It's easy to be open when you have a money printer by practically having a monopoly over PC gaming.
If competitors are just as open they no longer have a competitive advantage and are essentially just helping improve Steam.
If competitors are just as open they no longer have a competitive advantage and are essentially just helping improve Steam.
Do they contribute to open source development, upstream so that even competitors could use it? Yes. Do they allow you to share your library with family (and let's be honest friends too)? Yes. Do they allow you to play your games offline while not connected to their servers? Yes. Do they allow and actively encourage mods and user control of their content? Yes. Are they a "first mover" that actively brought new business models and technologies to market, which they themselves developed? Yes. Have they reversed course when users complain or give negative feedback? Yes (such as the paid mod idea years back).
About the only shame thing regarding Valve is that they were in on the microtransactions craze along with many others in the industry for a bit there (TF2 hats anyone?). Not a perfect company, but the "monopoly" here isn't "competitors can't come to market." It's more that they just offer a far better service and have NOT abused their market leadership in order to chase short term profitablity over long term success. More monopolies like this please.
In the same way Nintendo doesn't, no.
>Do they put up barriers to entry to keep small devs / publishers out unless they pay to play? No
Technically $100 is a barrier. The smallest non-free barrier, but a barrier nonetheless.
The bigger barrier is the opaque rules they sometimes have regarding certain sexual games. Even a few rated by the ESRB were rejected, so who knows where the barrier is. The only thing worse than a high barrier is a misty one.
>Do they prevent you from using other people's hardware? No.
Because they didn't have their own successul hardware until 2021. And 1m copies isn't a market large enough to do much with. Even the failed Vita sold a few million in the US.
>Do they engage in mass censorship or shadow banning of content? No.
yup, just not for the kinds of games people care to try and defend. Except that Stein's Gate one. Never underestimate anime fans, I guess.
They've done good stuff but let's not pretend they are saints nor perfect.
>Have they reversed course when users complain or give negative feedback? Yes (such as the paid mod idea years back).
still went through later. Heck, Steam marketplace is worse than any paid mod. I'm still so confused how people don't see this. Any other AAA studio woulda been burned for this (and still are burned).
>More monopolies like this please.
I'll pass.
To be fair, it's only a barrier to Steam. Every device that can install Steam can also install another game, app or even launcher. Steam will even put it in your library and launch it with Proton if you add it, just not give it a Store page or discussion/workshop/whatever.
> Because they didn't have their own successul hardware until 2021.
How exactly did that change things, though? No part of the Steam Deck is capable of being locked down in a potentially harmful way.
> yup, just not for the kinds of games people care to try and defend. Except that Stein's Gate one. Never underestimate anime fans, I guess.
facepalm
Taking games off an optional storefront is not "censorship". It's the same argument as people who say that Walmart is censoring America by taking confederate flags off the shelves.
> Heck, Steam marketplace is worse than any paid mod.
> Any other AAA studio woulda been burned for this (and still are burned).
You seem to miss the point of why people don't care. Contrast these two scenarios:
- Scenario A: EA not letting you play as Darth Vader until you unlock enough lootboxes; Bethesda making certain in-game missions exclusive to pre-orders or specific retailers; Blizzard locking off Overwatch characters even to paying customers who bought both games; et. al
- Scenario B: Valve selling hats for Team Fortress 2, letting users trade and purchase cosmetics in Dota, giving users a platform to trade game stickers and trading cards, etc.
It should be plainly obvious why other studios are burned and Valve is not. Honestly speaking, the closest Valve ever flew to the sun was with Mann Vs. Machine requiring paid tickets to play. The marketplace itself doesn't prevent you from enjoying anything in any of their base games.
technically, you can put apps on Nintendo/Sony/Microsoft's consoles as well. It's more a matter of popularity and long term support. I guess we can definitely talk about adding other game stores on consoles, but it doesn't seem like a conversation that got much traction. Even from people like Epic that is going hard after Apple over this issue.
>How exactly did that change things, though?
you can't lock down hardware if you don't make hardware. I'm not speaking metaphorically here.
Steam is a software company that dabbles in hardware. The hardware being open source is not its selling point nor a point of business, like other hardware manufacturers.
>Taking games off an optional storefront is not "censorship".
in the same lens that rating a game AO isn't "censorship", sure. Ewen though such a rating kicks you out of all major brick and mortar stores and doesn't let you publish on Xbox/Playstation/Nintendo. I agree the term is used loosely in the games industry, and I am using the term loosely here.
But really, there isn't much ACTUAL censorship in games period, so it's not really a plus to say "steam doesn't allow games it doesn't allow on its optional store". I am more criticizing its opaque rulings and its infamous non-communication to devs over such issues.
>It should be plainly obvious why other studios are burned and Valve is not.
because others can make money off the cosmetics instead of just AAA studios, sure. Makes sense. That's what Crypto promised but that also crashed and burned because the wrong leadership was behind it, so that boat has sailed. I think AAA should just eat the cost like Valve and even older games like Second Life and just make a normal marketfront. I think Blizzard kinda did this with Diablo 3.
That doesn't explain the paid mod kerfluffle, though. What's the difference between modding a hat to sell for $5 and collecting a hat in-game to trade for $5 to someone else? Hell, one of them involves work to actually create that asset.
>The marketplace itself doesn't prevent you from enjoying anything in any of their base games.
I guess it depends on framing. I don't play GaaS, but the only difference between Darth Vader DLC and Darth Vader Lootbox is a guaranteed transaction. You can argue neither is "in the base game".
But I guess players complained about on-disc DLC back in the day too. the difference in "base game" is much more ephemeral now that you can launch updates on the fly.
Isn't that basically an admission that all of Valve's most meaningful developments are Open Source? To the contrary, why are competitors having such a hard time when stuff like Proton and pressure-vessel is freely available?
Source 2 is still closed source and they still haven't released the SDK despite it now being over 3.5 years since HL:A released.
>To the contrary, why are competitors having such a hard time when stuff like Proton and pressure-vessel is freely available?
Because Valve already has the user content flywheel going. Valve has most content that people want and has a large install base that developers can target. There are a lot of gamers who only want to buy games on Steam due to the integrated experience doing so offers.
Convincing AAA devs to release on your platform is not easy to do. Adding Proton to your platform won't convince developers to use it.
I don’t know of any other software companies that are trying for “just works” on Windows, Linux and MacOS, other than the electron / web ecosystem. Valve’s stuff also cares about exposing low-level performance optimizations, unlike that stuff.
If I could buy ahead-of-time compiled slack and zoom clients from steam, I’d do it.
I'd argue it's actually hard(er), based on history.