By John Walker on October 12th, 2009 at 3:00 pm.
As mentioned in the Sunday Papers yesterday, there has been some controversy sparked after remarks made by Gearbox’s Randy Pitchford to Maximum PC regarding Steam, where he stated that the digital distribution service from Valve was “exploiting a lot of small guys.” This was later countered by an article on Gamasutra where Tripwire’s John Gibson retorted, “Ask the Tripwire Interactive employees if they feel exploited, as they move into their new offices paid for by the money the company has made on Steam.”
Interested to see if there were other positions we spoke to 2D BOY and Zombie Cow, who have sold their games on Steam, to find out about their experiences.
Says 2D BOY’s Ron Carmel:
“Valve’s digital distribution agreement is the simplest and most developer friendly agreement I’ve seen so far, and we’ve signed over a dozen of those. Also, no other digital distribution service I know of, PC or console, pays a higher cut of the revenues out to developers.”
But before we get to that, let’s elaborate on the original Pitchford and Gibson quotes to provide context. Pitchford was explaining why he doesn’t trust Steam as a businessman. He says that “Steam helps” when it comes to distributing games, but continues, “As a guy in this industry though, I don’t trust Valve.” When Maximum PC point out that Gearbox have worked closely with Valve he adds, “I, personally, trust Valve. But I’m just saying, honestly, I think a lot of the industry doesn’t.”
The point of contention is Valve being a games developer, but also owning the distribution platform used by their rivals to sell games. Pitchford argues that Steam should be a separate company, and doesn’t mince his words.
“There’s so much conflict of interest there that it’s horrid. It’s actually really, really dangerous for the rest of the industry to allow Valve to win. I love Valve games, and I do business with the company. But, I’m just saying, Steam isn’t the answer. Steam helps us as customers, but it’s also a money grab, and Valve is exploiting a lot of people in a way that’s not totally fair. Valve is taking a larger share than it should for the service its providing. It’s exploiting a lot of small guys. For us big guys, we’re going to sell the units and it will be fine.”
There’s clearly two arguments going on here. The first is that Pitchford believes there’s a conflict of interest for Valve, not only creating and selling games but promoting and selling those of their rivals. The second is that Pitchford claims Valve is exploiting the smaller, perhaps independent developers, by taking too large a share of the money made. It’s this second point that has received the attention so far.
There are complications in investigating this. When a developer signs up to have their game sold by a digital distribution service they also sign a non-disclosure agreement saying that they won’t reveal the details of the deal publicly. This isn’t specific to Steam or Valve, but it does of course make it very hard for anyone on either side to definitively prove their case. It was this point that Gibson directly addressed in his article.
“So, is Valve exploiting independent developers? In short: absolutely not. Without pulling any punches, I can say with certainty that if it weren’t for Steam, there would be no Tripwire Interactive right now.”
He offers an example of the sorts of offers put toward them when first trying to get Red Orchestra signed for a publishing deal.
“We’ll give you a 15 percent royalty rate, take the IP rights to your game, and slap a $1.5 million administrative fee on top of your recoupment costs.”
Gibson goes on to explain that the contract from Valve was the most straight-forward he had seen, and describes the royalty agreement as “great”.
“We were able to recoup our development costs for our first game within the first week of sales, and sales were straight profit from that point on.”
He drives this point home by concluding:
“Ask the Tripwire Interactive employees if they feel exploited, as they move into their new offices paid for by the money the company has made on Steam. Or me, as I drive away from the company that was built from the royalties we made on Steam, in my sports car paid for by the royalties we make on Steam, to the home that I pay for with the royalties we make on Steam. If that’s exploitation, I’ll take a little more.”
We spoke to two other independent developers who have published their games via Steam as well as on their own sites, interested to find out if there were examples of the issues Pitchford raised. First we spoke to Zombie Cow’s Dan Marshall, who recently had their point and click adventures Ben There, Dan That! and Time Gentlemen, Please! added to Steam’s store. He replied to our query succinctly:
“Sorry, it’s not a very interesting story on my part. I’ve got nothing but positive things to say about Steam – the guys I dealt with were thoroughly charming and helpful, and I feel far from exploited.”
Next we contacted 2D BOY, who garnered great attention and success almost a year ago with the release of World Of Goo. Ron Carmel told us,
“I know a lot of small developers who distribute their games via Steam and the only complaint I’ve ever heard is that they’re not always very responsive over email. I certainly have not heard anyone saying they feel exploited. My experience has been nothing but positive. Valve’s digital distribution agreement is the simplest and most developer friendly agreement I’ve seen so far, and we’ve signed over a dozen of those. Also, no other digital distribution service I know of, PC or console, pays a higher cut of the revenues out to developers. I think they deserve every penny of the revenue they get. They’ve invested a lot of money and effort building and supporting their distribution platform and every game that gets on it benefits from that investment.”
Clearly this is not a definitive survey, and only two more anecdotes. But the impression given is one of a service quite unlike Pitchford’s suggestions.
This of course only addresses the second point Pitchford makes. What about the other thought that there’s a conflict of interests?
Gibson addresses this in his article, acknowledging that Valve could exploit their position, but then explaining why he thinks they do not.
“Valve has a very unique take on this matter, and one that I think is smart business. Rather than say, “I don’t want to sell your game, because it’s a competitor to our game,” Valve says, “Our game is good, and so is yours, so let’s both make some money together.” The attitude is if the game is good, they’ll sell it. This is different than standard retail publishers and other digital distribution companies. GamersGate, for instance, refuses to sell games that require Steam because of the conflict of interest. And while they claim to be a better model for digital distribution because GamersGate is a separate business from their related retail publishing company Paradox Interactive, ask Paradox’s CEO if they would sell a game at retail that requires Steam.”
But of course the issue remains that they could. Perhaps if there’s something to take from Pitchford’s concerns it’s to ask questions about the position Valve is now in. They certainly did provide lots of promotion on Steam for Killing Floor – a game you could argue directly competes with Left 4 Dead – both are multiplayer co-op zombie survival games after all. Were the position being abused Valve could have taken their cut from sales while squishing the rival game from attention. However, they did not. (You might well point out that since they’re receiving a cut, it wouldn’t make sense to hide the game.) But they could have.
Since Valve wholly owns Steam, and Steam makes money from the sale of games made by rivals, Valve profits from the games made and published by their rivals. You can see why this may irk some in the industry. (You may also admire them for their moxie, and be rather impressed they’ve pulled this off.) But is it an issue?
Of course, if Steam were the only viable digital distribution platform (let’s say that Valve had patented the system, and no one else could compete) then this could clearly be an enormous issue. It would be a monopoly. But of course it’s not – there’s many others from the indie systems like GoG to IGN’s (and therefore News International’s) Direct2Drive. There’s GamersGate, Impulse and there’s Metaboli. Also, major publishers have their own non-independent online distribution services. The question is, how much of this market does Steam dominate? Is it viable for a developer or publisher to refuse their game on Steam?
The next obvious remark when considering conflicts of interest is: Microsoft? A games developer, and publisher, and owner of a console, and unique controller of its digital distribution. And of course the same goes for Sony, especially with the release of the digital download only PSPgo, Sony now also wholly controlling the sales of that platform’s content. If you wish to publish your game on either of these platforms you must first have it be certified by them, and of course pay a cut of your revenue to them for the right to sell your game on their machine.
Of course, finding parallels doesn’t justify anything. It simply puts the situation into a larger context. To borrow Kieron’s comment, because another country gives up its freedoms, should ours do the same? Steam, and of course other ubiquitous digital distribution platforms, could be argued to be the consolification of the PC. A console’s real purpose is a controlled sales channel from which the channel owner profits from everyone else’s access. So is it reasonable for Valve to run a business that sells and profits from the products of their rivals? While they appear to not be currently abusing this position, could they in future, and should something be done to prevent this happening? Or does the fact that games are sold on Steam at the independent discretion of the developer or publisher mean this objection is meaningless? Since the smaller developers who have spoken about the subject are so overwhelmingly positive, are Valve the right people to be in control of such a service? What do you think?
EDIT: Bit-Tech spotted comments from Garry “Garry’s Mod” Newman about whether Valve had exploited him at all. He said no. That’s either one hell of an NDA or they’re pretty decent to developers. You can read BT’s article here. There’s also details of the effect on Garry’s Mod sales from a Steam sale here.
12/10/2009 at 15:06 Michael Leung says:
I just think a spinoff would be of best interest to everyone. If Steam was forced to make money as its own service, I’d expect to see even better support and all that. Also, Steam needs to realize that there are other services out there, and if they want my business then they should try to work hard to get it, with places like Gamersgate, GOG, Impulse, and all that. But there’s not chance of that happening anytime soon, Valve wouldn’t spinoff their biggest moneymaking venture unless some higher power forced them to.
12/10/2009 at 15:11 Uglycat says:
Never knew about metaboli – looks interesting…
12/10/2009 at 15:26 Jacques says:
Metaboli are cool, but it’s very much a different system than the other distribution companies.
12/10/2009 at 15:30 Dominic White says:
Metaboli are the reason why I’m not buying Batman: Arkham Asylum. Why? Because it’s on their ‘Coming Soon’ list and it should be part of my overall rental package in a couple of weeks.
The thing with Metaboli is that you need to just think of it as rental. It’s exactly the same as having a subscription to LoveFilm or Blockbuster. An all-you-can-eat gaming buffet at a flat price. You don’t own this stuff, but you get access to more than you’d ever have the time to get through, and they do add a bunch of stuff every week.
They used to have super-restrictive DRM, but have moved recently to a much more Steam-like system where only the main EXE of your game downloads are encrypted, so they’re fully moddable. A pretty huge perk.
12/10/2009 at 15:12 jalf says:
Perhaps there is a middle ground though. Isn’t it possible that indie developers are treated far better than they would’ve been elsewhere, but still not as well as they *should* be?
Say they get 40% on Steam and 10% from a traditional publisher, perhaps they *should* be getting 70%.
In that case, I can understand why the indies are happy with the deal Steam is offering (it’s way better than the alternatives), but it’s also true that they’re being exploited. They’re still paying through the nose compared to the minimal costs incurred by the digital distribution platform.
Anyway, it’s an interesting debate, and I think the more attention is drawn to it, the more openness and real competition we’ll see in the future. Wouldn’t it be nice if digital distribution services actually had to compete on who could offer the biggest cut back to the developer?
12/10/2009 at 15:15 Michael Leung says:
Indies mostly love Steam because of the exposure they get. I mean, with a metric fuckton of users on Steam, they enjoy even more popularity than many other outlets. It’s in Tripwire’s interest to get in bed with Valve for all that popularity (the fact that they make good games certainly helped) as opposed to D2D or whatever.
12/10/2009 at 15:31 Alexander Norris says:
@Michael
The problem is that a traditional publisher will go out of their way to market your game to an audience that hasn’t already been acquired to your game – that’s sort of the point of marketing. As a publisher, Ubisoft will run print ads, billboards and TV spots for your game. Valve only pitch games to the people already on Steam, and don’t actively pitch Steam to anyone at all.
12/10/2009 at 15:36 iainl says:
It’s absolutely true that indie developers make more money off your purchase if you do it straight from them, rather than through Steam.
At the same time, they (the ones that are happy with the arrangement) recognise that it’s a smaller amount from a far greater number of people.
12/10/2009 at 19:16 Dan Milburn says:
@Alexander
So if developers want a traditional publisher, maybe they should get one? It’s certainly not mutually exclusive with being on Steam.
12/10/2009 at 15:15 gryffinp says:
Man I do not know enough shit about business to really argue or honestly even consider this point.
Here’s how I see it: Gamers are happy because they get games metaphorically delivered to their door at reasonable costs with all of the added advantages that Digital Distribution brings.
Small games developers are happy because their games are turning profits that would most likely be impossible otherwise.
Larger developers are less than happy because they don’t like Valve potentially having so much power over their shit.
Considering the category that I fall into, I am okay with this.
27/06/2010 at 01:32 Coillscath says:
Well put. I don’t know much about how the industry works at a level like this (And because of non disclosure agreements we probably won’t get real numbers. What we’re being told by the indie developers seems very promising though) but I think it’s just a case of the bigger companies being jealous that Valve beat them to a good idea and are now reaping the rightful bonus of taking such a risk. Developers are going “That’s not fair! We should be making lots of money too! How dare they?” and try to make it out like the indie developers are suffering. From the citations in the article, however, it seems the exact opposite. Indie games have been given a place they can flourish.
It reminds me a lot of the tantrum the music industry is throwing over online distribution of music. I might be wrong but to me it sounds like big corporations shouting “They’re doing too good a job and making us look bad! Somebody make a law to stop them doing that!”
12/10/2009 at 15:17 Guernican says:
I can see why developers would feel frustrated that another developer has created a distribution channel. But it does sound, as the article rightly says, as though there are plenty of ways developers can get their games out there without going to Valve.
