Comment by gchamonlive | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gchamonlive | Hacker News Reader

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It's not, though.

I mean, I don't remember the last time something came exclusively through Steam by exclusivity agreements. That cannot be said for Epic Games though.

Sure Epic had to come up with ways to increase their competitive advantage while having an inferior product with smaller catalog and worse ux, all problems inherent to a newer product trying to penetrate a consolidated market.

Steam felt like it was just there, adding features and improvements in a slow but steady pace and really offering value to both players, by introducing sales and democratizing access to games (sure in the EU and US it might seem less important, but coming from Brazil I can't begin to tell how much of an impact digital outlets had to providing access to quality games on emergent markets), and to developers by single handely making piracy somewhat obsolete.

Sure it had problems like high fees for small devs, a case can be said that this monopoly over time started hurting the small dev, or the massive flow of low quality games, but to call it a walled garden is a far cry from reality. We gamers got it good and we sometimes don't appreciate it. Just look at the state of streaming services to see what could have been.

It's not a monopoly, you're right. I misspoke.

It's a walled garden, because you can't use their various services on their own or with third-party services. The games themselves are just rented to you, you can't run them without your Steam account.

You absolutely can, the DRM part of Steam is optional choice by the developer. It can just be a Game Downloader.

You can even sell codes in your own store, WITHOUT STEAM GETTING MONEY. That's incredibly generous.

I don't understand why you would expect them to give away their features for free. That's like expecting a a restaurant letting you use their cutlery and tables with your own food.

Finally, you have never and will never truly own a game. No, not even when they came as CDs. It was always just a limited license.

> Finally, you have never and will never truly own a game. No, not even when they came as CDs. It was always just a limited license.

This is a common red herring - nobody means owning the actual IP for a game when they mention owning physical games. They mean having control over when, where and how a game is played.

Physical games give more control to the user, assuming DRM allowed that.

(and the real issue is having DRM or not, not being physical vs digital - for example my physical DVD copy of Bioshock has some stupid DRM limitation whereas my GOG copy is fully DRM-free, giving me more control than the physical one)

Didn't know that about the DRM part of Steam being optional.

> I don't understand why you would expect them to give away their features for free.

Incentives? Won't comment to that. But, what I expect is that my services and tools don't constrain their interoperability. Open protocols are nothing new. Neither are closed platforms.

> It's a walled garden, because you can't use their various services on their own or with third-party services. The games themselves are just rented to you, you can't run them without your Steam account.

If this really were an issue, GOG would be a lot more popular. Most people just don't care. It's actually really nice having Steam just auto-manage my entire library across all my devices, seamlessly, with all the mods and updates and files and such all taken care of. And being able to seamlessly stream to the TV/phone/Steam Deck is great, along with Big Picture mode.

I have several DRM-free titles on GOG that I never end up using -- only bought them there because they were slightly cheaper -- but now I wish bought them on Steam instead, because it's so much easier to actually PLAY the game that way.

Sometimes walled gardens are nice if the alternative is the untamed wilds...

As for "renting" games, well, not so long ago they were $50 a pop and if you broke the CD, too bad. Now those same games are routinely discounted by 75%+, and my library has increased in size a hundred times because of it. If it takes a rental model to get us there, that seems like a great tradeoff, honestly... like movies, most games don't really have infinite longevity anyway. If I can play it for a few years and then it eventually disappears for whatever reason (which almost never happens, btw), usually they will re-release an updated version later on with improved graphics and such anyway. It's not like digital games are a collector's item. In fact the subscription services (Xbox Game Pass, etc.) take that one step further I wish more games did that. The idea of "owning" a copy of software is dubious to begin with... one way or another you're paying for the development, whether it's a buy-once model + expansion packs, buy-once + DLC, subscription, lootboxes... every game does it differently these days, but overall players have a lot more games at a lot more price points.

GOG is the go-to example for why this isn't a walled garden. It is an extremely difficult market to penetrate, but right now there is a niche for every need out there.

Steam is definitely a walled garden, it's just not the ONLY garden. Epic has a fenced one with mediocre gardeners, the publishers have their own planter boxes, there's the untamed wilds of the pirate scene, etc.

It's (thankfully) not like the Apple/Google Play duopoly. You can still by and large sell PC games however you want, but a lot of devs/publishers choose Steam both because of its marketshare and because of its useful features.

That is true for all consolidated markets. Everyone could in theory create a service to compete with Amazon. There is really nothing preventing people from doing that apart from the fact that it is extremely difficult to penetrate that market.

In this sense those are walled gardens, but because of the nature of those markets. E-commerce, telecommunications, datacenter, banking to some degree are all examples of hard to penetrate markets.

The original article goes on to explain that going head to head against solutions that are consolidated in these market are a waste of time and money. Better to find and exploit a niche that is still untouched.

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