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Comment by jiggy2011 | Hacker News Reader

jiggy2011

Valve are going to compete head on with Microsoft then? That's pretty ballsy. Let's hope steam is not left a smouldering corpse.

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It's hard to envision this being an extinction event for Steam. Microsoft has just never been able to get people onboard in the way that Valve has with PC game distribution platforms. GFWL was/is a disaster that ended up being more trouble than it was worth. I could see Steam having to back out of software distribution, but I can't imagine Steam dying in the foreseeable future. Not with tens of millions of users voluntarily and enthusiastically locked into the platform.

I think users can be fickle about these things, MS just has to make sure their store tactically undercuts Valve's on some popular products and they could steal a lot of users.

MS also has a trump card here in the form of the Xbox, they can make their Windows stuff integrate with it very well for example allowing you to buy a game once and make it playable on both your PC and your Xbox, or to transfer save games between each etc. Microsoft can also demand Windows Store exclusivity for games to also appear on the Xbox.

Users are fickle, but this play was tried by EA with Origin. You can get them onboard with the big titles like Battlefield 3, but they've been less successful at getting users to buy titles from smaller publishers. Steam offers a better deal to small publishers, and is actively engaged in the community in a way that I doubt Microsoft can replicate.

As for Xbox-PC game interoperability, that would be interesting. I know multiplayer between the two platforms has been ruled out, but transferring from one to another might be attractive. It also makes you wonder why they haven't done it. Games built for the XBLA are written in XNA and can be played with minimal adjustment on Windows. But practically every XBLA-PC success I can think of (Bastion, Orcs Must Die, Limbo, etc.) has been put onto Steam. Makes you wonder why Microsoft isn't already mandating XBLA games be ported into Games for Windows Live if they go to PC.

> I know multiplayer between the two platforms has been ruled out

Thanks for pointing that out. I had thought CS:GO was going to be cross-platform Xbox/PC, but it's not anymore.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2011-08-26-ps3-cs-go-suppo...

Agreed. Steam has been something of a trojan horse, building a huge user base in gaming before rapidly switching direction into this market. Good luck to them I say, MS alternatives are nowhere near as polished.

They really aren't even going head to head with Microsoft, since the Windows 8 app store is only for "Metro" apps and this will only be for regular Windows apps.

The real danger for Valve is that people will release games for Metro instead of Steam, this is probably them trying to hedge against that.

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