Valve conquered PC gaming – what comes next?
ft.com
ft.com
Valve didn't conquer anything. Valve defended PC gaming when everybody else including Microsoft, had abandoned it, and focused on consoles.
Windows XP had amazing gaming APIs, like DirectInput: still superior to XInput after all these years, because of more axis and better FFB support; and DirectSound3D, which enabled hardware accelerated 3D positional audio.
These APIs were declared obsolete by Microsoft, in favour of XBox-compatible inferior APIs, which were feature equivalent to the APIs in the inferior hardware of the first XBox console. Inferior not in absolute terms, but inferior to what a PC was capable of.
And that was just the beginning. Microsoft focused and pushed for their console, and most AAA game studios followed suit. Consoles have been incredibly profitable, so their gambit has paid off.
PC Gaming was for old nerds, old game mechanics like FPS (Counter Strike) and RTS (Starcraft) and indie gaming. Valve kept the dream alive. Valve kept open computing alive, in a sense, as consoles are closed computing, and in some cases you need expensive proprietary licenses just to produce a game for one of the consoles, like Nintendo.
So no, it was not that Valve released Steam in the right moment. Valve is a big reason PC gaming is alive and thriving. They believed in PC gaming when all the big companies went the console way.
Valve saved PC gaming.
Then Microsoft and the AAA game studios took notice and we have the XBox store on Windows, and many game launchers, but they are opportunistic companies, who would destroy PC gaming if they could, to get their console profits up.
FT writes for its geriatric readership, for whom this article sounds like actionable information (the hurr durr, gaming is for kids crowd).
Extend SteamOS to seamlessly support other hardware beyond AMD (Nvidia, Intel), and, also offer a simple and clean Linux desktop environment on it.
No one wants to upgrade from Windows 10. A free, a fully-featured Linux OS SteamOS would put a Steam Store on every PC with relatively little effort and huge potential gains.
[1] https://www.pcworld.com/article/2834970/windows-11-has-nearl...
Similarly, windows 8 failed to get traction. Most people upgraded with windows 10 (and prob a lot of them due to eol fears).
Should we also mention windows 2000? There is definitely sth with microsoft failing completely every 2 OS generations since then. Maybe they need the feedback to make sth that people wanted to use.
I am less optimistic about the future, though, because I doubt they will double down on bloatware and monetising users, too much money at stake.
MS just decided primarily target Millennium to consumers which wasn’t that great..
Dude, you're throwing away revenue and a better negotiating position against MSFT! Did Linux hurt you or something?
(for the time-being, in order to initially open the flood gates for non-AMD hardware users)
Additionally, create a “Steam Store Apps” that’s compatible with, say - Flatpak, and curates free MSOffice and other popular productivity alternatives.
I've recently made the jump and it seems to have stuck. This is at least the fifth time I've tried to switch over the last 20 years and it's the first time it even moderately feels like most things have just worked.
In the latter case, what happens is the Extraction Vultures roll in, pitch some flashy slides about innovation and then progressively ruin PC gaming.
That can't be allowed to happen, so therefore, VALVe can't be allowed to monopolise this market.
Makes a huge difference when a company can just remain comfortably profitable and doesn’t have to chase double digit growth.
Nothing. They are too comfortable. They are stuck in rainy cloudy Bellevue Washington, in a skyscraper with limited space. Approx the same employee count as decades ago. Neither Epic's games store, EA's Origin, Microsoft's Games for Windows Live, nor Amazon's, was able to dethrone them. They tried to branch out into Movies and Music, they used to sell movies on there but removed the ability in 2019 because no one was using it. Looking back now, it even threw me off, but it's obvious now... People don't want to download movies, they want to stream them like YouTube videos. I'm sure people would want that with games too but that's difficult to do right now. Video games are an emotion, music and movies and books and comics are too. If I were them I'd try to expand Steam so it sells all types of media content. I think it's a mistake not to.
Optimistic Me:
I was worried about them about a decade ago because anytime you think you are "too big to fail" you set yourself up for long term failure and "getting comfortable" is usually what begin's a company's decline. But they've made some really good decisions to branch out. Like getting into hardware. They've got the Steam Link, Steam Machine, Steam Controller, their VR headset "the Index", and their handheld Steam Deck.