Plus it makes the guy from Gearbox sound like a real dick.
12/10/2009 at 15:23 Heliocentric says:
Steam’s only rival to me as a “hardcore” gamer is impulse. No-one else has autopatching, and for a multiplayer game (which are the only titles i will buy near release for high prices) i need efficent delivery of patches. Indeed, impulse and steam will download the differences (as i understand) between the 2 states rather than a generic (and often bloated) patch.
So, if you want to get £20 or more from me for one title you need a decent multiplayer game with seamless patching.
Other than that, your unlikely to ever get more than £5. And for £5 i’ll put up with a lot, limited activations, download limits(ea store) a disc in the drive or even messy patching.
12/10/2009 at 15:28 cyrenic says:
There should be a lot more discussion over Microsoft’s Xbox/PC conflict of interest. There, we have a conflict that’s actively being abused (Alan Wake, for instance).
Also, Brad Wardell threw out some guesses on Digital Distribution market share last week in a forum post. He estimates Steam has 80% of the PC digital distribution market share: http://forums.demigodthegame.com/366260
12/10/2009 at 17:03 Geoff says:
From those thoughts:
“The entire combined active online community of Steam, Impulse, etc. is less than the Halo 3 community on the Xbox 360.”
12/10/2009 at 17:08 Jim Rossignol says:
“The entire combined active online community of Steam, Impulse, etc. is less than the Halo 3 community on the Xbox 360.”
I’d like to see the numbers that back that up.
12/10/2009 at 17:29 Man Raised By Puffins says:
As would I, a quick perusual of Bungie’s and Valve’s stat sites suggests he may be a wee bit wrong.
Current players online for Halo 2, Halo 3 & ODST: 96,484
Current players online for CS, CS:Source & Condition Zero: 141,825
12/10/2009 at 20:28 Malibu Stacey says:
Add another 50 thousand to the lower figure for concurrent TF2 & L4D players & you’re probably up to 90% of people using Steam to play VALVe games right now but that’s still only about 10-15% of the people who are logged in to Steam as shown by the Concurrent Steam Users numbers.
12/10/2009 at 15:29 Alexander Norris says:
I won’t get into the whole restrictive bit of digital distribution because I want to do some more thinking on that before I make a comment relating to it. I will, however, say a quick thing or two about Valve making money from their competitors’ games.
How is this different from EA or Ubi or whoever else publishing a game for a company they don’t own?
I don’t think it is. I think people are troubled by the relatively small size of Valve, and the fact that they don’t have “Valve Seattle” handling e.g. the Half-Life series and then another studio called “Valve [insert city X]” that handles the L4D franchise, and then a mother-studio located in another city that handles the publishing side of things.
Valve have created an infrastructure that allows a small company to become a publisher as well as a development studio without needing to expand to multi-billion-dollar, multi-thousand-employees-across-multiple-branches-in-multiple-countries size. Without being a Valve apologist, how is this a bad thing? It means more publishers, and maybe more developer-friendly publishers at that. Admittedly, they lucked/savvy’d out and did something that no one else can now do by creating the means of distribution, but this aspect (Valve being a publisher) of the digital distribution problem is still a fairly good thing for gaming as a whole.
Are people really complaining about a publisher picking up a game that wasn’t produced inhouse? Because unless I’m wrong, that’s essentially all Valve does as a publisher for (e.g.) Killing Floor: sell the game for them, taking a cut of the profits and not owning Tripwire. It’d be like saying “oh, there’s a conflict of interest between EA and Double Fine because EA DICE makes games and EA doesn’t own Double Fine!”
12/10/2009 at 16:03 Innokenti says:
This. Pretty much is my thoughts – Valve isn’t acting too differently from the world’s megapublishers. They have the variable slide of both in-house developers, part-owned developers, developers working on IP they own, etc.
Any specific differences are fairly minor, and Valve seems to be more happy to publish through Steam just about any game, without needing to work out a complex deal involving taking IPs and so on.
12/10/2009 at 16:11 Sagan says:
This is very different from a classical publisher-developer relationship. A more fitting analogy would be if EA also happened to own the largest retail-chain for games, and Ubisoft, Take 2 etc. would all have to sell through EA’s stores.
12/10/2009 at 16:56 Alexander Norris says:
Mmyes, I suppose digital distribution eliminating the need for a third-party retailer does rather kick out my argument’s legs from beneath it.
Well-spotted, Sagan.
12/10/2009 at 15:29 Gap Gen says:
I think the second argument is largely moot – as people have said, it’s a free market, and independents seem to be rather happy with Steam.
As for the first argument, I think it’s worth more debate. One interesting thing that seems to be happening is that Valve are buying up or hiring small indie outfits – all of Valve’s recent games, as I recall, were from outside people brought into the fold. Half Life is Valve’s only really central product that isn’t something it bought in for a long time. Maybe that’s OK, but I don’t know if their role of developer and publisher in the same organisation is perhaps a little confused?
12/10/2009 at 19:37 VelvetFistIronGlove says:
That’s not really the case. Valve hired the Team Fortress people years and years ago (remember, TF2 was—with all its false starts—10 years in development). Portal was created when Valve hired a team of students, who had created a prototype game, Narbacular Drop (which you can see at https://www.digipen.edu/GameGallery/websites/NarbacularDrop/), but Portal has so much more to it that it’s definitely not a case of them just buying in a product/company. Left 4 Dead is the only product that the claim could apply to, but in reality, Valve and Turtle Rock had had an extremely close working relationship for many years, and Valve had already made a significant contribution to L4D before the merger.
Just to clarify: yes, Valve does hire people who have great products, but they have never just slapped their own label on an existing product; they’ve always added much more value into it.
12/10/2009 at 15:33 army of none says:
This is the best coverage of this particular issue I’ve seen so far. Thanks, RPS, for the fairly indepth discussion of Pitchford’s comments!
12/10/2009 at 15:36 Ravenger says:
If Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft are allowed to both own their digital delivery systems and produce their own games for them, then I don’t see why Valve can’t either.
12/10/2009 at 15:37 LewieP says:
I think Valve have probably done more for (a lot of) indie devs than any other company out there.
The biggest problem I can see is that they can decide to flat out refuse to put some games on steam. Clifski’s games and The Spirit Engine 2 are most obvious examples.
12/10/2009 at 17:52 Y3k-Bug says:
Why is this an issue, exactly?
12/10/2009 at 18:04 LewieP says:
Who knows what reasons those games aren’t up their. If it is just “Valve doesn’t like them”, then these games are going to get a lot less exposure, and earn less money.
Is it right that Valve’s tastes dictate how much money games make?
I predict in the (long term) future, there will be a section of Steam that is completely open and self regulated, that anyone can put any game up one (pending peer review), basically something like the Xbox Indie games. They could make the more popular stuff available on the regular section of steam too.
12/10/2009 at 19:42 VelvetFistIronGlove says:
But that isn’t different to any other publisher/retailer. They can all decline to accept your product if you offer to let them sell it.
That would only become a problem if there wasn’t a variety of digital distribution services, and Steam had a monopoly.
13/10/2009 at 15:34 edosan says:
“Is it right that Valve’s tastes dictate how much money games make?”
How is that different than what WalMart and Best Buy does? They pick and choose as well.
Yeah, I’d love to see those things on Steam too, but they’re not.
12/10/2009 at 15:41 Haggai Elkayam says:
All the “they could exploit the system” talk is very similar to “Google could take over the world one day if they wanted to”. I don’t like conspiracy theories. It mostly amounts to wasted internet ink.
Also, I think Valve doesn’t have that much of a conflict of interest here – they make their money if they sell their own game or their competitors’. If they snubbed “Killing Floor”, for example, I believe they would have lost some pretty decent profits – from KF itself and from other companies who would have heard about it and stayed away from Steam.
12/10/2009 at 15:41 Ragnar says:
I think there should be an easy way to transfer your bought games from one digital distribution service to another (at least those that the new one has available). That way, you will never be stuck with one distributor the day you feel that company is being abusive. In the same way I can transfer all my money from one bank to another.
12/10/2009 at 17:00 Alexander Norris says:
And that is the crux of it, in my opinion. Currently, no such system exists; I’m not sure if the technology for such a system exists; and I am ready to claim that the will for such a system to exist definitely does not exist.
Ideally, we need there to be a single, third-party, neutral and trustworthy encryption protocol that would allow all our games to be decrypted by any digital distribution application, so that deciding which application to use would be much like deciding whether to use MSN or Trillian rather than deciding whether to use a PS3 or a 360.
Unless a billionaire sympathetic to our plights pops out of the woodworks, though, that isn’t going to happen. The closest thing I can think of is Stardock’s GOO – and that’s yet to see use beyond a few products on Impulse. We’d need GOO to become the only encryption/decryption process in use across the whole spectrum of PC digital distribution, and for all current digital distribution/DRM platforms to “read” GOO.
Sadly, I very much doubt it’s going to happen.
12/10/2009 at 17:16 Geoff says:
Yes, there is not a market for this because it’s economically one sided, like “I wish the banks would just give me free money when I’ve had a hard day” or “If I pay Microsoft for a copy of Windows, Apple should give me OS X for free.”
Think about the economics of it, from their point of view. Steam’s costs are maintaining the infrastructure to support all the downloads and multiplayer interaction, as well as the administrative costs of tracking your purchases and games, and finally the actual license/royalties they pay to the content owners. Their revenue is when you pay them. If you don’t pay them, but instead pay Impulse, then plug the CD Key into Steam and expect it to give you that game, you’re using their resources without paying them anything.
This doesn’t map to “transferring my money to different bank accounts” or “transferring my phone number to any cell phone provider”, because when you do those things you’re paying the company you transfer to. The bank makes its money off of interest from your money and off of charging you service fees for your account. The phone company makes money off your monthly subscription.
How would Steam make any money by providing you the ability to access all the games you didn’t buy from them?
12/10/2009 at 15:42 12kill4 says:
As steam is currently part of Valve- a privately owned company- it does have some distinct advantages and disadvantages…. while the site is not accountable to anyone but its owners and the law (no market influence from share holders in other words) it is also not effected by the negative aspects of market accountability- such as short term investors and investment funds who, rather than seeking sustained performance gains in order to recieve nice divitends each year, are simply looking for an increased price at which to sell their shares. A system which encourages such aims can have just as much influence upon creating a profits first mentality as an internal conflict of interest. Similarly a split between Valve would also place greater finacial pressure upon Steam’s management- something which could just as easily lead to exploitation emerging…
On a more personal note… I find it rather hard to see Pitchford’s argument as valid. As he so clearly states- ““I, personally, trust Valve”. If this is the case then why propose that Valve cannot be trusted? Does he have so little faith in his own opinion that he chooses to contradict it so readily and obviously? If so, why is he writing such an opinionated article? Furthermore, as a rival developer, does Pitchford not also have a conflict of interest? Is it not plausible (excluding the close personal relationship we know Pitchford has with Newell, [see: River-Boat Poker...]) to suggest that he might wish to reduce the competitive advantage which an extra revenue stream offers Valve? I would hazard to suggest that it is the success of Steam which we can thank for the continued success of Valve’s games… the simple fact that they can continue to gain private funding over extended development periods- without being at the mercy of a publisher- and even comfortably absorb a loss is one of the reasons why their games are so consistently polished and innovative.
So in short I believe that Valve isn’t broken, so why try to fix [/break] it.
12/10/2009 at 15:44 Calabi says:
If it was a separate business it would be squeezed until it sqeeked.
Talking about the amount indie devs get. There’s been recent controversy over the amount artists get whom sell digital distributed 3d models. Turbo squid reduced the amounts artists get to just a 40 percent share, you only get more if you exclusive with them. Companies are always looking to sqeeze those under them.
It sounds like the person is advocating some kind of monopoly, ruled by a benevolent company such as microsoft sure that would be much better.[/sarcasm] They would also have a coflict of interest anyway.
All we really need is plenty of competition like we appear to have or some persons to come up with proper laws about digital distribution, ownership of content etc(which they should any way).
12/10/2009 at 15:48 Darkelp says:
I don’t see any problem with Valve owning Steam at all, if other companies don’t like it then they should go elsewhere to publish games.
Until Valve start to rip off developers (which would bring about a backlash that would destroy them) I shall have every bit of faith in them, and Steam.
Also, as many have already mentioned, this business model is exactly the same as many other businesses. It all sounds like jealousy from those that wish they had had the balls to try something like Steam in the first place.
12/10/2009 at 15:50 Lobotomist says:
Man. I expected to read objective article. But you should better call this one ” Valve , let me bow to you golden greatness and kiss your legs while wallowing in dirt.”
I mean its clear RPS guys are huge Valve supporters , but this is really to much.
Fact that games like L4D constantly top bestseller list. This easily faked fact is huge advertisement.
