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Steam keeps on winning
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this post was submitted on 27 Dec 2023
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It's funny that back in 2009 Gabe Newell was talking about the focus on the customer, and making the DRM be above all useful and do things that benefit customers instead of just benefitting the developer/publisher.....and here we are today where people really don't give a shit about the revenue split, but the fact that Steam is an extremely convenient and useful platform that does a lot of legwork for the end users that people don't even think about anymore.
Epic is trying to wave a banner of revolution, where we the end users just want our shit to work and run nicely. Obligatory mention of Linux here as well, where it seems Valve is truly trying to foster an ecosystem that benefits customers as opposed to fucking them over. That's in lieu of the Polygon hit-piece https://www.polygon.com/2017/5/16/15622366/valve-gabe-newell-sales-origin-destructive where they point out the scummy things Valve has done.....but if you take Valve away you're left with a barren landscape of shitty publishers that actively treat customers awful with none of the good things Valve does.
Such a weak article. One of the arguments is that valve is awful because... people talk about steam sales, thus giving them free marketing.
Personally, I just don't want to have to use 6 different game stores/launchers and I'm happy with steam. Just having game pass also is enough to illustrate how much of a pain it would be, since I've bought a bunch of games and have later noticed I could have tried them for free on the Xbox app.
Man, you weren't kidding. Their strongest argument was that valve can run steam for essentially free, which is just fucking ridiculous. Valve defined content service in the 21st century, they paved the way for streaming and netflix. How anyone that is arguing in good faith can think reliably serving data thats 10x-100x larger than a Netflix stream is 'basically free' is unbelievable.
Also, it is not "pulling out all the stops" to drag out an international business court case if that case took eighteen months. I've seen international filings where you havent even gotten a hearing date after 18 months, what in the hell is the author smoking...
Well… Not to take away any points from Valve because it’s still a big chunk of infrastructure, but this made me pause… I think steam content is arguably easier to serve than something like Netflix. Netflix has to deal with encoding content and it’s important for streams to not buffer, so it has to consistently stream data at a decent rate (if steam hiccups it sucks, but it’s not a problem where you’re interrupted mid game, at least). Games can be a lot bigger than videos, but I’m not sure how much that matters for this. Storage is relatively cheap and Netflix will probably have multiple copies of each video in different codecs and bitrates which might make it more equivalent storage wise? Per hour of entertainment my guess is that Netflix actually has to send more data over the network than steam on average. There’s plenty of smaller games, and people can often spend hundreds of hours in a single game. If somebody rewatches a show they’ll stream it again, but if they replay a game they might still have a copy downloaded…
I don’t know any of the actual details, but I’m curious now how they actually compare! I’d guess Netflix probably has twice as many active users as steam, and I’d guess Netflix uses more bandwidth per user than steam (I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if it was 10x as much… I think people could easily stream 50gb per day, and I maaaaybe download that much from steam in a couple of weeks on average). Would be curious how it actually works out!
This isn’t to say steam is free to host, it obviously isn’t, I just think Netflix might be harder. I’m a tiny bit worried about Steam’s back catalog long term, eventually it may not be deemed profitable to keep hosting old games “for free”. Like eventually if nobody is buying a game anymore, but people keep downloading it, it couuuuld technically cost steam more to host than they made off of it, and maintaining storage long term costs money too (though hopefully this keeps getting less expensive over time). The margins for Valve are super high, though, so hopefully it doesn’t matter!
That article thinks people aren't smart enough to realize that Valve is a corporation like other ones, but it's one that strives for the "win-win" scenarios, where other corporations strive for the "win-lose" (AKA profit above all).
People don't mind if a corporation makes money, as long as they do it ethically (products that are priced fairly, not harmful to their customers, works well, and last a long time), and also takes care of their customers, treating them with respect.
But that article doesn't seem to realize that, it tends to write that all off as just some kind of psyop by Valve on their customer base to 'pull the wool over their eyes' while they fuck them over.
having a company that is not actively trying to exploit us is surprisingly refreshing.