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Comment by uyzstvqs | Hacker News Reader

Steam does. That's why they're the undefeated king.

This applies to everything. If you see a product category where users are legitimately unhappy; then enter it, build something actually good, you'll be the biggest and richest in no-time.

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People hated steam when it launched but you needed it to play CS 1.6. It made installing mods easier. Then HL2 released, orange box, and they were able to get a critical mass as they provided platforms support for other games. Steam got better. It’s still not great but they have so much market share that basically any PC gamer already has it. Epic wants some of that money. The problem is nobody wants to install another store and they aren’t doing anything to improve gamer’s experience other than giving away games and having some exclusives. They’ll never hit the critical mass needed that way.

I still don't like Steam. I resent that I have to have this "Store" middle man on my computer just to have access to games. I want to pay a company for their product on their web site, download the installer, and install it on my operating system directly. I don't want this other layer that I'm dependent on, who could switch off my access to the things I "bought" whenever they want.

Steam has multiplayer integration so you don't have to connect by IP to play indie games, that is massive. So many people either don't have access to their router or don't have the skills to configure it to play multiplayer without steam without having a server middleman which most indie games wont have.

Then steam reviews are the most accurate reviews there are for how likely you are to be happy with the purchase. I am much more hesitant to spend money on a game where I can't see the steam reviews for, so there is basically no way I'll buy a game on epic store that doesn't exist on steam since I am basically buying it blind.

With gaming on Linux, steam fixes so many middle issues. I can download a game and it just works through some combination of WINE and voodoo magic.

And all game controller even works!

Steam is a serious value add on Linux.

Looking at what many of your games do I think it is better option. I have zero doubt that there wouldn't be countless downloaders and accounts and poorly written startup menus for each game and each publisher both big and small.

Simply getting installer would not be option for most games.

GOG/Humble Store/Itch is for you then.

With the added downside of less choice and/or delayed releases

I mean, steam does install the game and you can run the executable, but yes, there is a level of trust that it won't delete the game or some such.

I vaguely recall Half-Life 2's launch being pretty problematic.

I started using Steam in 2007 and it was fine. In 2006 there was still some residual animosity towards it but I think the tide had well and truly turned since the early days (and I think there were a handful of third party games on it by then too which I guess was something of a vote of confidence - a few were Source engine titles so they may have got a discount or kick-back from Valve, but not all were).

> People hated steam when it launched but you needed it to play CS 1.6.

I thought CSS was the first release on steam beta? I remember playing the crap out of it, then the actual steam release happened, and it somehow turned into a laggy buggy hunk of crap for months.

No, it was 1.6 that was on the Steam beta. That was years before HL2 and CS:S were even leaked let alone released.

Not sure of the exact history but pretty sure Steam was launched as a beta in 2002, or maybe 2003. In September 2003 or so the database was wiped and Steam was launched, again with probably only Counter-Strike available.

Counter-Strike Source was launched some time in 2004 and then Half-Life 2 came along in November 2004.

Steam dropped basically alongside team fortress.

I mean, people really didn't hate it. There was some grumbling about digital and not having a cd, but by and large people liked it as soon as they had broadband.

it was pretty meh back then, so people had pretty understandable reasons. it made LAN parties harder for example :)

but it got a lot better.

Epic had more money and time compared to Valve. and their store is still worse.

sure, Steam has an enormous moat, but that won't be the case forever, Epic should be ready with a nice platform to exploit niches that Valve misses

instead they hemorrhage money on things that does not make their fundamental position any better.

Indeed people behave as if Gabe would live forever, or Valve's management will always take the perfect decisions.

Eventually like it comes to all of us, there will be time to a new generation of game stores, or gaming devices.

But it won't be Epic unless they change their attitude.

Steam has a lot of issues but there are too just lots of areas where better products don't win out over inferior products, that's just not how the world works for lots of reasons.

Updating games on HDDs on Steam takes ages; I often see the download complete but then wait another 30 minutes for their diff to complete; and that happens with 10-20 games every week when they have big updates (10GB+). Just for this one thing I would switch elsewhere.

That's what's happening to Windows as we speak.

Steam was first to market and it took forever for competitors to form.

It being a good service is secondary.

If Valve started to routinely do Bad Things on Steam they'd be gone pretty quickly. Many would go to GoG, some just stop buying games. Bad Things do occasionally happen (bad things like those "oops, we don't actually have licenses for the music used in the game you bought" revokes), but Valve keeps succeeding in keeping it to a rather low background noise level. Competitors have two decades of being that good or better to catch up. You can't buy trust, you can just put money into not losing any of the trust that grew over time. When competitors have done that for two decades, Valve, unless they fail in the meantime, will have even more.

I heard the same thing for Discord last month, and reddit and Twitter a few years back. It kind of worked for Twitter due to be outstandiningly bad, but it still didn't "kill" Twitter in the colloquial sense.

I don't see it going down any differently with Steam. It may take a dent and open up a competitor, but it won't do a move so catastrophic that it losses its leader status from that alone.

Which of them are privately owned? In a publicly traded company, there's an inherent logic that people who believe that the company can get by with squeezing customers a little harder will end up with higher projections than those who think it's better to get by with a moderate approach. Price goes up with the bids from the squeezers and occasionally a moderate will sell until eventually the squeezers own an identity-defining fraction. Valve only is what it is because of the ownership structure, its closeness to being bootstrapped (I assume that in reality ownership is a little more complicated, but close enough)

We could also call those squeezers "optimists", and publicly traded implies ownership by the most optimistic (well, the most optimistic who have money to invest). Leading to behavior patterns that could be described as suicidally chasing the most unrealistic money making projections. (and founder majority stakes are surprisingly susceptible to falling in line with those optimists, because those owners still don't want to see their valuation going down, doubly so of they ever started borrowing against their stakes)

"pretty quickly" is a few years, not one month. Chrome dominated the browser market pretty quickly even though the richer bigger company microsoft already had most of the browser marketshare, and that was 3 years. Before those 3 years it seemed like nobody would be able to make a dent in microsofts monopoly, and then it was gone in just 3 years.

If steams fumbles as hard as microsoft did with internet explorer they too could be mostly gone in 3 years, replaced by a giant competitors product.

The Reddit blackout is coming on 3 years old now. The twitter kerfuffle is almost 4? I'm not holding my breath.

And yes, chrome is a great example. That came right on the legs of Microsoft losing an anti trust case. For something that seems so quaint in 2026. I miss when regulations had teeth.

> If you see a product category where users are legitimately unhappy; then enter it, build something actually good, you'll be the biggest and richest in no-time.

In what role-playing game?

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