And since Valve is owning distribution client , there is no reason not to do this. After all they can not be blamed for promoting their own games, over competition.
12/10/2009 at 17:56 abhishek says:
I guess you must have missed the Steam top sellers list for the last 3 months or so where Aion (both the Collector’s and Standard edition) has outsold Left 4 Dead and other Valve titles.
12/10/2009 at 18:29 John Walker says:
I can’t quite work out what you were expecting. Are you saying my article is biased because I didn’t say that Valve might be faking their own sales rankings with absolutely no evidence? (Left 4 Dead 2, I believe, is only available to pre-order via Steam, and so is obviously going to spike over games available on all distros. Or it’s pre-ordering in just vast quantities. Or they’re lying. I have no evidence either way.)
12/10/2009 at 19:11 Lobotomist says:
I am saying that article is very much one sided.
As journalist you should try to offer both sides.
Also I give clear example of way Valve can use Steam to give advantage to their own products.
By the way I work in internet advertising and content. And above mentioned example is something done on regular basis. Google does it. Microsoft and Yahoo as well. So why would Valve be different ?
12/10/2009 at 19:26 Jim Rossignol says:
Your mum is very much one sided.
12/10/2009 at 20:17 Lobotomist says:
Haha…that was below the waist!
13/10/2009 at 01:25 Starky says:
It’s NOT a journalist’s job to “consider both sides”, a phrase I’m sick to death of hearing when people talk about journalists (often about the BBC), because when people use that term they don’t mean consider, they mean “present both sides with equal validity and let the reader make up their own mind”.
This is rubbish.
The job of a Journalist is not to present all the information and then let the reader decide, lack of bias does not mean giving every side/opinion/option/person equal consideration. In other words neutrality does not equal giving equal validity.
The job of a journalist is to try and discover the truth, then present that truth (with sources) to the reader.
Lack of bias means the journalist should investigate the news with no preconceived notion or conflict of interest – their opinion should reflect the truth (as best as they can uncover it) as based on the weight and merit of the evidence. Their opinion (backed with evidence and sources) should then impact the opinion of the reader. Impacting the opinion of the reader is the whole bloody point – without it, it’s just mindless copy and paste.
All the best journalists write with a very clear voice and a very solid and forthright opinion – and all of them back that opinion up with facts, sources and evidence, basically they tell you their opinion and then tell you WHY they have that opinion.
I’m usually saying this to people who think that creationists shouldn’t be ridiculed and their opinion be given equal merit (they should, and it shouldn’t) to hundreds of years of collected, catalogued and verified evidence, it’s a bit odd to be saying it on a gaming blog.
15/10/2009 at 22:36 Kid A says:
At the end of the day, bub, RPS and it’s readers pay to read what RPS writers think. If it was a publicly funded institution, then fine, complain all you like about bias. But it ain’t, so don’t.
12/10/2009 at 15:55 thealexfish says:
I don’t see any conflict of interest here. Valve has always been very good about giving third party games equal advert space on the Steam storefront. They do a much better job of being fair to third party devs (small and large) than either Sony or Microsoft. When I look at the Steam storefront right now, the only first party game I actually see right away is Left 4 Dead GOTY, everything else is third party.
I think keeping Steam under ownership of Valve ensures product quality in both platform and the games offered. Since Valve develops both its games and Steam at the same time, it can ensure that the platform works best for games and keeps it on the bleeding edge of technology and innovation. They offer Steamworks for any dev that wants to use it, and doesn’t keep it to themselves. I consider this to be very generous and a rare activity in the game industry.
12/10/2009 at 15:56 Joshua says:
It seems like the people who like Steam are basically using the old “benevolent dictator” argument – Valve’s in charge, yes, and Valve sets the terms, but those terms are good so everybody is cool. And while this is usually a terrible argument, here I gotta say it’s more compelling.
It’s likely the reason why Valve is so nice is because they are Valve: they move so many copies of their own product that they, really, don’t even need the Steam money all that much. Half-Life and Portal and Team Fortress and whatever are all, essentially, subsidizing Valve’s good attitude. If Steam was an independent company that lived or died 100% on its storefront, there’s absolutely no guarantee that attitude will last: in fact, I could guarantee it would go away as soon as the business/profit margin is threatened.
12/10/2009 at 15:57 neems says:
Although it’s clear to see where the conflict of interests argument is coming from, in practice I suspect that, for the time being at least, Steam is better off under the auspices of Valve.
Valve are who they are ie a pretty funky bunch of guys doing their thing the way they want. I think I would prefer Steam to be run by them, rather than being let loose to either truly become the money grabbing monolithic king of digital distribution, or get snapped up by the likes of EA or Activision-Blizzard.
Talking of EA and Acti-Bliz, it’s notable that both companies have games for sale on Steam, which I’m fairly certain must say something.
12/10/2009 at 15:58 CdrJameson says:
And, don’t forget, buy your expensive development hardware from them too.
Well, you might trust the current US president, but that doesn’t mean you should always trust the US government. Management changes. Valve could sell Steam to someone a lot less friendly.
WIth my developer hat on, Steam seems great. It’s a way to get less exploited than you will by a traditional publisher.
12/10/2009 at 17:25 Freudian Trip says:
SteamWorks (the dev tools, the sales counters, the in-game analysis, all of it) has been free to developers for several years now.
12/10/2009 at 16:00 pkt-zer0 says:
Steam already has alternatives, so I don’t really see them exploiting their monopoly much. The PC has always been about choice, anyway, and Valve won’t be able to change that. Also, it seems that Battle.net 2.0 is basically Steam rolled into Blizzard’s own stuff – they could be the ones to step up as a major competitor, should the need arise.
12/10/2009 at 16:16 Alexander Norris says:
They already have, though. Think about it – Steam is the biggest digital distribution platform, but the name of its game is restricting our choices. Games purchased on Steam can only be used on Steam with the account that purchased them; you can't resell games you’re not playing anymore; Valve reserve the right to do whatever they want to your account at any time; they don’t even look into VAC bans – if you’ve been banned (which essentially makes every multiplayer game that uses VAC that you have on your account unusable), then tough – get another account and buy your games back.
Without this restriction, digital distribution would never have taken off; and I’d love to believe that Valve are secretly working against DRM and that later on, when they control the market, they’ll suddenly cast off the shackles of oppressively restrictive content management systems, declare a new hippie age of computer gaming and force established publishers into playing by there rules; but actually thinking that this fantasy might happen and acting accordingly is plain stupid.
12/10/2009 at 16:00 Evernight says:
Food for thought:
If the digital distribution site you use goes bankrupt and/or cancels what happens to you ability to DL the games you bought? My guess – they are gone… that’s most likely in your EULA if anyone actually reads it.
So why trust Valve? Because this company makes great games! This company will thrive because we trust it to survive and therefore we want to buy our games there. Places like Impulse have much smaller companies behind them and therefore are much riskier…. for the same price.
If Steam is pulling 80% of the digital distribution its because they have earned it – free markets will always move toward high efficiency
12/10/2009 at 16:20 Sagan says:
If Steam goes bankrupt, there will be a betting war between the major publishers to buy it.
If a smaller digital distribution site goes bankrupt, it will likely be taken over by another one, who could use the additional customers. So if, for example, DLGamer goes bankrupt, I bet Impulse or Steam or someone else will want to buy them. Because all of their users will suddenly be forced to use your program if they want to play their games again.
Unless you buy from a really obscure site or directly from a company, I think it’s unlikely you will lose your games.
12/10/2009 at 16:00 KikiJiki says:
Interesting article, though a bit one sided to say the least.
There ARE development teams that have had a rough time with Steam, perhaps talking to one of them could lend a bit of balance to the discussion and make for an even better little bit of writing?
12/10/2009 at 16:02 bill says:
I gotta agree that Steam is a huge step forward for most smaller devs, and we wouldn’t be seeing the current huge boom in indie games, small russian FPS games, etc.. if it wasn’t for what steam started.
Developers get totally exploited by the big publishers all the time, as many of the recent shenanigans and closures have shown. Even making a successful game isn’t often enough to save them from their faustian bargain.
An interesting phenomenon though is that recently the big publishers are on steam… so maybe the small devs are losing out twice! Steam works great if it’s the only cut you pay, but if you’re paying out to both EA and Steam…
That said, I think Steam’s customer service is pretty terrible. they seem to be seriously in need of more staff. Also, they should be a lot more transparent about their practices, both for Devs, sales and customers. Not listing DRM, not fixing broken games, not responding to emails, not explaining why accounts are locked, etc…
On the flipside, i think games journalists need to ask more questions to valve about Steam. It’s great getting all the info on L4D2, but how about asking them about some of the issues?
12/10/2009 at 19:52 VelvetFistIronGlove says:
I wholeheartedly agree. I know nothing about the developer relationship with Steam beyond what’s mentioned in the article, but their customer relations are mediocre at best. Which is the primary reason why I don’t really trust Steam: I use them because it’s incredibly convenient, but since they don’t offer refunds, don’t generally discuss banned accounts with the account holder, have strong regional pricing and regional lock-in, and actually offers quite a clumsy user experience, I’d love to see RPS do an interview with Valve’s Steam guys discussing customer issues.
12/10/2009 at 16:12 lumpi says:
For me, the most problematic argument in this debate, as pointed out in the article, is that “other companies are worse”. Or even that “Valve’s offer is the best”. Just because Nintendo’s, Sony’s or Microsoft’s deals are horrible doesn’t mean Valve’s position as the benevolent leaders of online distribution cannot be problematic… or change to the worse, once the monopoly is established (monopoly isn’t the lack of competitors, it’s the ability to ignore competition since the market is getting too dull in one’s favor). I don’t like the shift from actually owning the software you buy to essentially “licensing” it, only being able to legally access it via a controlled channel. Digital distribution is an entirely new (and soon the leading) way of getting games to customers, and seeing it more and more in the hands of a single company that also uses it for its own products and has a rather forceful approach to its implementation is worrying.
I admit, I’m mostly seeing this from the consumer’s POV. Since you are stigmatized as an “angry internet man” when complaining at these sorts of things from the customer’s perspective (thanks for the “trolling culture”, IMDB and 4chan!), I’m glad someone from the opposite side is backing up what many gamers knew and preached since the early days of Steam. I could go on and list the numerous disadvantages of having games locked in the way Valve is doing it with Steam, but I don’t really feel like discussing every single aspect of this.
I’m more concerned about the risk of problems we aren’t seeing at this point, yet are very probable if you look at the history of monopolies and the disadvantages of waning competition. Basically: Steam 2020. Will Valve still be your buddy? Will anyone still remember Impulse and D2D? I envy the optimists among you…
Today, Valve still has to care about consumer goodwill. So I’d rather see this discussion (and an eventual reaction on Valve’s side) now, than in 10 years when they don’t have to care anymore. And I like that there is any discussion at all.
The only thing I know for sure is that blindly trusting a company’s good intentions, no matter how awesome their products are, is generally a very bad idea…
12/10/2009 at 16:12 TotalBiscuit says:
There is something one must consider when making suggestions that would weaken Steam in the marketplace. Right now, your enemy, as gamers, is not Steam or Valve, it’s brick-and-mortar stores. We like Digital Distribution, right? Right. We like paying less for Digital copies because you don’t get a physical item and the overheads are much lower for distributers, right? So why are most new releases games still £29.99/£34.99 on Steam, which is more expensive than brick and mortar? The reason is that brick and mortar stores are putting pressure on publishers and distributors, using their buying power to force a higher Steam price.
Example
“Hey, THQ, you know that latest PC game you’re bringing out? Well if you want your next game to get shelf-space/promotion in our store then I’d strongly suggest you give us the preferential price over Steam”.
It’s the same thing Walmart and big-box stores have been doing for ages, demanding cut-throat prices under threat of corporate boycott.
Steam is the only DD system with the marketing clout to win over publishers. Once publishers realise that they will make more money through Steam and can take the risk of pissing off brick and mortars, they will do it and prices on Steam for new release titles will drop to a more appropriate level. Steam is getting to that point, particularly as PC users adopt DD on a larger scale.
This is a case of pick your battles. Steam offers a good deal to developers and publishers alike. It is not perfect and at some point, there may come a time when the DD market needs a bunch of competition and the perceived conflict of interest needs to be dealt with. At the moment however, the larger issue and threat is coming from brick-and-mortar strongarming, so let Steam deal with that before we start bitching at them to seperate from Valve aye?
12/10/2009 at 16:19 Wibbs says:
You are probably right in what you say, but they don’t do themselves any favours by gradually introducing more and more ‘features’ which make them look remarkably similar to bricks and mortar stores, regional availability and pricing being two of the key ones.
12/10/2009 at 17:02 Alexander Norris says:
The optimist in me would love to believe that those features were introduced in order to gain the publishers’ trust before Valve brutally turns the tables on them and demands the customers be treated better.
