Comment by AstralStorm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by AstralStorm | Hacker News Reader

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Steam is successful because its advertising is rather low key, showing a popup with offers, and providing a search, directory plus suggestions. Their gain is from consumer analytics too. (They also take a cut for using their platform from the game developers or publishers.

It also provides some added value like achievements, basic social media in forms of forums and chat, some (somewhat broken at times) controller handling, some bug reporting, cloud save handling, voice communication handling, even some space to host game related content. On the whole, more value added than taken by paltry ads. The bigger value minus is the "Steam DRM" - requirement for an online connection to use the downloaded application. And providence help you if you post inflammatory comments under an account that owns game access licenses. You will lose that.

The other ones don't do it quite as effectively, esp. the suggestions part. Being a game library and download service is not what makes Steam in particular good, though it is an essential part.

Steam's most important advertising is actually quite in your face, and used to occupy a good part of the gaming sphere for a couple of weeks each year: their sales with discounts between 50-90% (calculated from the current "regular price" which for older games is often already far below original retail price). They've switched it up in recent years, making the summer sales tamer in exchange for more weekly sales, but the concept stays the same: sell "old" games for prices you can't refuse. And that's why people don't mind: when they tell you it's a great offer it genuinely is.

Everyone else in gaming is fighting for the newest releases. That's the battleground XBox and Playstation use, and that's where newcomers like the Epic Game Store try to beat Steam. Steam meanwhile is pretty toned down on new releases, and is going for long tail sales instead.

They are really good at it, too. Fallout 4 for just 8€? Brilliant, I've heard so much about it, let me check it out. But just 5€ more and I get all the DLC? And there's a bundle with Skyrim? Before I realise whats going on I spent 30€ on games released a decade ago that I don't really have time to play anyway.

Bethesda releases aren't games you play, they're hobbies you pursue. Imagine all the enjoyable hours you'll spend browsing nexus and creating a stable environment for each of the games you own. It's almost like having an aquarium.

Skyrim is the raspberry pi of video games. So many hours getting something “just right” to the follow up by never using it for that purpose. Always good to have around though just in case.

It’s important to take Steam DRM in context. In a world where DRM was becoming more intrusive by the day, and you had to contend with every game having its own unique way to mess your system up in its fight against piracy, Steam provided one single DRM system that almost everybody agrees to use. For consumers, worse than no DRM, but miles ahead of the status quo it replaced.

Also, Steam does have an offline mode. You just have to ping the mothership every few weeks iirc.

Yeah it feels like people forgot about the Sony Rootkit DRM (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...) that ended up exploited by malware.

In some ways, Steam has provided an experience better than having no DRM. I can hop in a friend's computer and download any game I've purchased. Or I can delete old games to free up space and redownload them later (without having to deal with DVDs or external USB drives).

The tradeoff is handing over the control of my game library to a company. I can see how that tradeoffs can be compelling to some and not worthwhile to others.

The thing is Valve is the sort of company that has built that elusive relationship - trust - so much so that I would expect them to arrange for some way to keep people most of their games if the service was shutdown, and if they didn’t, it would be a surprise.

If Valve ever stabbed me in the back I could just pirate my library back, so I'm not that worried.

It's also important to remember that SteamWorks DRM is optional. There are many games that will work without steam installed.

To add to this, the original Witcher is the game that made me decide I was never again going to install a game directly. It was going to be steam or gog, and I've kept to that over the years with few exceptions (rpg maker games, etc).

As a freelance developer I would run vmware with a dedicated partition for the VM. The VM was linux and the partition itself was either ext3 or reiserFS (can't remember).

Since Windows didn't recognize the partition, the DRM for witcher repartitioned that drive so it would have a "secret" partition to track who knows what.

That affected my ability to earn money and was doing things to my PC I would never have accepted if asked.

compared to that, steam is a godsend. I understand people complaining about steam, but to this day I'm still a huge fan of steam for what it forced the gaming industry to accept.

I still prefer GoG due to its policies, but steam is fantastic.

You can download all 3 Witcher games without DRM after buying them on GoG. Did you have the standalone version? I don't understand why they put a DRM in it.

This was back when Witcher first released, they removed the DRM at some point.

