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Comment by GalenErso | Hacker News Reader

Amazing how a company that treats its customers respectfully, gives them what they want, avoids the usual corporate scandals and just keeps steadily delivering the goods year after year can be successful.

Steam had one job. And it did it well.

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It probably helps a lot that it's still not a publicly traded company. Steam can prioritize long-term profits and doesn't have to squeeze out its user base for every last penny. Counter example: Activision/Blizzard.

> gives them what they want

I did not get Half-Life 3 yet.

But on a serious note, we don't know how successful they actually are. They are a private company. Concurrent players & logged in users growing, with more and more gamers around the world and covid as a catalyst over the last years is probably not a good sole indicator. Those are growing for everybody, just compare them to Roblox alone.

I'd say maybe a better one could be pretty much every publisher returning or rumoured to return soon - but that could also just mean better deals for them and Valve also not making more money.

Besides that, doesn't seem all sunshine at Valve either. There were reports of a hostile work environment in the past, among other things supposedly due to the ego-fuelling bonus structure.

When Alyx arrived GabeN talked about how they'll ship two more big VR titles soon-ish, which didn't happen and which supposedly are at least on hold. We at least know that they currently work on a non-vr game called Neon Prime right now and that might or might not ship soon.

The Dota 2 and especially the CSGO community wishes for more communication and updates for their games. The Source 2 update for CSGO has more people coping now than HL3.

They let games like Artifact and Underlords just die. Especially Artifact, with being a buy-to-play title where you additionally had to buy the cards for additional real money, had quite some controversies around the game and how Valve handled everything.

At least in CSGO the esports scene is also not happy either with how Valve ignores and handles cheat & fraud cases half-assed. Their own anti-cheat in CSGO is also still shit.

They also face a more competitive environment now than possibly ever before. There are other game stores/fronts like Epic's and Activision's, and the console giants are coming for a piece of their pie (Xbox Game pass and Sony's equivalent). There's also the ever-looming risk that Apple decides to go after their market with Apple TV/iOS somehow.

If I was an executive at Valve, I'd probably be happy with the current success, but nervous for the future.

Nothing of this is "new competition" though, and the threat from console gaming was arguably much bigger in the past, yet so far Steam has weathered all storms pretty well. There are now more ports from Xbox and PS to PC than ever before that would have been exclusives in the past (e.g. Sony 1st party titles like God of War, ten years ago something like this would "hell freezing over territory").

Apple's paying a bit more attention to gaming these days, but I don't think they'll ever release an Apple TV that performs better than a midrange phone.

If they really wanted to make a big push into gaming they could; they certainly have the gazillions for it. Make a more powerful Apple TV, invest a billion into game dev studios to target MacOS and iOS, either make Apple Arcade free or beef it up for the same price. I just feel like they would've done this by now if they were ever going to.

They faced Origin and won. I'm not sure about Ubisoft, but I think some of their games are available without using a non-steam launcher. Doesn't mean they'll win but their record is pretty good.

I lost respect for Valve after they discovered cash cows that are Dota and CS:GO skins, hired economists to hyper-optimize milking their customer base and subsequently abandoned making good single-player games like they used to. Their greed culminated in an "Artifact" which flopped hard in large part due to its monetization model.

Yup. My steam account is old enough to vote and it's never even crossed my mind to go elsewhere (exception: Good Old Games for older or self published games). The Epic Store is never going to earn my loyalty due their exclusivity deals.

> My steam account is old enough to vote

Is there a secret voting mechanism on Steam that I'm not familiar with? Mine is 10 years old so I hope that it would get access to it :D

Sadly no. And the 18 years of service isn't even enough to automatically pass the age gates...

Nor should it be. Many of my friends handed over their steam accounts to their preteen sons. (As useless as those age gates really are being a separate discussion).

I meant, like, in local elections.

Oh...of course, my bad.

Lets not forget that Valve was one of the early adopters of loot boxes with Counter Strike and TF2.

You mean, before it was known how it would affect the gaming landscape in the large?

I think lootboxes should be regulated like gambling, but the way Valve implemented them was not as bad as what the industry at large has done.

1. Loot was cosmetic or a "sidegrade" of items that could be obtained through other means (especially TF2). That is, not pay-to-win.

2. Loot boxes and their contents can be sold on the marketplace, so there are opportunities to make your money back if you get a $400 item. You can also sell the boxes themselves without paying for keys. Free Steam credit for everybody.

> Loot was cosmetic or a "sidegrade" of items that could be obtained through other means

To phrase this difference (and hopefully less ambiguously)

All items, other than cosmetic-only items are obtainable via relatively reasonable gameplay.

You can purchase non-cosmetic items, and you can purchase (lootbox gamble for) otherwise non-obtainable items.

That's like blaming Edgar Alan Poe for trashy modern emo slam poetry. Those were innocent times when the innate evil of the loot box was not yet known. Valve abandoned them when the truth of what they were tampering with became clear. I am willing to forgive so long as they do not return to the dark arts.

At least those boxes have possible resale value. And actually just keeping them unopened have not been bad monetary gains. Some of the oldest ones have stupid resale prices at this point.

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