The realist in me presumes this isn’t the case and thinks I’d be a fucking moron to believe it.
12/10/2009 at 16:15 Wibbs says:
Is there a clear list of critieria available anywhere that lay out exactly what a game and game developer must be/do to be accepted onto Steam? It seems that if this process was transparent and it was clear to the developer why a game had been turned down then this would go a long way to sorting this kind of thing out….or am I being too simplistic?
12/10/2009 at 16:50 Urthman says:
Yes that is too simplistic, because if some company had a game that technically fit the criteria but because of some loophole was a game Valve did not want to publish, they could be sued for refusing it.
It’s similar to how the ratings boards can’t give transparent criteria for rating movies. You’d have movies that technically fit the criteria for PG even though they actually had content that deserved an R.
12/10/2009 at 16:17 The Sombrero Kid says:
The issue is for randy and for me and a lot of other people is although there are loads of competitors to steam, there are no competitors in anywhere near the same league, the only alternative worth talking about is impulse and it’s consistently more expensive unfortunately, hopefully for the good of the industry someone comes up with a healthy competitor to steam before a monopoly kicks in.
there’s also an interesting aspect of Digital Distribution that because it’s an overarching service consumers tend to be anti competitive about it they’d prefer if they only had 1 place for all their games, which is bad for them in the long run.
12/10/2009 at 16:17 Tzarkahn says:
Steam is fantastic it gives you those games you might never try straight there with 1 click stuff.
I pick up these little indie games I’ve never seen before or old games that I already own but just want to have there.
12/10/2009 at 16:24 Alex says:
This looks a really interesting, chin-strokey, thought-provoking article.
However, I am entirely distractined by your TGP screenshot, which is exactly the same one I went for when I reviewed it (not ). Except your’s is much prettier and non-compressed :(
Now…
ON WITH THE ARTICLE!
12/10/2009 at 16:24 Ravious says:
Excellent article! I really, really have to want a game for me to buy it elsewhere than Steam. For example, as much as I want Borderlands, I know I would not have bought it if it were not on Steam. Lord of the Rings Online (my main MMO) is not on Steam, but I still run it through Steam to be with my friends, etc. (also X-fire blows since it won’t work on top of DX10 games). So yeah, I am entirely happy with Steam, and am super glad that they distribute and really push indie games.
12/10/2009 at 16:25 Alex says:
Fudge. Entirely mislinked that (has the edit function gone???)
This post now is entirely a plug for me.
12/10/2009 at 16:45 Alexander Norris says:
Does the racism slider actually do anything? I’ve always wondered.
12/10/2009 at 16:28 Cooper says:
Introversion have sung praises about Steam before. If I remember correctly, they claim to have sold more copies of Darwinia on the day of the steam release than they had in total before that. They also mention the weekend deals as great – even thoughthe price drops, they got a really high uptake.
I have no problem with Valve championing PC gaming by providing an excellent distribution service. Let’s be honest, PC-only games are increasingly rare. Even Valve are moving to cross-platform releases. If one of (if not the) largest digital distributor of PC games is putting the sotlight on the more ‘indie’ games out there – that is only a good thing. Mainstreaming in popularity and recognition and money-making for games which would otherwise flounder can only encourage more originality and, maybe, more risks in the mainstream. If someone comes along and does it better than Steam (as I would argue GOG have done with old games) then that’s great, but for now I’m a happy punter.
12/10/2009 at 16:33 stormbringer951 says:
I’d rather not buy things on Steam. Firstly, I have to download shit, and I’m off to uni soon and then my bandwidth would be down to nil. Secondly, the paranoia of if Steam ever goes under, I’d lose all of my games. Unlikely, but still.
Like Shamus Young said, we used to pay for the right to play games. Now we pay for the right to ask to play games.
12/10/2009 at 16:35 Wookie_Wookstar (Big D) says:
Steam is awesome, I have no problem with it at all and wish it would sell more. Valve can do no wrong in my book, maybe this guys just pissed he did not think of the idea first!
Long live Valve!
12/10/2009 at 16:40 Vinraith says:
I think it’s legitimate to be concerned about one digital distributor getting to be too damned big, and I think Steam’s certainly the most likely candidate. It doesn’t help that they’re also one of the most invasive digital distribution platforms out there, with a client that has to run not only to install but also EVERY TIME a game is run. This has been a source of trouble for a lot of people (it certainly has been for me) losing access to their games for various periods of time, especially since offline mode works at about a 50% rate. We tolerate it, because Steam is convenient and the deals are good.
Now, right now, Steam’s not a huge problem because Valve is a “nice” company, but once they’ve got a large part of the market and a majority user-base with a huge cache of games on a system as obnoxiously invasive as Steam, it’s easy to see how a shift in behavior/ownership/whatever at Valve could spell real trouble for the platform as a whole.
12/10/2009 at 16:40 Centy says:
I love steam its a great service but I do share some concerns over their current dominance especially with moves like L4D2 being more expensive (and some might say existing at all). But thats the only real concern I have for now but the opertunity still exists but so long as the current people are in charge they should keep the status quo because I wouldn’t hesitate to going back to boxed copies or downloads from the developers site.
12/10/2009 at 16:42 Ffitz says:
Hmmm…
So, braindump.
Valve are one of the best things to happen to PC gaming for a long, long time. For several reasons.
They’re privately owned. IMO the worst thing for a company these days is to be publicly listed. “increasing Shareholder value” as a business driver is just a weaselly way of saying short-term profiteering in the interests of a group of people who more often than not have no interest in what a business actually does and who are simply interested in never-ending growth to drive a share-price up, or taking huge dividends from profits that otherwise could have been re-invested in the business to improve products or services that would benefit the “unimportant little people” in the equation here. You know, the customer.
Valve being privately owned means that they have the freedom to focus their business on the people who really matter. Not shareholders, but gamers. Obviously they want to make as much money as they can, but they still understand that the important people in their business are their customers, and not some parasitic shareholders out for a quick short-term profit.
Valve strike me as gamers first and foremost. They’re not “programmers” or “accountants” or “secretaries” or “businessmen”. They’re gamers who work at those jobs. I might well be casting aspersions here, but I doubt that the suits on the board of EA or Activision / Blizzard are big gamers.
Therefore I think that Valve at heart want what we want. Great games, delivered in an easy, simple manner. They have a dedication to quality which shines through in their games, and they’re happy to take a “done when it’s ready” approach to a game which other publishers are more often than not unprepared to accept, usually because it would negatively affect the company share price (and coincidentally the suits’ stock options).
Because Valve are gamers, they understand that a busy, vibrant and competitive ecosystem is a healthy one. The more good games out there, the better. Everybody wins. And so much the better if they can encourage indies to be successful by offering them a platform offering a good return and wide access.
I might be being impossibly naive, but I really do believe that Valve are the good guys here, that the love of gaming is the marrow in their bones and they want to do everything they can to make it easy for people to either make or get great games. The fact that there aren’t seperate studios all over the place, and that therefore staff can play the other games that are also in development alongside their own, and feed in ideas and suggestions makes a far richer creative environment that just wouldn’t happen if these projects were developed in isolation. The Steam platform has become an integral part of this. I’m not going to pretend that steam is perfect, and that it hasn’t had it’s problems, but thankfully it’s far, far better now, and of course Valve are still working on improving it.
So why might people be afraid of Valve and steam? Abuse of monopoly is the sole reason, I suggest (apart from simple envy). There’s nothing to stop Valve from abusing their position, other than the fact that were they to do so, they’d destroy overnight a reputation that they have lovingly built up over twenty years, that is in all likelihood actually the most valuable thing they posess, and lose the goodwill and business of an awful lot of people. So they’re not going to do something so monumentally stupid.
So the worst thing that could happen to Valve is for the company to be divided up into “business units”, all working seperately, or for the company to be split and floated. It would be the death of Valve, and the only people who would win would be the parasite investors who suck all the good, risk and creativity out of everything they touch.
12/10/2009 at 16:53 Alexander Norris says:
And then they made Left 4 Dead 2 instead of releasing the DLC. /angryinternetman
All joking aside, see what I mean? It’s so very easy to lose their customer’s trust, and there will always be people willing to buy regardless of trust since Valve is currently the mainstream when it comes to digital distribution. This means that publishers will continue to use them, and people will thus continue to buy from Valve, trust be damned.
We may not be past it now, but there is a point where Valve will be beyond relying on customer trust to succeed. When we reach that point, there will be nothing standing inbetween us customers and being exploited by a system that restricts access to the games we paid for except the good will of a handful of eminently fallible human beings.
I’m not sure I trust Gabe Newell enough to give him free rein with the future of PC gaming.
12/10/2009 at 16:58 cliffski says:
I’d like to point out a few things.
Firstly, steam and valve are very popular amongst gamers, so you are very unlikely to hear from any developer who will criticise them. Not just because of public opinion, but because of NDAs. People in the industry talk very differently about a great many topics when they are on private forums or in person after a beer than they do online. This is true of distribution partners, price points and piracy, as well as DLC and other stuff.
In private many developers rail against piracy, enthuse about chargeable DLC and point out that games are too cheap. none of this makes for good PR copy, for obvious reasons. I’m surprised and impressed that anyone would publicly criticise such a major and popular sales channel as steam.
As to whether or not the criticism is justified, I think it’s right to be wary of monopolies, but valve just isn’t one right now. I’m a keen gamer and buy most of my games through retail, purely due to price, and crap bandwidth. We don’t need to worry about valve controlling distribution yet. Hell, I’m still indie after many years and have managed that without a deal with steam so far.
Finally, I have to point out that royalty splits from digital dist sites vary widely. I’ve NEVER seen anything below 35%, that would be laughable, and I’ve never seen over 80%. I’ve definitely seen deals from 35% to 80%. Obviously NDA’s mean you can’t say who offers what.
For direct sales, I keep > 90% :D
12/10/2009 at 17:02 Gutter says:
You do get to keep 90%, but you end up paying for exposure.
I don’t see how it is better.
12/10/2009 at 17:00 Gutter says:
Steam is the new Nintendo, they rock. They have replaced the physical game platform by a virtual one, AND their virtual “console” actually run games not made for it. Take that console makers!
I use D2D and all that, but I always check first on Steam because I feel like they are a recognizable face, probably because of Newell and because they make games. The Valve Head/Eye dude is much more memorable than the D2D logo, because I’ve seen it thousands of time. Other services are just anonymous whatever, they don’t get my attention as much as Valve does.
12/10/2009 at 17:05 jackflash says:
I like steam now, but I do fear them. As someone who wants to start an indie PC game studio, I worry what their actual royalty rates are. I have no idea whether they’d take 5% or 50% of gross sales, some percentage with a cap, or diminishing percentage, no idea. That uncertainty alone bothers me. At this point, I wouldn’t even plan to sell boxed copies of the game, I want to go digital only. Doing that without Steam would be insane – they are basically the Microsoft of PC gaming digital distribution. All of the other players are small fry. If Steam takes a small percentage, they fully deserve it due to their nice infrastructure. But since they don’t provide any funding to developers, taking more than 5% seems unfair. Indies have to internalize all of the risk and Steam gets only upside.
12/10/2009 at 17:08 jackflash says:
One other thing. Steam is pretty good since Valve is still a private company, but what happens if they get acquired or go public? This whole happy fun time will be over, really, really fast. Nothing sucks more than PC game publisher that has shareholders or overlords to satisfy (see, e.g., EA).
12/10/2009 at 17:14 The Orly Factor says:
My issue with Steam – and it’s an issue I think even Steam downplays and/or refuses to acknowledge – is that it’s DRM at it’s very core. I know there are going to be people who disagree with me on this, and that’s okay. However, a lot of games that require Steam or are bought from Steam require you to have Steam. You have to activate the game online. You can’t really do what you want with the game once you’ve bought it. Their “games as a service” philosophy, to me, means that you don’t really own the game. Rather, their leasing it to you. When I pay money for a product (which I believe is what a video game is), I expect to own it in full, and that means I should have the freedom to do whatever I want with it.
Steam doesn’t allow me to do this. Granted, I’m in a minority, but this lack of control over a game I rightfully purchased rubs me the wrong way. I only played Half-Life 2 for the PC once. A lot of why I only played it once is because Steam proved to be such a headache for me to use. However, when it came to the Xbox version of Half-Life 2, I played that game a lot and, when I was done with it, I was able to give it to someone without having to deal with a bunch of DRM nonsense.
Until Valve & Co. come up with a way to have their games run without using Steam, without the invasive measures, and the other downsides others here have mentioned , I won’t be buying anything from them. For me, their method of doing business doesn’t work for me. GOG, however, has a wonderful service model (DRM-free, too, I might add!) that I wish more people/developers/publishers would jump onto.
12/10/2009 at 18:08 Magnus says:
This is the point I was going to make.
