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Ubisoft Insider Alleges That Company Wants Steam To Remove Concurrent Player Counts To Hide Its Failures
(fandompulse.substack.com)
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this post was submitted on 27 Nov 2024
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Hm. I wonder who is "unhappy", exactly. The industry is super reliant on Steam data across the board, I can't imagine Ubi's own people would love to lose the ability to track competitors, even if they also buy estimates from other sources.
I can see how they'd be annoyed that their more console-focused games and games that have a chunk of players on non-Steam platforms, like Outlaws look worse when the only info people see is from Steam. I don't know that the answer is to get Valve to close API access as a matter of policy. I personally would love to get similar info from Sony or Epic, which I bet would make Ubi look at least a bit better right now.
Of course, from Valve's perspective there is no downside here. Right now I bet they have a rep telling Ubi "hey, you want to look good for investors? Prioritize Steam sales to look better on public data", which is exactly the kind of mildly abusive crowdsourcing techbro stuff Valve loves to do.
I mean, is “do better if you want a better public image” really that “tech bro” an answer to this problem? It feels like you’re putting “don’t fuck over the customer” into the “bad” category here…
I think you're misrepresenting the point. Valve's hypothetical point, which would be "do DISPROPORTIONATELY better IN MY PLATFORM if you want a better public image", but also my point. Valve has a looong history of moving key parts of their platform to either automated or crowdsourced solutions, with very mixed results. The greenlight process, the review process, the curator system, the controller mapping library... The techbro approach isn't about "don't fuck over the customer", it's about "use gig economy processes to run the service and its features with a skeleton crew".
That's a thing. You can like their approach to customer support practices and still acknowledge that is a trend.
Except their actual point would very likely be “if you want better numbers, do better” at least in response to “we don’t like our numbers, hide them”.
And all of those things aren’t exactly “gig economy”… the first and most obvious is reviews. Something that is just… normal for users to do. Unless you’re saying you want valve to be the one to decide if a game is good or not, and completely remove user feedback?
The greenlight process was less “do our job for us” and more “vote on what you like.” They explicitly held the final decision, but gave users a way to have a voice in the process. This is about as close to “gig economy” as they got.
Controller profiles are literally an easy way for users to share their profiles for games with other users. The alternative is a single profile valve thinks is best being the default, and you having to fine tune things to what you want, even if someone else says “hey man this is the perfect profile for this game.”
You seem to be taking issue with users having a say and the ability to share with each other on a platform, and you’re complaining about core things users like about Steam.
Just because users “do work” on [thing] doesn’t inherently make [thing] “gig work”. And even if it did, if users are directly asking for those features, why is that a problem?
Why is it a problem, indeed? You're the one taking issue with someone pointing it out, even though it's a pretty uncontroversial observation.
I mean, there's more: there's the NFT-like marketplace of trading cards, which itself is a spinoff of their monetized tradable asset marketplace, some of which is based on user-generated content. There's the ongoing acquisition and monetization of mods. There's their original plan for "Steam Machines" being basically a spec sheet and a certification badge they would sell to hardware manufacturers. And this is more insidery, but they are definitely not beyond sending marching orders to indie devs on how to spend their budget to get store placement...
Some of those I think are good ideas, some of those I don't like at all. But they are definitely crowdsourcing effort in order to run the largest online gaming store on PC with a skeleton crew. That is not really up for debate. I don't even think Valve would argue that's not their approach.
And it is, very much, a techbro-y mildly abusive gig economy thing they do. They pretty much invented it. Valve is one of the earliest digital transformation media startups, right there with Amazon itself and very much a trendsetter for the Spotifys and Netflixes. This isn't an attack, it's a thing that happened.