Here are a few links referencing it.

https://steamcommunity.com/app/33250/discussions/0/558752451...

https://www.gog.com/forum/the_witcher/tags_drm_in_the_witche...

Most of the games from big studios still use their own DRM on Steam because Steam DRM is worthless, I can crack it in 5 seconds for any game on steam, that's why you often see games that have Steam+Denuvo or Steam+CustomDRM.

I use gog.com instead of steam where I can. They provide DRM free installers for all their games (this may have changed more recently not sure).

Anyway gog is really great :)

> "Steam DRM" - requirement for an online connection to use the downloaded application

It's not a requirement. It's to the discretion of the game developer on whether or not they want to require it to play their game.

True, but it's (as far as I know) the only DRM that is not listed in the store page. "Third party" DRMs like Denuvo must be listed there, but Steam's gets a free pass.

For me it’s about context. Steam ads do not bother me that much since it’s easy to turn off/dismiss, but also importantly they're "first party" - I’m already on steam and a gaming mood so I don’t mind checking out offers for other games.

Streaming ads are annoying because under no circumstances I'd be thinking of picking up tampons while watching a football game.

What's your thoughts on targeted ads in general?

Setting aside the ease of dismissing - would you be willing to give up some data to allow them to be smarter (having more context)?

I am not willing to give up my personal data for the sake of advertising. I don’t understand stand why advertisers need to be so intrusive. If you visit a tech news site vs a celebrity news site like TMZ, you can make some generalizations about the audiences without more evasive targeting.

Not OP but honestly i am tired of it. If i'm on stackoverflow, i want to see ads for a new course, a job posting or a clickbait tech article on a new stack that makes Java bearable. When i'm researching some obscure history, i don't mind ads about JC Martin latest book available on amazon (and i might even buy it!), and when i'm looking for camping gear, i don't mind ads for other camping gear.

That i get ads for camping gear when i'm looking for information on the French second restoration, and when that ad takes my whole screen, i get fed up and reinstall ublock.

It's easy. I know one person who made a lot of money from blogging. Affiliate links + direct ads to Festool or a know paint company. It beats adtech by a mile five years ago (for revenue at least). I think it doesn't work as well now with Intagram and tiktok, but he still get money from that.

Those ads are why you can crank an obscure topic like the second French restoration into Google and get useful information.

Or you could just go straight to Wikipedia, whose only ads are for Wikipedia fund drives.

There was a time when the internet was not beholden to advertisers, but still managed to deliver all kinds of lovingly/obsessively detailed sites on obscure topics like the second French restoration. It was slower and jankier and (arguably) harder to navigate, but it showed that many people are happy to produce and maintain online content without resorting to ad-veillance.

Well with the right approach, you don't need to give any data. I've said before on here that I think affiliate marketing is acceptable for text content, if the thing that I'm recommended is actually something I'd use. Caveat is it should be both obvious it's an affiliate link, but also unobtrusive and I should gain value from the material, not just link-stuffing every other word in a recipe blog.

The video equivalent is the sponsored segment, which producers insert because they know people block ads and they don't make enough from YouTube alone. These can be good if they're actually relevant to the content. The problem is when I'm watching a video about coffee and the presenter tries, for the umpteenth time, to sell me Squarespace. Usually the product in the video is also affiliate-linked in the description (plus all the AV gear the producer uses) In contrast, I'll watch someone like MarcoReps shill me JLPCB because he's using the boards in the video and they actually look good.

In both cases, I think targeted affiliate advertising can work if it's done well, and it's a lot better than generic follow-me advertising that has no relevant to the page content.

In a hypothetical world where personal data is securely shared and stored, I'd prefer a more targeted ads (if ad free is not an option or the price of that option does not justify the content)

I personally do not mind the idea of targeted ads and data brokers but as a software engineer I know my data is not safe due to ignorance or incompetence

I often wonder how much better the click through rates are for Steam than the ad industry as a whole. I’d estimate that I typically click on at least 4-5 ads on the steam home page a week. I actively enjoy scrolling through them to see if there’s anything that looks interesting to me.

What also helps if having a non garbage client. The Xbox windows client? Are you kidding me Microsoft?

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