I think the real conflict (from a consumer point of view) is the differences between Steam as a service, and Steam as DRM.
There have been several games which require you to have steam, and offer no alternative. (Empire Total War, Dawn of War 2 and anything by Valve). In these instances, it appears that Steam is being used as DRM rather than as the service which is it’s primary function.
These type of “locked in” games are a way of Steam gaining in percentage of digital download users, at the detriment of its rivals. This also helps to create a “locked in” culture, where a gamer may think that they already have Steam for some games, that they may as well purchase all their digital downloads through that one service. It can be rewarding for an individual, but at what cost to the general consumer in years to come?
12/10/2009 at 18:13 abhishek says:
I don’t think anyone would deny that Steam is, in fact, DRM. I’m also sure that everyone would prefer a DRM free world but that is somewhat impractical these days when it comes to games (and generally, digital entertainment). What remains, then, is the question of which is the best form of DRM… or rather, the most acceptable form. A lot of people believe Steam is it. Others don’t. Some people like having online activations and no dvd requirements for their games. Others will put up with a disc check but nothing more.
12/10/2009 at 20:06 VelvetFistIronGlove says:
Bollocks. iTunes, 7digital, and Amazon are proof that DRM-free is perfectly workable for digital music. I’d say that GoG is proof enough that DRM-free also works very well for games.
12/10/2009 at 20:18 abhishek says:
The same iTunes that went DRM free all of 6 months ago you mean? Besides, I suspect the move towards DRM free music is not so much to provide value to the customer, as it is to say “well, you’re likely to pirate it anyway. So here it is officially, DRM free and we hope you buy it”.
As for GoG, being successful, you neglected to mention that the average age of a game there is well over 5-8 years old. So why aren’t the publishing houses knocking on the doors of gog.com to get the latest and greatest releases on their service? That’s right, the DRM. So while gog is definitely (and deservedly) a success in it’s niche, calling it a testament to the success of selling DRM free games is, as you put it, “Bollocks”.
12/10/2009 at 17:16 bill says:
If Steam isn’t successful, we’ll be left with EA, Ubisoft, Activision digital distribution sites… which’ll mean:
(a) Really sucky deals for developers
(b) Not many original/indie games
(c) Higher prices
(d) Download your game for 6 months, pay more for an extended download period
(e) Horrendous DRM.
While steam might not be perfect, it’s one of the best things that’s happened to PC gaming for a long time, as it’s taken the power out of the hands of the big 3 publishers, and put it in the hands of the developers.
If the gaming media just held steam a little more accountable, and if we could just all get it a little more transparent, with better customer service, we’d be laughing.
12/10/2009 at 17:20 Vinraith says:
Because things like Gamersgate, Direct2Drive, and Impulse don’t exist? What?
12/10/2009 at 18:13 Magnus says:
(e) horrendous DRM
You mean like Batman Arkham Asylum having a disc check at retail, but through Steam it requiring the Steam client and also it has limited activations?
(If you check the Steam store it says “3rd-party DRM: SecuROM™ 4 per month machine activation limit” on the right hand side)
Now I admit, 4/month seems like it’s not an issue. However, why does it even need to be there? Did they just randomly add other DRM for laughs?
Perhaps not the definition of “horrendous”, but it’s still worrying when you get an extra bit of DRM on top of an already quite hefty DRM such as the Steam client.
13/10/2009 at 04:41 bill says:
(e) Horrendous DRM.
I don’t mean on discs. there won’t be any discs in a few years. I mean on the EA DD store, the Ubisoft DD store, etc… Unless you seriously think the big publishers aren’t going to try and control the direct download market. Or you think their offerings will have nice friendly DRM?
@vinraith:
Of course they exist, what’s that got to do with anything? Steam has 80% plus of the market. When EA, Ubisoft, etc… all really start promoting their stores, It’s gonna be very hard for small stores to stay in business, let alone compete and provide better options. Steam is essentially the only hope of keeping them in line.
12/10/2009 at 17:19 bill says:
PS/ now this has been linked to on the GOG forums, you’re gonna get all the rabid anti-steam nutjobs… run for it!
12/10/2009 at 18:14 Magnus says:
If you dislike Steam, that makes you a nutjob?
12/10/2009 at 18:36 abhishek says:
Not at all. But, I’ve noticed that being anti-Steam is a sort of collective identity of the users of the gog.com forums. An otherwise fantastic place for discussions about games/gaming is somewhat dragged down by this particular trait.
12/10/2009 at 17:20 Aphotique says:
I think Pitchford was trying to say that, while Valve/Steam may be exploiting the indie developers less than other distributors, they are still exploiting indie developers. A sort of, X may be better than Y, but X is still less than Z argument. I think its less of an argument against Valve/Steam, and more of an argument to the treatment of indie developer, but because Valve/Steam have the ‘best’ deal, they are the focus of the investigation. It boils down to, yes, Valve/Steam’s deal is good, but is it good enough.
Don’t get me wrong, I love Valve games, and I love Steam. I’m just presenting what I think is the argument.
As for the second part, I can see its merit. While its nice to think that Valve/Steam will always be benevolent, nothing lasts forever. As it gets larger and gains more control, the more possibility it will have to deny developers a massive market of buyers. Will it happen? Nobody really knows, but companies change all the time, from personnel, to outright ownership. Is it a possibility? Yes, which makes it worth pondering on at the very least.
12/10/2009 at 17:22 Muzman says:
As an aside; I’m loving this journalism thing going on here.
I feel a little sorry for the guy. Pitchford sounds like he’s leaning on a bar somewhere shooting the shit gone midnight in those quotes. Another round and he’ll share with you some novel theory on why the twin towers really fell, or something like that. Unfortunately now he’ll probably have to back it up or back up.
12/10/2009 at 17:25 oceanclub says:
I have to say, as someone else mentioned, I’m far more worried about Microsoft’s conflict of interest than Valve’s. At the end of the day, it’s in Valve’s interest to keep the PC gaming market going. Microsoft still seem to be of the opinion that a future iteration of the XBox series will be their crock of gold, and it’s worth stampeding over the future of PC gaming to get to it.
P.
12/10/2009 at 17:39 Acosta says:
I find funny discussing if Valve exploits their clients or is a “benevolent dictator” when traditional publishers get a free pass over the most aggressive and restrictive deals in the entertainment industry, the ones that will basically destroy your studio if anything goes bad and has made this industry so risk averse that we have 100 iterations of the same concepts until the cow is dry.
Valve is not a monopoly, is just successful, and it´s not mandatory for the a studio’s business, independent or not (but it can help, and it can offer a better deal than others). So what are we discussing?
12/10/2009 at 17:51 teo says:
I’ve reacted console-ish nature of Steam at times
Sometimes it simply won’t let you start a game with modified files. For instance, I tried to replace the music in the new free trackmania with the music from the older version. I really didn’t like the new music, but Steam kept reverting it back. It’s a very un-PC thing
I have lots of other anecdotes of small workarounds for things where even copy-protecting files didn’t help, and it felt very intrusive. I like Steam a lot, but at the same time I don’t =/
And as much as ppl love Valve, they don’t always do the right thing
A lot of ppl got upset over L4D2, and they’ve taken massive dumps down the neck of the CS community more than once I tell you.
12/10/2009 at 18:41 abhishek says:
I wouldn’t say that the community reaction to any particular move by the developer of a game is a good measure of right or wrong. If it were, then Blizzard would be the worst pc developer who make a mistake every single time they make a change to WoW (judging, of course, by the community reaction on the official forums).
12/10/2009 at 19:19 Psychopomp says:
“I
DON’T
LIKE
CHANGE!”
12/10/2009 at 19:29 Adam Bloom says:
That’s odd. I never had a problem installing the fan patches for V:TM Bloodlines.
12/10/2009 at 19:41 Vinraith says:
Mods work for some games and not for others, usually there’s no way of telling until you’re already invested, which is not great. Similarly, since Steam wrests all patching control away from you, there can be significant problems if Steam isn’t up to date on patches, or if the latest patch is broken in some way.
In general, digital download systems in general (with the exception of DRM free models) and Steam in particular represent a significant loss of control for PC gamers, which undermines one of the strongest characteristics of the platform.
On the up side, there does seem to be a push to make DD more mod friendly, and lately most Steam games that have had major modding support have gotten along with mods pretty well. Here’s hoping that trend continues.
12/10/2009 at 20:00 Bhazor says:
As far as I know that decision lies with the developer not with Valve. From what I understand everyone gets the same set of tools (Steamworks or whatever the original version was called) which the developer/publisher then tweaks to fit their release. So if a game won’t run mods on Steam it’s because the developer at some point removed that function or they were unable to fit it in.
12/10/2009 at 17:55 kwyjibo says:
I’d like to see Steam spin off from Valve. I’m not sure which team is subsidising the other right now, but I believe that a separate Steam corporation would allow for greater investment.
12/10/2009 at 18:02 MadTinkerer says:
@Alexander Norris: “Valve only pitch games to the people already on Steam, and don’t actively pitch Steam to anyone at all.”
That’s because pitching Steam is redundant. Allow me to demonstrate from my own experience:
1) Orange Box is released. Gets HUGE reviews. When I finally got my previous laptop, the very first game I purchased was The Orange Box at retail.
2) “Oh what’s this? Steam? Required? Well… Hmmmm… I’ve never heard of it, but I’ve already bought the game so I’ll try it out.”
3) “Oh so all of The Orange Box is in this list here. Huh. There’s also a store integrated into the application so I can just use my credit card to add more games to the list without going down to the store. Well that’s neat, but I don’t know if I’ll use it.”
4) “Weekend Deal? Hey that’s a pretty good offer. I think I’ll buy that one.”
One and a half years later…
5) “Hey, how many games do I have on Steam now? Huh. Over two hundred. Most of which aren’t Valve games, because Valve doesn’t even offer nearly that many games on their own service. So I guess Alexander Norris’s point is moot.”
Really, Valve doesn’t need to promote Steam any more than Nintendo needs to promote particular Wii channels. Everyone who buys one of Valve’s games automatically gets exposed to the Steam service and everything that goes with it. An ad for Left 4 Dead 2 is effectively an ad for all the games on Steam.
12/10/2009 at 18:12 Alexander Norris says:
Your point would only be valid if Valve only sold Valve games. We’re talking about other companies selling games that don’t require Steam on Steam.
12/10/2009 at 18:07 mazetti says:
Even if it was decided that Valve are abusing their position and should shut down Steam tomorrow… what is the alternative? Windows Live? At the end of the day, Valve have made a system which above all else works really well and delivers a great user experience. That’s why it’s so popular. Anyone who thinks it’s not fair is going to have to show me a better (or at least equal) competitor, otherwise the whole thing is irrelevant.
12/10/2009 at 19:43 Archonsod says:
No they haven’t. Steam is probably only saved from being the worst distribution method by those companies who still use time limited downloads.
The client does continue to improve, however they still insist on having it running whenever I want to play a Steam game. Stardock’s Impulse has a client, but they don’t force me to run it when I want to play a game. Others, such as GoG or Gamer’s Gate have no client in the first place.
They still use a DRM wrapper, unlike the aforementioned rivals. I don’t want to start a DRM debate, but this makes the service inflexible. I’m sure I’m not the only one who has had to wait weeks for a patch released for a game to finally make it to Steam. Sacred 2 suffered a three week delay on one patch because, in Valve’s own words, the guy responsible for adding the Steam wrapper was on vacation. Not great for a game where multiplayer is a major component. It also restricts my choice as a buyer; I own the disk version of Sword of the Stars but I could buy the expansions on Gamer’s Gate because they work just fine thanks to the lack of a wrapper. Buy a game off Steam and you’re locked in to buying any additional content from the Steam too, which given Valve’s erratic pricing policy is not a good thing.
Add in to this that there’s less incentive for them to actually change the client, both Gamer’s Gate and Impulse on the other hand have seen some sweeping changes from market demand. My preference these days is for virtually any service but Steam, however since other devs are now embedding Steam into their games it’s not always my decision to make :(
12/10/2009 at 18:10 Gorgeras says:
My inner Marxist says property is inherently anti-social. Games as a service are superior for customers. I own a lot of games that are pretty much now obsolete and unplayable. I was able to at least buy a version of Ocarina of Time which came with Wind Waker for the Nintendo Gamecube and is compatible with the Wii, eleven years later. I can’t repeat this with many PC games. The statutory rights protecting customers using services are much stronger in my experience than those protecting consumers of products. You buy products ‘as is’, but services oblige the service provider to a certain continous standard. No matter what an EULA or ToS may say, they can’t excape one phrase that damns the corporate elite to a modicum of decency: “This does not affect your statutory rights”.
