That's what happens if the buyer is also the user, I guess.
I think their company structure also helps, where employees generally don’t work on things unless they actually want to. This means that you don’t end up with designers redesigning UIs that don’t actually need it, etc.
Eventually the people that run it now will age and die,
and one day the vampires will move in to suck its corpse dry.
May not be our problem but will be someone's problem.
Anyway, thanks, Past. Signed, The Present...
P.S. Maybe The Future can stop them?They make enough money —they're practically printing it— to never need investment, and they don't seem to piss it away like your FAANGs.
Which is all to say, even down the line, why would they risk it all for more money? Might seem naive but private ownership allows them to maintain this course.
Main problem of being too successful is that you can't let money sit in the bank, especially if you are a public company.
I think this has changed, at least in my view recently. I find a lot more of my time spent on games in Xbox Gamepass than on Steam these days and have a bunch more launchers as publishers have pushed games to their own platforms.
Steam machines… yeah, maybe but no, not really? The first iteration yes, but the steam deck is a very successful handheld steam machine after all.
- "I need to download a lot of data, I want discs!"
- "I will be forever bound to Valve. What if they go out of business?"
I think the first point got kind of obsolete, because broadband is readily available compared to 20 years ago. And the latter also lost importance, I guess? At least I don't read that any longer.
It's still a very valid complaint, and will forever be as long as you're tied to Steam's server being up and willing to give you the content you paid for. That may not always be the case, for example if financial embargos prevent Valve from actually providing the service in your country. It's more like you're paying Steam to use their service rather than actually buying the game. Right now people are not worried about Steam exit scamming and thanking us for all the fish, because it's a very solid service that basically has a monopoly on PC digital game sales, plus the Steam Market being a money making machine on its own, plus the Steam Deck providing further leverage on game sales.
But there's a nonzero chance they can just ... close. Which was a very real possibility when they launched. Now, not so much, but the future has always new and exciting ways to fuck it all up at a moment's notice.
People got comfortable, and that comfortability is great. Until it isn't, and then it's a travesty. Then it all repeats again and people never learn not to put all their eggs in one basket.
That's just the result of the flow of time. I remember a little over a decade ago when Blizzard was considered one of the best companies out there and that they always delivered quality titles. Stuff changes (and also, sometimes people can be very fickle).
Not that this isn't a valid concern, it certainly is, but I guess what we've learnt is that you don't need to be bound to Valve for games to be bound to a big corporation.
Look at Minecraft, which was never on Steam. You could've brought that a decade ago, and now you're told you need to bind yourself to Microsoft to continue playing it.
Nowadays, the only problems I have with Steam stem from my credit card's security mechanisms.
It's kind of like Netflix vs other streaming platforms except Steam has a much better moat.
The perception changed when Steam started allowing 3rd party games and had cheaper prices (through blink-and-you-miss it discounts of course, so they can still milk launch-day hype) than boxed copies and the indie explosion that digital distribution allowed
It helps that everything else is so much more annoying.
Ehh, people use IOS by choice too. An "ethical" walled garden is still just that, walled.
GOG and itch are great platforms as well, so I think people can sometimes miss the trees for the forest and remember the bad experiences.
If consumers choose to stay in it, then that's their choice, no? I see it just as much as a scathing commentary as it is a flowery euphemism. No different from "golden handcuffs".
Regardless, I'm not too interested in going into a rabbit hole of word games. If "closed off software ecosystem storing 3rd party products you purchased" is a preferable terminology, feel free to substitute that phrase in.
>while promoting ideas of delicious fruits and beautiful flowers.
Sounds like a good things to promote.