instead of downloading*.
For a very long time, Netflix was the go-to place for any movies, and piracy was on the decline. Now all the old media companies (who have even bigger god complexes than game studios) are doing the exact same thing everyone in this thread is discussing with alternate launchers, and creating their own streaming services. And piracy is suddenly back on the rise. Only time will tell whether this will play out the same way as the OP, or whether the flexibility afforded by inherently streamable format will allow them to succeed in splintering where game studios failed.
*Two notes on this:
1) it's a benefit afforded by having a much more linear data format
2) despite what HN commenters may believe, it's only a small percentage of users that care about owning content rather than being able to conveniently access it)
In the US, maybe? Because here in Europe Netflix or any other streaming service has never been the go-to place for _any_ movie. You get to watch what they offer today, but if you want a specific movie, tough luck.
Steam is the place to be for 99.9% of PC gaming, anywhere in the world. This is why gaming piracy is pretty much dead while people are still downloading movies and tv shows to this day.
This is like the famous Dropbox comment
"For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem"
I've used the file verification and repair feature many times. It's also a convenient place to enumerate the games I have access to so I can download them on a new PC.
I'm sure this isn't the absolute best timeline, but it sure beats a land where Origin and UPlay successfully beatup Steam and we're all forced back onto walled gardens. And it seems sustainable, the second largest platform (IMO) out there is GOG which is owned and operated by CD Projekt Red - it seems like game studios see a lot of utility from owning a mostly open platform like this.
Centralized software install/update, with a good CDN behind it, is a pretty huge advantage. Even if you don't care about any of the other features of the Steam launcher, that one alone is worth it. Having every publisher run their own download servers means they're much more subject to getting overloaded under heavy demand, or becoming permanently unavailable if the publisher goes out of business.
And generally I think Steam staying alive is much more likely than random places serving stuff. Even if it were DRM free. Just looking at history quite many services have come and gone on PC.
The most important services are of course the first two, and in this sense, you can think of them as basically something like apt, but built with software that requires you provide proof purchase before downloading it. This helps explain why having to use multiple launchers provokes such frustration among users--it means you basically have two package managers running on your system.
Maybe if software update were a part of standard OS services, it wouldn't be such an issue, but as it isn't [on desktops], another platform providing such services becoming popular for doing so shouldn't be surprising.
On the mac the store makes things, in general, easier. On windows its comedy. I wonder how many folks like myself now just instinctively avoid it.
I don't work at Microsoft, but if I had to guess there are several teams working on individual components and they lack a clear leader that enforce a global vision so it falls apart at integration time.
I had an Xbox game pass trial. When it expired it closed the game I was playing. No message. When I tried to reopen the game nothing happened. None of my games worked. But most importantly, it never told me why. Nowhere in the interface does it communicate “your trial ended” or “hey resubscribe to game pass” or “you can’t play games anymore” instead everything just stops working with no explanation. I was midway through contacting support when I pieced together that maybe the trial ended, and confirmed that on their website. That information isn’t available in the desktop app.
(This was over a year ago, hopefully it’s fixed now?)
I don’t think I’ve had Hennessy ever in my life, but they own my favorite Scotch and some friends’ favorite scotch. They don’t go bragging about it, they just collect the checks.
Forgetting that Bethesda is owned by Microsoft is easier to do if it’s not on XBox.
Not to mention that it basically kills modding if you don't also want to crack the game yourself/get a pre-cracked version from somewhere.
More cynically, this seems a "games generation" where Microsoft is trying to "win PC gamers back" by being very Steam friendly/Steam forward in their PC releases and strategy. There's a lot better PR for Microsoft here if Bethesda migrates everything to Steam, and it may just be for those PR reasons.
the music is great too https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fj21GFbEQog
maybe I should reinstall tonight too...
Later: … oh NO.
If Microsoft is anchoring one of its largest gaming properties to Steam, then what are their eventual intentions for Steam & Valve? :(
0: https://gagadget.com/media/cache/9b/6f/9b6f3304b05c9c98449db...
1: https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidewalt/2012/03/07/valve-gab...
Unrelatedly, it got me thinking... What if Microsoft bought Yahoo and Docker?
I trust that Steam will be around for a very long time. I can download DRM-free installers from GOG. Everyone else? I don't know, I have much less confidence.
I wonder if they tried the subscription thing first but then gave up and just went with the buy model as a least-worst choice at a point in the cycle where it was too late to back out of the whole endeavour.
Stadia uses custom hardware so games can't just run on Stadia as-is, they have to be ported, which requires investment from the game's developers (or a porting shop).
I have to imagine most publishers that Google approached expected them to foot some of the bill for that work, if not all of it.
They should have gone with standard hardware basically.
With Google's reputation of killing products, and the hubris of thinking they could just waltz into the gaming space and be competitive within a year, it's no wonder that no one took them seriously and the product never took off.
Other streaming services like GeForce Now (sp?) let you install games you already own on Steam and play them on a cloud computer, which is a much more attractive model I think.
But of course adding a non-Steam version of the game doesn't magically give you a Steam version of the game absent a key-based import (which Valve supports both technically and a matter of policy).
Managing a hundred different games from a dozen different sources is a pain.
If we lived in some fantasy utopia with standardized identity authentication and easily-verifiable-cryptographically-secure-proof-of-purchase then maybe distributed content distribution could make sense.