Valve has a fantastic relationship with their customer base, even the L4D2 Boycott is very civil if you ignore what journos and forum trolls write about it. I’d trust Gabe Newell with a box containing the universe; all that is and all that ever will be. Valve is unlikely to change unless it goes public or ‘Honest Gabe’ sells his controlling share(I don’t remember if he owns all of it or just most of it). It has to happen at some point, but when it does the best we can hope for is that Valve falls into the hands of good people. Maximising the chances of this will require awareness-raising of the point and criticism where it is needed, but also a little optomism; a belief that this will actually be possible.
12/10/2009 at 18:12 Harper says:
When it comes to DRM, Steam is by far the least of all evils I have encountered. You activate the game once. Then you can play in offline mode whenever you want. You can delete/install the games as many times as you want without penalty. Hell you can even have the game installed on multiple machines at one time.
It isn’t perfect, but it is better than anything else I can think of ATM.
12/10/2009 at 18:13 frymaster says:
the other difference between steam and traditional publishers is that the devs keep control of things like the pricing, and retain the rights to their own product, AND still have the right to punt the game on other online distribution channels. try doing THAT with the physical-media lot, though happily that seems to be par for the course for most if not all of the online services.
re: steam keeping control by preventing reselling: I suspect it’s much more simply that they are trying to prevent the trainwreck that would occur if people could transfer their games to others from their account. The number of people who are capable of setting up an IRC client (not the most user-friendly of things) and yet fall foul of fake “I am a valve employee” messages depresses me…
12/10/2009 at 18:14 SwiftRanger says:
I think I can believe those developer comments that Valve doesn’t exploit their games. But the main point from Randy seemed to be that Steam gaining a monopoly (it’s already close to that) would be just as bad as what the console peeps have to put up with and that puts the perspective back to a consumer point of view which, after all, is the most important one.
With all due respect for Valve but boy, their service has had serious growing pains ever since big PC releases like DoW II or Empire decided to use Steamworks. Patching, mid-game interrupts, connectivity issues and then I am not even talking about the ethical/game ownership side of Steam. It’s all shameful stuff which reminds you why it’s never good to put all your eggs into one basket.
I hope Valve can solve the issues (the service has a lot of brilliant things about it as well) but I am afraid they’re growing a bit too fast on the Steam side.
While brick & mortar stores are the lousy bastards in this industry they’re still in this biz because the audience is big enough for them. If there is one thing I miss in the whole digital distribution hype then it is a better master plan to lure regular consumers to the online business side, even on PC. If the problems of accessibility, poor regional pricing, trust, security and ease-of-payment don’t get solved then I’ll stick with boxes from my local shop, thank you very much.
12/10/2009 at 18:14 Warren says:
Sure, Valve could abuse their leadership position in Digital Distribution. But that’d be akin to killing the Golden Goose. It’s my opinion that the current leadership at Valve is too smart for that.
12/10/2009 at 18:21 K says:
I’d just like to briefly defend the other publishers being vilified for not being as generous with the shares from the profit. Don’t forget they’re often funding the development of the game in the first place, so they’re more deserving of it. Valve isn’t funding the development (which I suppose is where the exploitation argument is strongest, but still a bit shaky), it’s more of a retailer for most. This obviously has advantages and disadvantages to different people.
They’re developers, publishers and retailers all at once. It makes them pretty special in the industry.
12/10/2009 at 18:31 Davee says:
Hey wait, about that Paradox Interactive/GamersGate vs Valve/Steam digital distribution statement – I’m sure ive seen Mount&Blade beeing sold on steam, yet Paradox is the publisher, right? Wouldn’t they then want it sold only on GG instead of Steam? Altough I guess Paradox could’ve made a special deal with TaleWorlds (makers of MB).
What a paradox (I can make my own puns, see, John? Hehe. Heh).
12/10/2009 at 18:34 goodgimp says:
Wow, real gaming journalism on display! What is the world coming to?
Thanks for the great article :)
12/10/2009 at 18:37 Monkeybreadman says:
i’m hitting you with a, ‘word’
12/10/2009 at 18:39 Mejwell says:
I’m disheartened by the amount of responses that amount to “Well, it’s the best we’ve got, so let’s stick with it.” Not to say that Steam’s in a bad state, but that seems like a silly reason to use to justify anything. Have some self respect, PC gamers! Don’t you know you can fly? (Metaphorically).
12/10/2009 at 18:40 Frosty says:
I have to say, without Steam, there’d be a good couple of titles I would not own, Indie and non Indie alike. Garry’s mod, Audiosurf, Time Gentlemen, Please! Unreal II: The Awakening and Dark Forces to name a few.
In fact, the only games I am missing are full priced ones because I find Steam too expensive for the new stuff, so that can hardly be exploitation.
12/10/2009 at 18:43 Chris says:
I interviewed a lot of small developers for an article at the Escapist and a few told me that Steam only takes a 30% cut (they probably weren’t supposed to tell me that). All of the 10 or so indies I talked to were very happy with Steam.
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/issues/issue_209/6236-A-Delicate-Balance
13/10/2009 at 04:15 TeeJay says:
Out of interest, how much would it cost a developer to do their own digital distribution? For example, let’s say the retail price is £10, so Valve charge 30% = £3 per download, and the developer gets £7. How does this compare with: a) the developer doing it themsleves via their own website b) other digital download services c) selling DVD-based media via play.com et al? Do developers have much of a choice? Is it good value? Or just ‘best of a bad bunch’?
Also do developers say anything different if they talking confidentially and 'off the record' rather than identified?
12/10/2009 at 18:48 Matt says:
I’m not sure your example of Left 4 Dead and Killing Floor work here. Although we can argue that both games are competing against each other in “game type”, Left 4 Dead was released a half year earlier than Killing Floor. So, if we’re talking in terms of a consumer choosing which zombie shooter to order off of Steam, they could buy the one that already has high ratings and a large player base, or the new one. Since they didn’t come out at the same time, the decision the consumer makes isn’t on price (ie: consumer has only $50 to spend, but on what?). Also, neither game require a monthly pay-to-play system, meaning that beyond the initial game price, there isn’t a monetary investment in both games (for instance, Age of Conan and WoW).
As I see it, there’s no drawback for Steam to distribute Killing Floor. Quite the opposite- they have only to gain through their cut of the distribution. The question Valve has to ask itself is why not distribute every game, so long as no game is highly similar in type and release date.
I trust Valve as well, but the opportunity for exploitation is enough that I think we should keep an eye on them (especially if certain things happen like Valve becoming a public company, or Gabe retiring).
12/10/2009 at 20:04 Tei says:
Also, theres something called synergy. If you play one zombie game and have fun (and are not burned of zombies) you are more inclined to play other zombie games. So the more (good) zombie games, the bigger market for it. So competition can result on more money for everyone. Killing Floor has more sales thanks to L4D, and we have to suppose that even L4D has get some more sales thanks to Killing Floor ( dude avoids L4D, dude play Killing Floor, dude have fun, dude buy L4D han have more fun).
12/10/2009 at 19:11 mrrobsa says:
Argh! Anyone else keep reading through comments then realising they’ve started on pg2? If RPS insists on not having single-page comments can we have a page index at the top of the comments?
13/10/2009 at 09:15 Catastrophe says:
This is page 2? DAMMIT.
I wondered why people seemed to be refering to something I couldn’t find… it was from comments on Page 1. ¬_¬
12/10/2009 at 19:17 cube says:
I don’t think that there’s even a question then. Remember, Steam is effectively a retailer, not a publisher. Valve isn’t subsidizing any other developer to create the games(unlike EA or Activision), they’re just taking the finished products and putting them to market.
Plus, given Valve’s reputation, that question isn’t really on Valve as much as it’s on the individual developers that they’re selling.
12/10/2009 at 19:19 skooma says:
Valve decided to publish Garry’s Mod and sell it. Now the guy who made it makes a pretty decent living from it. If there was no steam it would have just been another mod and he wouldn’t have gotten shit.
12/10/2009 at 19:30 Mac says:
I use steam, but the one thing that gets my goat is that they have effectively destroyed the second hand market … even with some of the DRM we, the internet public, got up in arms about with the likes of Bioshock, Mass Effect, etc, I could and can uninstall the game, and claim that install back and the game has some value to sell second hand. Anything i’ve purchased on Steam is tied to my account FOREVER.
The other problem for me, living in the UK, is that other than the weekend deals all other games are more expensive than retail … now that is just plain wrong!
12/10/2009 at 19:56 jackflash says:
Not to be dismissive, but that’s sort of the point of Steam. And they are not alone on this. This will be the last console generation that uses optical media – the developers and publishers see second hand sales as being too large a revenue loss for them (M$FT is already rolling out their digital distribution model on the 360). The software industry has been telling their purchasers for at least fifteen years that they do not own the software – they license it. This is in the EULA for every game you buy, and it is in the EULA for Steam. You do not buy games on Steam, you “subscribe” to them. This is basically no different than when you buy a game on DVD (the publisher grants you a limited license to “use” the game, but you do not “own” it), the only difference being, of course, that most of the time when you buy a game on DVD there is nothing the publisher can do to keep you from playing it (draconian DRM measures aside, for the moment).
12/10/2009 at 22:00 lumpi says:
Calling the second-hand market a “revenue loss” is one of the most cynical statements imaginable.
I wonder how Joanne K. Rowling thinks about libraries? Or whether Mercedes Benz plans to self-destruct cars to prevent used car sales?
Seriously, if you accept that arguing, you deserve to be ripped off.
12/10/2009 at 22:49 invisiblejesus says:
The used market is a moot point for me and a lot of other people, as the used PC game market vanished long before digital distribution became a major factor. There’s still people selling on Amazon or half.com, but the prices there with shipping and the chance that I’ll get stuck with a non-working CD key make it not worth the hassle most of the time.
13/10/2009 at 01:29 jackflash says:
@lumpi – naiive, much?
If you think a book and a piece of software are the same thing, come join us in the 21st century some time.
12/10/2009 at 19:54 Bhazor says:
I agree with Pitchford, because I only buy one game every three or four years so naturally using Steam I only buy Valve games.
12/10/2009 at 19:56 Heliocentric says:
Watch out for the match man of hay.
12/10/2009 at 20:11 Bhazor says:
I wouldn’t say its too much of a straw man.
From what Randy says his big fear is that Steam gives Valve games an unfair advantage and as a result other companies on Steam fail to shift units. This would be an issue if it was say Square-enix or EA who release dozens if games a year. But with a company that produces one game every 18 months theres really no way you could say that shuts out all the other companies. Theres also no exclusivity for developers so they can continue to sell however else they like.
Randy also ignores the fact that every new game or developer is trumpeted with a big brassy “Update Box” which is essentially a pop up but a nice pop up that tells me about shiny new games rather than nude Russians.
12/10/2009 at 20:10 DMJ says:
On the whole, Steam being the dominant force with a host of competitors to keep them honest sounds like a much better idea to me than either console-style certification dictatorship or a multitude of undistinguished fly-by-night services which offer no unification.
12/10/2009 at 20:33 TCM says:
I find Steam to be delicious.
That said, if it were to ever start being unsavory, there’s always the high seas and set sail, me harteys.
12/10/2009 at 20:54 Brian Woods says:
I think dude’s idea is that if other companies do the work, they should get the profits. He feels now Steam is ok, but at some point, greed will set in and people will start to be nickel and dime’d over how Steam handles their games.
12/10/2009 at 20:56 Jimbo says:
It’s not like Tripwire or 2D etc. are in any position at all to start complaining about Steam, even if Dandy Pitchfork is correct. Steam are in such a dominant position in the market that if these devs piss them off and get dropped from Steam, they would be finished. They have no choice but to take whatever Steam is offering and be happy. It obviously doesn’t benefit Steam long-term to be so greedy that they put the devs out of business, but I’m sure they squeeze them for as much as they can.
Maybe they would be better off if the DD market was more competitive; maybe the game creators would be calling the shots rather than a single dominant delivery service.
Randy is right about one thing, that Steam isn’t ‘the way forward’. How is it that Steam can already regularly charge 20% more for a download of a new PC game than an online retailer will charge to have a physical copy hand-delivered to my house? Steam’s costs are tiny in comparison. If they can charge that already, imagine how bad it will be if/when digital distribution becomes the only option.
12/10/2009 at 21:00 Shnyker says:
I do think that steam should spin-off. Its the same reason you don’t sell Sony game on an Xbox. Even with an agreement, its still not good business. I love steam and valve both, but I think they should split.
12/10/2009 at 21:10 IAT says:
I really wish they would fix how offline mode works. That’s pretty much what’s stoppin’ me from buyin’ non-Valve games on there.
13/10/2009 at 00:31 Starky says:
Pretty much every 3rd party game I’ve got on steam (30ish), not requiring steam (steamworks titles) work without steam, just launch them from the executable directly in the steam folders.
The few that didn’t did with a bit of fiddling, the only games I can’t run without steam running are CS:S and TF2 – which given their online only nature, I don’t care.
