Amazon thought it could compete with Steam because it was much larger than Valve
pcgamer.com
pcgamer.com
But then they also have basically made a service that makes it so that a good chunk of PC games have unnecessary online requirements and are difficult to legally preserve, and can't legally be passed down to your children, resold, etc. All things that most PC games allowed before.
Sure, maybe that transition was inevitable, but I still don't think it was strictly necessary that the move to digital distribution on PC also meant the death of resale and the death of the ability to legally leave games to your family and friends when you die. That was a conscious effort that I would've preferred they not make.
But then they made the Steam deck, and they've been really cool about not locking it down in terms of either hardware or software. Probably cooler than most any other company that owns a distribution platform would be with their own hardware.
The platform, doesnt matter whether its netflix or amazon or booking or uber or airbnb or visa or youtube/fb, all converge in how they behave to Survive.
I don't think it was necessary to survive at that point. I think it was just the way they wanted it to work.
Steam doesn't make the games on it use the DRM, and the DRM isn't hard to bypass.
What's hard to preserve about steam games as a group?
I agree that bequeathing and plain old selling is an issue.
It is good that Valve doesn't require the DRM, but it's not like they've historically encouraged people to make games completely available offline. I think they've finally changed course, but their own single player games used to have the DRM requirement, plus "offline mode" was unreliable and broken for like the first 7 years of Steam's life.
> What's hard to preserve about steam games as a group?
From a legal standpoint? A lot, though it probably depends on what country you're in. If you're willing to preserve by relying on piracy, not as much. (Though some games that use external DRM have not been successfully pirated and thus cannot be preserved at all.)
Overall, part of my issue may be that I'm sensitive to how many problems Steam caused over the years, which might be different than the types of issues people are having now. But I still remember how broken Half-Life 2 was for a long time. It was a single player game (at least at launch), and you had people that worked on internet-less submarines and places like that writing in to Computer Gaming World pleading for advice on how to get the game to work reliably offline. There was no reason for the service to cause problems like that, and there was no reason for them to take years to make offline mode reliable.
How are you defining "preservation" here because I'm just thinking about backing up the game files the same way I would back up just about anything else. And that's not complicated by Steam.
The separation of the license and the content, plus the inability to transfer the license, makes things legally muddy. I can copy the files, but I can't copy the license. So you eventually end up in a position where the data for the game itself has been preserved, but there's no one alive that's actually got a license to legally play it (unless new licenses are issued into perpetuity, which seems unlikely given a bunch of content already is in a position where new licenses aren't issued).
In contrast, every person that ever bought a new Atari 2600 game could be dead, but the license just transfers with the cartridge. So a museum could get some Atari 2600 cartridges and an Atari 2600 in the year 2100, and there wouldn't be any legal hurdles to playing the games.
If they just get the files to some Steam game, what do they do about the legal aspect of the fact that no one has a license for the game? The museum doesn't have a license to the games unless it purchased them new when licenses were still being issued. Should we just rely on the fact that, when push comes to shove, we can just use the software without a license? That just doesn't feel like a good solution to me.
I guess the limited lifetime of copyright does kinda solve this in a way, but it seems weird to just leave it so that games are in a state where they legally can't be played, and possibly the files can't be legally kept, for years on end until copyright expires.
I can't recall ever having issues playing a single player game while offline.
I do wish software was transferable, but I don't think publishers would have ever gone for anything like that. Remember, in the 2010s we had publishers trying to kill physical game resale with things like multiplayer passes. An attempt to make software transfer a part of Steam would have just prevented Steam from successfully attracting publishers, just like they have DRM because publishers wanted it.
I do not think we will, or even could have, see actual software ownership ever develop naturally. It will require government intervention.
It's no surprise that it's hard to compete with that.
On the other hand, I find it surprising that no one thinks there is a way to take operating system market share away from Microsoft with a better end user operating system. There is constantly new annoying stuff practically forced upon you and people are complaining left and right. Of course Microsoft has built several moats, but this level of disrespect against your own users has to backfire some day.
Valve certainly thinks so, they just needed the time to test consumer reaction to SteamOS and improve compatibility with its vast library, and the did that perfectly with the Steam Deck.
They are launching a new SteamOS beta version next month that properly supports desktops. But it’s still not clear if it will support NVIDIA GPUs right away.
Amazon has no idea how big and dominant steam is in this segment and this article just proved it.
I'd call it trust rather than habit. Steam is 20+ years old and has never really actively fucked over it's users. You sorta know where you stand.
Pretty much all the other delivery platforms are viewed somewhere between suspicion and active hate.
You can't break into a scene like that without bringing something special (see GOG and their DRM approach).