Comment by eatsyourtacos | Hacker News Reader

Comment by eatsyourtacos | Hacker News Reader

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>Valve used to make games, now they make money

You can say that, but really what they moved to is creating a platform that saved PC gaming. I can't imagine where we would be at without Steam.

There would be 20 different platforms we would have to install full of bloatware garbage and everything would be horrific as all fuck. Indie games would be having a much harder time, because sure there would be other things out there but again it would be so split that it would be hard to even hear of games to get traction. PC game prices are a damn steal, which helps everyone because at $15-20 I will buy way more than $50-$60 a pop. Every platform would have it's own bullshit DRM that would make things a nightmare.

Steam allows offline play, family sharing.. it just freakin works without being fancy bullshit.

So yeah, they certainly make money. But I can't thank them enough for what they have done.

The Steam app itself is also pretty great. I didn't fully appreciate that until the Epic Games Store, which runs about as well as a sloppy Javascript app from ten years ago. It's been in the same dire state for years.

Meanwhile Steam is pretty quick, the interface is well organized, and there are tons of useful features from controller configuration to the mod workshops.

I definitely agree that there's an alternate Steam-less timeline where major game publishers migrate entirely to consoles, as they were threatening to do in the mid-2000s. We'd never have all these PC ports from Japanese developers (from Dark Souls to Persona 5) without Steam.

Steam demands I update every time I open it.

without Steam there might have been 20 different platforms, but another possibility would have been Microsoft just fully taking over the space and treating the PC like a very expensive Xbox. Even with Steam’s success this has always been a possibility. I think Steam’s massive investment in game compatibility for Linux (ie: Steam Deck) has been an amazing counterbalance to stave off the potential of MS monopoly on the PC gaming space and I am so thankful for their continued support of PC gaming culture and tech.

Given the state of the "Microsoft Store" on windows... dear lord we are lucky that is not the case.

I do love Microsoft to a large degree for a lot of things.. but holy shit they suck ASS at things like store fronts in their own ecosystem. I have barely ever been forced to use it, but it literally did not work or gave me random cryptic errors when I did.

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