12/10/2009 at 21:17 Tim says:
I think it’s better that steam is a part of valve. I think I’d trust less a company which isn’t directly involved in making good games. I like impulse for the same reasons.
They know what good games are and what is important for gamers and developers.
I’m far more suspicious of gamersgate and direct2drive. I just don’t feel as secure that they’ll still be around and letting me download the games I bought through them in years to come.
Maybe it’s just image, but to me they feel like ebgames style retail shops except online, and they have never cared about what’s good for gaming and gamers.
12/10/2009 at 21:41 Feanor says:
Nice to read such an in-depth article about this subject.
12/10/2009 at 22:44 Phil Armstrong says:
My takeaway from all this brou-ha-ha is that if Valve were dicks, then Steam would be a great way for them to rip off independent game houses. Fortunately for all concerned however, Valve are not dicks.
As a bonus, they appear to be making large piles of money from Steam whilst remaining in the ‘not being a dick’ state, so there seems little danger of them turning to the dick side any time soon.
12/10/2009 at 22:45 mejobloggs says:
My only complaint about Steam is that you can’t give away old games. I often give my old/unwanted/’sick of’ games to my brothers/friends
With Steam, I’m stuck with 90% games that I never play.
12/10/2009 at 22:45 Hmm-Hmm. says:
I’m not suspicious of Steam, myself. The reason I’m against Steam (and similar ‘services’) is that it’s [b]exclusive[/b]. It divides the gaming community, and it requires you to connect to a ‘service’ which isn’t a part of the game itself. For some games, you need Steam. Some demos are only available from Steam. Etc.
Me, I’d rather just buy games from a service you need only access when purchasing (and possibly for a single verification). I don’t need it to be exclusive nor offer ‘services’ like fora, chat, et al. I’d rather those be provided by different services.
12/10/2009 at 23:08 Adamos says:
I like steam due to the convenience ( a username and a password all you need),the selection of games and those great weakend deals but overall i prefer impulse due to their take on DEM ( download a game no need a client in the background, redownload the game as much times you want using a key they sent you via email and copy it if you want on a DVD plus you can order a hard copy for $5 )
Now if only there was a service with steams selection of games and weakend deals and Stardock’s DRM policy
12/10/2009 at 23:36 heroic zero says:
Jimbo: the higher price for download versions of some titles is due to publishing agreements that are set up to benefit the publishers rather than the public. Some publishers are afraid of digital distribution, because it threatens the established order of things.
12/10/2009 at 23:41 EBass says:
The only problem I have with Steam is this. In Steam required games EVEN ones not made by valve such as Empire Total War to use one example. Is that you are buying not the game, but merely the right to play it on that Steam account which can be withdrawn at any time by Valve.
Say you’re little idiot cousin comes over and downloads CS and some hax. Gets caught and you’re account gets permabanned. You’ve just lost not only the valve games, but every steam neccery game tied to that account.
12/10/2009 at 23:43 DrazharLn says:
Teo, try disabling automatic patching in steam. That should stop steam reverting your files.
You can find that option by right clicking the game in question from the games tab and opening properties then updates.
I’ve never had a problem with steam preventing me modding a game. I still prefer to get my games DRM free (from GoG.com, for example) where I can, however.
12/10/2009 at 23:54 dsmart says:
@ Jimbo
Bollocks. If that were the case, we’d all just shutup with the traditional “No Comment” when asked.
Anyway, here is what I posted on Shack the day this broke.
13/10/2009 at 00:05 Will says:
Tesco sell Heinz Baked Beans, as well as their own brand. They do this because it makes them money. But this is only due to the fact that Heinz is well-known to consumers; economists would have us believe that if we couldn’t buy Heinz Baked Beans in our local Tesco, we’d vote with our wallets and shop elsewhere.
However, Heinz is already a big player – it’s not a small provider. We wouldn’t bother if we had never heard of it. The analogy of the supermarket works well then; we have already allowed the concentration of market supply into the hands of a few for almost every other product out there. The consequence? Crushing power of the oligarchs. While it is true that I have been exposed to games I would never otherwise have bought on Steam, it is also a fact that the indie developers will become as helplessly dependent on a handful of platforms as farmers are to the price-making power of Sainsburys and co.
How then, do we protect against exploitation? The economist’s cloud cuckoo-land idyll of perfect information should, in theory, nullify any supermarket dominance of an uberfirm – and the interweb, more than any other marketplace, offers a tantalisingly close approximation of this. It is up to us to seek out the diamonds in the rough. If there is ever any indication that smaller developers are not getting a fair deal, then we should shun the distributors and go straight to the source; sites like RPS enable a kind of digital equivalent of the admirable, though distinctly middle class, practise of buying local produce.
To help continue this trend, we need 3 things: education – to make the games-buying public aware of their spending power and how they affect the games industry; capability – and this can just mean having enough money in the bank; and the willingness to spend more for an ethical purpose (an issue intimately associated with piracy). In short, it’s up to us.
13/10/2009 at 00:10 invisiblejesus says:
While I’d agree that Steam isn’t a perfect service (like a lot of folks, I prefer to have my games 100% DRM-free), I do wonder how many indie devs have to speak up before people stop saying “Oh, they just have to say nice things about Steam” and start respecting their credibility a bit. Seriously, we’ve got one guy (Randy Pitchford) getting people all wound up about this, and he’s not even someone in a position to be handling business with Steam personally (that normally is handled by the publisher, unless the developer is independent). And on top of that, he just happens to be putting out a game that’s almost certain to be L4D2′s number one competition and in a position to be hurt badly if L4D2 pulls too many players away from Borderlands’ online play. I’m not suggesting everyone should just line up like good little boys and girls and sing Valve’s praises, but why exactly are we supposed to take one guy who doesn’t seem to really know what he’s talking about so seriously while ignoring everyone else with anything to say about their dealings with Valve? Especially when that one guy is putting out the closest thing we’re likely to see to a “L4D2-killer”? If I had to guess I’d say Pitchford was just running off at the mouth without thinking, but if we have to ascribe ulterior motivations to someone it’s a lot easier for me to believe Pitchford’d try to turn a few customers away from L4D2 than to believe that Valve would shoot themselves in the foot by pulling some underhanded tricks with Steam.
13/10/2009 at 00:14 Starky says:
What exactly is wrong with that phrase?
It is the best we’ve got, we we’ll stick with it.
That’s a perfectly good, and logical reason to continue to use a service, it’s the best available.
When it’s no longer the best available, and people continue to use it because it’s what they know – that is a slightly sad thing.
I pay £15 a month for gym membership, I stick with it because it’s the best gym in my city (best equipment, best staff, best facilities), it’s the best service so I reward that with my money.
Steam is the best service (in my opinion, I tried impulse and found it a bit rubbish), I like many hated it at the start, I went so far as to pirate half-life 2 AFTER paying for it retail due to been forced to use steam. Now though, years on steam is fantastic, all those growing pains are gone, the community tools are brilliant – and short of a massive F.up by Valve will continue to go from strength to strength.
Hell a company could make a platform with better features than steam, better done and at this point that still would not be enough to take the “best” title from steam – simply due to the size of the community steam has now, that’s a feature other companies will struggle to contend with.
Just as someone could make a “better” version (from a technical standpoint) version of facebook, but the major draw of facebook is the community, my mother signed up to facebook because “everyone is on it”.
Everyone is one steam, I doubt at this stage anything is going to topple steam as the market leader digital distribution platform.
Still, biggest does not always mean best (though again IMO in this case it is) and devs always have the option NOT to use it.
13/10/2009 at 00:19 Starky says:
Hmmf that was supposed to be in reply to Mejwell. Oh well.
13/10/2009 at 00:29 malkav11 says:
I dig Steam, but I’d like to see every game they offer available on other digital distribution services as well. It’s simply not consumer-friendly to have a single point of sale. And that pretty much necessitates not having forced Steam integration ala Dawn of War II or Empire: Total War, also, because obviously that’s something of a disincentive for competing services to offer those games even if offered the opportunity to do so.
13/10/2009 at 01:09 Jack says:
I admire Valve’s moxie.
I trust Valve.
I trust Gabe.
Pitchford sounds like a cigar-chomping skeptic.
13/10/2009 at 01:12 Vinraith says:
You say “skeptic” as though it were a bad thing.
13/10/2009 at 02:15 Forscythe says:
Steam is a wonderful service. By far the best of the breed.
Of course, if Steam becomes a monopoly, it will inevitably turn evil. We should hope for as much competition as possible, because it will make Steam and the other services better. Let’s not forget that ALL of the current services are unfriendly to the consumer in some important ways. For example, I’ll jump ship to any service that gives me back the right to sell or give away my used games.
While I’m at it, a few other things that suck about steam that Valve might fix if they are forced to:
* The steam application is a slow, godawful memory hog, and it has to run for me to play any game.
* I can’t play games on two computers at once, even if they are different games. If my wife wants to play TF2 in the other room, I get kicked out of L4D.
* Offline mode just plain doesn’t work right. Enormously frustrating when you need it.
* Valve lets developers put whatever hateful, intrusive DRM they want into their games.
13/10/2009 at 08:31 Vinraith says:
I’m unsure why you think Steam is the best service, considering that the clientless digital download vendors neatly avoid most of those problems. Personally, given a choice between buying a game on Steam and buying a game on Gamersgate or GOG at the same price, I take the non-Steam option every time. Since Gamersgate guarantees you’ll never run out of activations (and of course GOG doesn’t allow such nonsense to begin with) you don’t even really have to worry about 3rd party DRM.
13/10/2009 at 03:03 Buemba says:
I do use Steam for most of my PC game purchases these days but I hate to see the inevitable “I’m not buying this game unless they put it on Steam” comments that pop up whenever a game is announced for a different distribution service first (See Braid on Impulse and Burnout Paradise on D2D for example, though both were eventually announced for Steam later). Some people mix their love for Valve with their support for Steam and start adoring the service unconditionally, turning a blind eye to its shortcomings and attacking those who point them out (Which can be eerily similar to the way a console fanboy defends all of its exclusive games to the death). Which is one of the reasons why I do agree that ideally an independent company should manage Steam, though I’m not convinced gamers would have adopted digital distribution so quickly if it wasn’t spearheaded by one of the most beloved developers in activity.
It’s a given that Blizzard will eventually turn Battle.net into a digital distribution service, and hopefully that coupled with a strong backing by Activision will finally give us a viable competitor to keep Steam on its toes. After all, without a strong competitor no business can thrive in a way that benefits the consumer.
13/10/2009 at 03:25 invisiblejesus says:
“Some people mix their love for Valve with their support for Steam and start adoring the service unconditionally, turning a blind eye to its shortcomings and attacking those who point them out (Which can be eerily similar to the way a console fanboy defends all of its exclusive games to the death).”
You’ll see a lot of that if you go to the right message boards, or even the right game stores sometimes. People with extreme opinions are usually going to be the most vocal, and those who are inclined toward bad or obviously stupid behavior are going to gravitate towards those places where they are allowed to behave badly or stupidly. In reality, the majority of gamers are really pretty reasonable, but the perception is that the entire gaming community is dominated by rabid, unreasonable fanboys and/or haters; this is because the majority of normal, reasonable gamers are off doing their thing and not putzing around on message boards. That’s more for the very enthusiastic gamer, and people with extreme opinions and extreme behavior are naturally going to be disproportionately represented.
Cliff notes version, don’t take what a bunch of nerds on some message board or comment thread to be representative of the norm, because the norm think that you and I are bigger geeks than they are for even posting here. :P
13/10/2009 at 07:07 Nalano says:
It’s only a conflict of interest if it’s a public service.
It’s only a monopoly if it’s a monopoly.
I decry the death throes the industry and point to the gold and silver ages of computer gaming just like everybody else, but the only constant is change, and I find this to be a lot more dynamic and interesting than xbox, ps3 and the wii.
13/10/2009 at 08:00 MinisterofDOOM says:
Garry hit on the point standing out most in my mind: As consumer, gamer, and end-user, I do not want to have to have multiple software distribution programs installed on my computer just to play my games. I already hit on that a bit in the semi-recent GFWL discussion. Every additional distribution “hub” platform I have to install is an additional hassle and one more thing sitting in my system tray. Steam is acceptable in that it’s the powerhouse, does things well, and provides the games I want. I would like for things to continue this way. What I do not want is to become dependent on Steam, Impulse, GFWL, Direct2Drive, Big Ted’s Chokey Chicken Games Downloader And Add Blocker, and seventeen other programs I simply do not NEED. I don’t even really NEED Steam, but it serves a valuable purpose and being a SINGLE platform it’s tolerable to have to have it running to play those games (though I’d prefer to be able to play games without Steam active).