So I guess Valve's a hardware company too now.
It's breaking windows monopoly and cracking open the other distributors closed systems. I can even run NVIDIAs cloud gaming so I may not even need new hardware.
(Now having said all that I'm still sore over the new doom game which has ray tracing enabled permanently. It invalidates all my old hardware and the steam deck)
Such an incredibly pro-consumer move by a company with such a big market share. Anti-enshitification. Hard to imagine any other big name company doing something so radically positive.
The handheld was just a market that didn't have much competition at the time. Which likely made it easy to justify it as a business decision for Valve.
> it basically prints money.
Is "next" needed, then?
(the title is a hook - the article is overall a nice coverage of valve, worth a read)
This is untrue; many tried. Almost every major publisher has its own launcher. The problem with them all is they absolutely suck. Even Epic Games Store, the biggest competitor with the most money poured into it, is ridiculously bad in almost every way. Aside from the lack of network effect, it just misses most of the QOL features, is slow, ugly, and very unpleasant to use. Almost universal agreement in the PC gaming community is that EGS is a bootloader for free games that it throws at the user. Every time I use EGS, I am constantly amazed by how bad it is, despite probably tens of millions of investments.
The second point that the article completely misinterprets is Microsoft's role. Microsoft (Xbox specifically) is hands down the closest company to beating Steam in its own game. PC game pass provides a constant stream of very good games available on day one for dirt cheap. The work that Microsoft is doing on optimizing Windows for games in general and for handheld consoles in particular is very promising (see Xbox Ally X). This is the threat that Valve faces. Not just a better store, but the absence of a store and "buying games" in general. For example, I intended to buy The Outer Worlds 2 on launch. Now that I know it will be available day one on Game Pass, there is almost zero chance that I will buy it on Steam or anywhere else.
The gaming industry will ALWAYS use DRM.
This will keep GOG a niche player.
I remember the old game launcher that was called Desura?, which a lot of those third-party keys sites would sell keys for, and it's no longer around. So one of the main concerns with these online platforms is them disappearing and losing all your stuff.
Quite frankly, I am happy that GOG exists for this niche. It would be less "sabotaging" if consumers would actually vote in their own interests. However, this has been shown time and time again to never happen, sadly.
But outside analysts are wrong and completely misunderstand the games industry, see https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ethanevansvp_as-vp-of-prime-g...
They have a near-monopoly on PC gaming, which sounds bad at face value. But the only reason for that is that they've continually developed an excellent platform that helps connect people with games that they want to play, and then be able to play them. There are very few marketplaces that strike the right balance of presenting you with options you want, while not artificially getting in your way. (In other words, it's not very enshittified.)
There's nothing stopping someone from never buying another game on Steam, and moving to another marketplace on PC, unlike the store monopolies on consoles and mobile devices.
There's nothing stopping someone from never buying another game on Steam, and moving to another marketplace on PC, unlike the store monopolies on consoles and mobile devices.Of course it will never be as easy as having a single storefront for all your content, but as we can see from the streaming market, that’s not something that will happen either way.
You can keep Steam installed and keep downloading your games through it, but you don't need to give them another penny.
Compared to PS+ and Xbox Live, which charge subscription fees to continue accessing online content, it's a pretty sweet deal for the consumer.
AFAIK your games are locked to your account, and you'd need to log in at least once a month or something to keep access even in offline mode.
If you close your steam account you lose everything, so I don't see how that's a weak form of lock-in?
EDIT: I believe GP is incorrect about the nature of subscription fees for PS+ and Xbox Live, though. As far as I know, standalone purchases of games from those services do not ever require a paid subscription - you need to retain your account and connectivity for the license checks, but that's free and does not require a paid subscription on either service, so pretty much the same as Steam. But they are correct that those platforms don't provide other store options. EDIT 2: Ah, I misread GP, they said "online content", and maintaining subscriptions on those services is required for that.
This is a digital media rights issue, not a Steam issue.
