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.
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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?
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.
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).
“I
DON’T
LIKE
CHANGE!”
That’s odd. I never had a problem installing the fan patches for V:TM Bloodlines.
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.
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.
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.
@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.
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.
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.
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 :(
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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).
Wow, real gaming journalism on display! What is the world coming to?
Thanks for the great article :)
i’m hitting you with a, ‘word’
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).
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.
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
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?
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).
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).
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?
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. ¬_¬
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.
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.
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!
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).
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.
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.
@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.
I agree with Pitchford, because I only buy one game every three or four years so naturally using Steam I only buy Valve games.
Watch out for the match man of hay.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Nice to read such an in-depth article about this subject.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
@ 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.
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.
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.
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.
Hmmf that was supposed to be in reply to Mejwell. Oh well.
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.
I admire Valve’s moxie.
I trust Valve.
I trust Gabe.
Pitchford sounds like a cigar-chomping skeptic.
You say “skeptic” as though it were a bad thing.
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.
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.
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.
“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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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’.
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
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.