As far as I’m concerned, I already have too many digital games downloaders installed on my computer. I do not want any more. I want the ones that are good (Steam) to succeed and I want the rest to die so that I don’t have to bother with them anymore. It’s just like any other market. If you had to have a special fuel filler for each brand of gasoline (petrol for you Brits) you might use, you’d be eager to see the weaklings die off so the big ones can gain hold and you don’t have to deal with all that extra hassle. One way, the best way, is all we need. As long as Valve remains upstanding (and considering their history with both fans and business partners, I see no reason to doubt they will) no one has anything to fear.
13/10/2009 at 08:17 abhishek says:
Although there is something to be said about the validity of having a single platform for convenience, it’s generally a bad idea to want the competition to die. It is, after all, the competition that keeps the ‘big guys’ honest and on their toes. There is almost no way in which the consumer loses out when there is good competition for his hard earned money. So, while I don’t believe Steam can/will become some big, abusive monopoly in it’s field, I am definitely glad that there are choices like Impulse, GG etc. available to me as a consumer. One is free to choose a platform of preference and stick with it, but wanting the others to die out is a little shortsighted in my opinion.
13/10/2009 at 08:19 Vinraith says:
Direct2Drive doesn’t have a client, neither do GamersGate or GOG. If you’re sticking to Steam, you’re denying yourself options for no good reason.
“As long as Valve remains upstanding”
No company in a position of pure monopoly has ever remained upstanding, period.
13/10/2009 at 17:48 Gorgeras says:
I’m tempted to say Ford but I know there will be objections. While Henry Ford was in charge, workers on the production lines earned a wage which Ford considered importantly on principle would allow them to easily afford the cars they made. In those early days of the motor vehicle, Ford virtually did have a monopoly.
It was only when competitors started turning up and the nature of western capitalism changed that the Ford company had to. Ford is a complete reversal of the typical transition of a company from ‘competitors = better’ to ‘monopoly = worse’.
13/10/2009 at 09:46 Super Bladesman says:
I love Steam, to be honest. In fact, if anything, Valve are evil for using it to drain my bank account of far too much money in return for great games that I don’t have time to play. :D
13/10/2009 at 10:05 MisterX says:
I use only 2 digital media ditribution services
90% Steam and 10% Impulse.
Both I find to be solid, dependable PC friendly ( i.e no crappy 3 downloads/activations per game crap, or paying extra to “insure” your game to be able to download it more)
Compare it to EA’s god awful attempt at it. THAT was/is a complete shambles. interesting to see them putting their games on steam/impulse now….
I was initially dubious about no physical media, but the sheer convenience of having all your games in one place, not having to hunt for DVD’s makes it worth while.
Valve did a bang up job bringing little known games from little known developers to the masses
Long may they continue to do so.
13/10/2009 at 10:35 Reverend Speed says:
From Slashdot via Kotaku, Randy Pitchford’s response (apologies if this has been posted already):
“As a guy who reads, trusts and respects slashdot and the community here, I figured I’d take the time to clarify my position since my intent has been construed out of context. As a gamer, I *love* Valve’s games. Hell, I’ve *made* some of Valve’s games! As a customer, I love Steam. I like owning a credential that I can use from any terminal and I like the software. There are other things I like, too. As a businessman, I appreciate the access to Valve’s customers that they are providing with Steam. I think there’s value to that access. I’m really happy that the Brothers in Arms games are available on Steam and I think Steam customers are really going to dig Borderlands. I have been and hope to be a partner to Valve for many years. From an industry perspective of digital distribution on the PC, I think Steam is doing it the best right now. They’re in front and they’re really getting value out of their leadership position with digital distribution on the PC. From an industry perspective, I believe that Steam would be even better off if it were a separate company. Trust issues that result from conflict of interest could be mitigated if Steam were a separate company. Take that only as analysis. It doesn’t matter how much I trust Valve or how trustworthy Valve actually is – it’s just perception within segments of the publishing and development community that, I guess, no one is really talking about. I’m on record in this article saying how I personally trust Valve. I was attempting to comment on perception from some angles of the industry. I also believe that gamers and customers and anyone making games using 3rd party digital distribution systems would be greatly benefited if Steam had some viable competitors. Competition generally drives higher quality products and services at lower prices. I can’t see how anyone could argue against that point. If we love Steam, we should hope that as competition appears that it prompts the Steam folks to go faster and better towards improving the service and the pricing. In spite of the implication made in the original source article, I do not want Microsoft to control digital distribution on PC, but believe they (and others) could enter the space if they wanted to and help the competitive landscape and even, perhaps, help to standardize the landscape a bit. I believe that because Valve is a game maker that generally “gets it” I think there’s a lot of value to the position they have and I’m really excited about the risk they took and the foresight Valve showed in paving the way there. These are not mutually exclusive feelings and they are all honest and forthright.”
- Randy Pitchford on Slashdot
In passing, IS Steam a ‘pure monopoly’? The field of competitors and niche-focussed rivals would suggest not.
Certainly Mr. Smart’s comments seem to indicate otherwise… “a) Valve’s entry into the digital distribution scene actually helped INCREASE royalties paid to developers. I know this how? Because one site that I am with was taking a 50% cut for selling our games. Once we got on Steam and saw what their [smaller] cut was – we were able to have that other site match Valve’s cut or we would pull our titles from the service and not give them our new games. The end result was that we got an amendment with the reduced cut. So now ALL the sites that we have our games on are taking the SAME cut as Valve.”
Sorry, not really a business head, so I might need some explanation regards the use of the word ‘monopoly’ here.
13/10/2009 at 13:00 teatime says:
I have to say on the whole I really like steam, its convenient, patches stuff automatically and generally a good experience. I have purchased loads of games on Steam for myself and my family, but there lies the problem…
…because of the single sign on mechanism employed, only one member of my family can play a game at once (unless you force offline mode by disconnecting the internet), otherwise whilst I’m playing Left 4 Dead, as soon as my partner goes on the laptop to play Peggle, or my son goes on Garry’s Mod, I get logged out mid game which is very frustrating.
It would be good, if the Steam software could detect if it is on a LAN and allow multiple people to play, even if they have to be different games.
Come on Valve please sort it, this will get worse as the games catalogue grows, maybe come up with a shared login mechanism or something.
14/10/2009 at 01:35 SquareWheel says:
Well I don’t think you’re supposed to be sharing accounts in the first place, even if it is in the same local network.
13/10/2009 at 14:21 matt says:
I see your point and I agree. However, the point that I was referring to is that, though Valve can be argued to be splitting dev from retailer, the claim of collusion between branches is possible. The issue of Valve/Steam subsidizing the other game studios is besides that point. So, whether Steam will release a game like Killing Floor is plausible IF Valve wanted to limit the visibility of the game- and attempt to make Left 4 Dead the most dominant zombie shooter.
Simply put, IF Steam becomes such a huge player in the Online Distribution game, nearly becoming a monopoly (if not a monopoly due to the diminished influence of competitors), than the argument can be made that Steam could choose not to distribute any game, finished or not, that conflicts with whatever market policy they have (which may include other zombie shooters).
13/10/2009 at 14:47 andy302 says:
Valve is a good company on a whole i mean if you wana complain about conflition look at EA they bought out dev companies in the 1990′s and had nearly became a monopoly they then started to exploit the customer and still nickle and dime us from time to time.
lesson to be learned dont look at the new guy on the block as your rival,look to him as if he were your ally and work together so as to not get absorbed by a company like EA/Microsoft/Sony its been happning way too much.
I do believe at anytime any 3rd party game on steam can be removed on the developers reqest cant do that with EA can ya nope because you BELONG to them…
13/10/2009 at 16:41 medwards says:
I’ll add on to the comment-frenzy here: I think the issue is digital distribution lock-in. Like I want to be able to buy on D2D but have my games served to me on Steam, and if I was on some other solution I’d like to be able to buy from Steam and have the game served to me on my platform of choice. The arguments that Steam should separate business units to alleviate conflict of interest are bogus: Digital distribution platforms are often meant as brand unifiers and vendor lockin (see GWFL bogus-ness). That Valve hasn’t done this yet is a tribute to their acumen as gamers and not businessmen. And, as was pointed out, their market position doesn’t keep them from being more businessman-y if they should say.. do a public offering. Platform lock-in is the defense of this, but good luck convincing all the parties of this, for now they have captive markets in their little domains and the artificial profit inflation that results is too tasty in the short-term.
13/10/2009 at 19:37 Jetsetlemming says:
Steam has proved its worth to me outside of playing videogames, with the ingame chat, friends, and community functions. Being able to hit alt+tab and bullshit with a friend without interupting my game is a glorious feature that, at this point, I just couldn’t live without. I reinstalled Shadowman a few months ago, and was heartbroken to find that it runs in such an old version of DirectX that the Steam Overlay can’t run with it. HEARTBROKEN.
I add every game I have in Steam. If it’s on Steam, I buy it there. If not, I add it to my games list. I’m willing to buy games through other services when there’s a good deal (for example the Penumbra series for $5 on Gamersgate a few weeks ago), but it all still ends up played through Steam. It really is at this point as ubiquitous and necessary to my computer as Xbox Live is to a 360, and I’m OK with that.
15/10/2009 at 22:46 TeeJay says:
Anyone is free to complain about bias if they want.
17/10/2009 at 14:44 Melf_Himself says:
Honestly, I don’t give two shits about whether developers are exploited or if Valve are the devil with their evil business plans. All I know is that I can get awesome games on Steam, fast, for a fraction of the price of getting it in a store. If that means Valve gets to laugh all the way to the bank, fine with me.
Oh, and lol @ Valve being threatened by a game made by someone else. Seriously, they know they have the best shit in town, they’re not worried about cannibalizing their own market or whatever.
17/10/2009 at 22:08 Alex Hayter says:
I can understand in principle the hesitation many industry people would feel towards a single game developer owning the dominant digital distribution platform that publishes the biggest games on the PC.
If that company was Microsoft, or Apple, or EA, I’m sure people would be ALOT more hesitant, and alot more critical of the service.
Valve has, however, proven themselves as a trustworthy bearer of this big responsibility.
Pitchford is right to bring this scrutinizing attention on the developer, as an eye should always be kept on them. But his comments did seem a little bit tinged with an undeserved vitriol – because Valve have done an amazing job so far. Maybe Gearbox games haven’t been selling too well on the platform? With the over-saturation of so many WWII shooters on Steam, it wouldn’t shock me to hear that Brothers in Arms did poorly compared to other AAA titles.
Personally, Steam is the centre of my PC gaming life. It isn’t perfect, but it’s far better than any other service available – including hard copies of games.
17/10/2009 at 22:24 Hug_dealer says:
There is a huge article in pc gamer from a year or so ago about the issues with steam.
they stem from having no set standards for which to accept or decline games for steam. so they can turn down any game they dont want on it for any reason they feel. alot of indie devs are trying to get on steam, but steam keeps saying no and wont give a reason to them.
19/10/2009 at 00:17 Fraser says:
There are shades of Google here. Google similarly has a dominant position or near-monopoly on various internet media channels (loosely defined) that could be worrying. However, both Google and Steam built their success on providing a good service, listening to customers and being trustworthy. They both honestly seem to want to be the best, nicest, most convenient, most likeable company they can be, and people like them for it. Google has acknowledged it, by adopting “Don’t be evil” as its unofficial motto; Valve hasn’t said as much directly, as far as I know, but you can see the same principles at work in everything they do, from the reportedly fair profit margins that go to developers from Steam sales, to the way they dealt with the L4D2 boycott.
What they surely understand is that a dominant market share in an internet-based market is no guarantee of future success. If gamers started to dislike Valve and/or Steam, they could shift to a competitor in a millisecond. It’s tougher for developers, but ultimately, if they weren’t getting a good deal they would be loathe to use the service, and it would suffer as a result.
The current state of mutual trust and good service between Valve and customers, and between Google and internet users, needs humility, good intentions and wisdom from the company to be maintained. As long as it lasts, though, everybody benefits.
18/12/2009 at 07:26 Andre says:
What they surely understand is that a dominant market share in an internet-based market is no guarantee of future success.
18/12/2009 at 08:13 Kadayi says:
@Andre
Any particular reason to parrot exactly what the other guy said 2 months ago?
04/01/2010 at 04:38 Abercrombie and Fitch says:
Thank you!
19/02/2011 at 23:57 zarathustra says:
“Their “games as a service” philosophy, to me, means that you don’t really own the game. Rather, their leasing it to you. When I pay money for a product (which I believe is what a video game is), I expect to own it in full, and that means I should have the freedom to do whatever I want with it.”
Tell me a service – INCLUDING retail – wherein this is true. AFAIK, ALL distribution models (including shiny plastic disks) are some form of rental agreement.
Now stop moaning half-truths about Steam & do some bloody research.
“alot of indie devs are trying to get on steam, but steam keeps saying no and wont give a reason to them.”
ITYM, ‘because they’re crap’…