Audio works fine almost always [1]. Controls usually work ok (I use both an x360 controller and a steam controller) but sometime it requires a bit of connecting and disconnecting, but to be honest it is probably more of a proton issue than steam link.
Overall I'm quite happy, although it is not yet a seamless console-like experience.
[1] There was a brief period last year when steam would crash when running under PulseAudio, and switching to alsa would prevent audio to be streamed. The issue fixed itself, either because of a steam update or a system update.
There are 2 problems with this.
1. You can't downloaded patches of game updates (with good ux). You would need to downloaded the entire game for every update which is bad.
2. You can't install the game to the system without a program.
>and payments from their website
Steam can provide less friction to make a payment since someone likely already has payment information attached to their account. A 25% cut is worth it if they can make more than 25% revenue than they otherwise would have made.
There is also the marketing potential of being in the steam store. Gamers looking for a new game can see / find your game. You can see people on your friends list playing your game. You can see friends reviewing the game or getting achievements on your feed.
And with Steam(at this moment) there is no way to tell it to "please don't update this game and let me play this version". You can disable the automatic updates but you won't be able to run a game from the launcher if you are not uptodate because the Play button is changed to Update.
Lol no patch installers were a thing before Steam. And usually more efficient - for the longest time Steam would re-download any changed files.
That would essentially be a launcher. We are talking about a downloaded on a website. A website can't patch a file, not know what patches you need to get up to date.
I wonder how many of those can be retrieved (and are playable) from archived copies?
Edit: available meaning "available for purchase" (my mistake, thanks for the corrections)
On other hand purchase might be disabled by developer, but game page is still visible: https://store.steampowered.com/app/210550/Angry_Birds_Space/
If I buy a game in store X, and it’s available on store/platform Y, I should be able to play it on both.
Unfortunately, I don’t think that’s the case.
I recently bought a Nintendo Switch, and although I’m happy overall, some games have very heavy limits built in (think: max number of units in games), and they’re also available on PC/steam, but I would have to buy the games twice. I just can’t get over myself to do that, I shouldn’t have to do it. At the very least make the license transferable! :)
It actually works quite well. I can purchase a movie on the Roku Movie Store (powered by Vudu) and have it appear as purchased on my Apple TV with iTunes, and all of the big studios are members so not that many films are missing.
You also now get a Movies Anywhere code in the box of most Blu-ray purchases, which works exactly like you would expect and appears on all the stores as if it were a Roku or Apple TV purchase. (Ultraviolet codes are grandfathered in if you have any of those.)
Moving outside of PC games, I think things get very hard to argue for cross-portability. Each platform has a unique (closed-source) tech stack, and that requires paying developers to write code to take advantage of the features available on each of those platforms. Since portability incurs measurable costs, it's hard to argue, for me, that users shouldn't bear some of the brunt of those costs. If legislation were already in place, such a price could be built in to the product.
The problem, however, is Valve. Monopolies have no incentive to open up to sharing with outside entities. Steam likes to seem open with abilities to hand out keys and such and a good API, but the reality is it is all in service of keeping people locked to their platform. Meanwhile, GOG has shown a willingness to hand out licenses for games you own on Steam, Epic Games has talked about being open to such initiatives, etc.
But in particle this bridge between stores is anti-GDPR and can be abused from some stores.
Say I'm a publisher; I can sell my games for 5% cheaper than all the competing platforms and let my installer/store languish. All it needs to do is let people buy the game, and my competitors can do the hard work of actually distributing the game, updating it, supporting features like community pages, friend lists, steam workshop etc.
People buy the game from me because it's cheaper, and the other platforms can pay the actual cost of supporting that license.
These keys are often stolen or pirated.
The Steam subreddit has a page dedicated to it https://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/wiki/dangersofkeyresellers
The keys from these sites are frequently revoked after they're discovered stolen.
However, all of the sites listed at isthereanydeal.com I have tried are not that. It's not clear what the business model is, but they're absolutely depending on steam to deliver and maintain the content, and it's not clear that steam gets any money out of the transaction.
Bethesda games are a good example of that. You can pay 80$ for Skyrim VR or get it on g2a for 20$. This is just because the game is very frequently on sale for about that amount.
Consequently, it's good business to onboard them, even at an immediate loss.
In practice, I think this actually hurts the established guys. A big reason I prefer to buy on Steam is because the majority of my library is in Steam. A PC gaming library also has more longevity.
In general, I would be reluctant to buy multi-platform titles on the Switch. If porting was available, I would buy certain titles on the Switch or pay to move it to Switch. I would then pay to move everything over to Steam if my Switch died.
Mandating transferable licenses across platforms means that a PC player who has no intention of ever owning a console device now has to pay for the engineering of the port (and vice versa for console players).
On the same platform, OTOH, this seems like a decent idea.
Download a legal copy of the game from anywhere. No DRM, but your license key gets checked against the blockchain.
Back in the day, you can borrow your friends game after they were done. DVDs can be shared. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I also don't know how IPFS people would feel if they became the CDN for commercial software.
The feature would be that it's structurally decentralized in a way that decouples content creators from delivery.
What does that have to do with IPFS? IPFS doesn't really care what's on top of it.
All of the prospective "stores" can host their own IPFS nodes and contribute to the bandwidth availability, just like how a CDN works.
Isn't that DRM?