It's also not solvable unless you legislate platform agnostic licenses that are valid regardless of platform. Fat chance of that ever happening and I doubt that's actually what you're suggesting.
don't came with visibility talk because chances of having your indie title being seen there is minimal. marketing exists for a reason and it's also costly. and don't came up with "THEY OFFER ONLINE SERVICES AND OTHER GOODS" because most don't even f* care about dark-pattern-grind-like achievements or a social-media HUB for sharing screenshots or streaming
if they at least sold Deck at a true loss and made a decent VR (also sold at loss) i wouldn't be hating for sure /s
You are also absolutely wrong about indie titles. Many of the games that I'm presented on my personalized top pages on Steam are indie. And Steam makes it very easy to find indie games.
I don't understand your point on "marketing exists for a reason and it's also costly". You seem to be undercutting yourself by saying that the marketing provided by the Steam store provides actual value.
Selling hardware at a loss only makes sense when you control everything that's done with it. Consoles can be sold at losses because they can't (generally) be used for purposes other than playing games on which the console makers make money. But a Steam Deck is just a PC. If they sold them at a loss, people could just buy them and use them as PCs.
just take a quick check on wishlists, buys and views of indie people releasing games on Steam without marketing budget (money or popularity wise). it isn't a magic bullet, otherwise, marketing would be obsolete... even AAA industry burns millions of USD at
30% is a huge hit on top of all the thing studios have to pay. they just comply because it's either that or go home on the PC market; with rare exceptions like Minecraft and whatever popular is out there nowadays
The fact you want a distribution service to be peer-to-peer kinda implies that distributing a game can have some significant costs. Maybe that 30% isn't quite as abusive as you make it sound?
Having to install Steam and sign in with a Steam account to install a game is a form of DRM.
This is utilized by some publishers who sell keys on their own website, same for e.g. humble bundles.
So yeah, it is in fact a 30% cut for just the store and visibility.
The P2P network exists, it's called bittorrent
i think we're past peak PC gaming, and gaming in general. the real money is in social media, which i suppose steam has elements of. indeed perhaps that is the real fuel for its success, and not the game store aspect.
My predictions is by 2030 Xbox will be out of business, PlayStation will be where pretentious auteurs make games that are 80% cutscenes, most savvy gamers play indie PC games, and Nintendo remains the only big name game studio to not collapse.
I think Xbox game pass and their streaming services will ensure Xbox will continue to grow.
PlayStation are in a more precarious position because they rely on hardware sales. Xbox doesn’t.
PlayStation is also the hardest platform for amateurs to target.
That said, I don’t expect PlayStation to collapse either.
Your comment also suggest that you think EA would collapse. Which is laughable considering EA make a killing from monthly iterations of sports titles. They could survive on that alone, never mind all their other major cash cows.
People made the same predictions about movie budgets as well. Yet movie studios still make a killing despite the costs.
How is the real money in social media? Those platforms that make money almost exclusively by making the user experience worse (in particular shoving ads and promoted content down your throat, and harvesting your personal data). In contrast, selling games actively makes money by giving people what they want.
For me it's really an ideal situation. I can play great games like overwatch 2, Apex legends, cs2, path of exile and more completely for free. I can ignore bullshit games like I dunno Genshin impact? I think that's one of the really toxic pay to win games. There's also that Diablo mobile game. I don't participate in those.
It's that simple. You offer a good deal I take it, offer a bad one I dont.
The infrastructure aside, creators havent properly used games to make art yet, just toys. In terms of film history, we are currently in the "train approaching stop" era of gaming at the AAA level with all these movie-games just trying to tell a static story with no real user interaction in it, and in the silent film era with indie games, where some games like DDLC and undertale (and mayne the fromsoft titles to a degree) beginning to do interesting things with the interactivity inherent in the medium. There is a long long way to go before the blockbuster fatigue era
From the article:
“… the chart indicates Steam had an operating margin of about 60 per cent and made $2bn of commission revenues, for about $1.3bn in profit just from Steam commissions in 2021.”
That’s a very impressive profit and limits who can afford to buy it. Netflix could pay something like $50 billion in stock to own the gaming market.
Keep paying or loose your library of "licensed" games ????
this would probably be too evil, even for today's End-game Corporate America,
so it'll probably be a mix of a subscription for any and all new games, but you can keep your old games if your account is old enough