In all honesty Valve is more like Google. Blizzard had moderate success, then had a unicorn (WoW) which made them and their parent companies at the time (Universal and then Activision) a lot of money.

Valve on the other hand is the Google of the PC gaming scene through Steam.

I would equate Blizzard to be more like IBM or Microsoft in all honesty, Microsoft is probably a better case than the big blue.

Moderate success?

Warcraft 2, Diablo, Starcraft, Diablo 2, Warcraft 3 were considered massive successes and all predate WoW.

That's like saying Google had moderate success with search but hit gold with Gmail

Not to mention that since WoW, Diablo 3, Hearthstone, and Overwatch have been massive successes. (I'm pretty sure SC2 sold well, but not as much as these other ones.) I can't think of another studio that has such a consistent commercial and critical track record.

Calling D3 a "massive success" is blowing it out of proportion. It got game of the year in 2012. It hasn't lost enough money to be shut down but not quite enough to get the love it needs to be better than release. Path of Exile has been a massive success, in contrast.

Estimates of Diablo III + the expansion (a $40 retail at launch) put it around 20m copies. That is a massive success IMHO.

Diablo 3 + expansions is the 12th best selling video game of all time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_video_gam...

That list plays with numbers in very interesting ways that aren't very useful. Not counting digital sales (uniformly), you end up with stats from an arena that doesn't really apply anymore. Notice LoL isn't on the wiki or Kritika Online or any of the actual massive successes (active users or net profit or ARPU) in the industry.

IIRC, it was the fastest selling pc game of all time. That's quite a success.

Those games were all big fish in their markets, but they weren't the money printing machine WoW was. I don't remember the numbers, but they skewed heavily toward the MMO. That's why every studio came out with its own MMO in the years that followed.

Speaking of Valve -- there's an area that is absolutely ripe for disruption. The Steam client hasn't really improved over the years. It's missing basic features -- like sorting your game list. They completely lost the social game to Discord and Curse, and the steaming game to Twitch. Their review system is maybe their best feature, but it's still pretty bad -- vulnerable to brigading, and not a super clear indicator for me if I'll be interested in a game or not.

They're basically a CDN. For me, that's all they provide.

And they charge an INCREDIBLE amount for their services, to developers -- 30%, I believe. Do they really provide THAT much value? I doubt it. I personally can't wait for some startup to blow them out of the water.

They're essentially the universal gaming app store. If you create your own store you're going to have to 1. provide a significant discount to compete and 2. have large names jump ship with you.

At this point, the only way a competitor has a fighting chance is if Origin or Blizzard starts opening up to third party games. Blizzard did that with Destiny 2 but it seems like they might only want to partner up with high quality dev work (whereas Steam is littered with shovelware made on RPG Maker).

I don't know about Origin or the Battle.Net client. Origin has a terrible reputation. Blizzard doesn't like to share, they're slow to move, and even though they're great at making games, they're not so hot at the services that go along with those games, generally speaking (remember VOIP in WoW?).

Discord seems incredibly well-positioned to take on Steam directly. They've got huge adoption in the gamer community. They're great at the community management side of things, as far as I can tell. They've figured out how to provide a better voice experience than pretty much any other service out there, so they're smart. If it's possible to provide the same thing that Steam does at less cost (which I strongly suspect it is), Discord could do it and probably make a killing at it.

And they'd save game developers a ton of money.

Origin has been selling third party games for many years. They sell Assassin's Creed and lots of indies.

https://www.origin.com/usa/en-us/store/browse?fq=publisher:u...

I use origin for the limited set of exclusives (sim city, mass effect3) and consider it the poster child of what not to do

Admittedly my usage is low. However twice I have encountered installer errors regarding permission issues

It turned out origin never created the root installation folder. Manually creating it yielded a successful install. WAT?!

I won't be buying anything further requiring origin until 2019 at the earliest.

Destiny 2 is published by Activision, who also happen to own Blizzard, so Destiny 2 ending up on Blizzard's store isn't much of a stretch.

It remains to be seen whether Activision/Blizzard will open up their platform to independent third parties.

Both Activision and Blizzard are owned by Activision Blizzard Inc. and are working independently besides game publishing (IIRC Blizzard used some help with Diablo 3 for consoles, Destiny 2 is the first non-Blizzard game on Battle.Net).

The client is getting a rework soon.

As for the 30%, imo it's about right. I personally try to avoid games that aren't on steam (and more recently GOG). Steam provides friendliest, cloud saves, simple install to anywhere, automatic updates, matchmaking, workshop, easy uninstall, and playtime tracking. All of these are minor features but combined they greatly incentivse buying there.

> The client is getting a rework soon.

Interesting, where do you get this from? Been waiting for this for years now but haven't seen any official message from Valve themselves about this.

Maybe it's been fixed, but as of a couple years ago Steam didn't seem to have a way to kill an account. After some security breach or another I decided it was time to remove it (I was never fond of the ownership model anyway), but couldn't find any way to do it.

Buy something with a credit card, then initiate a chargeback.

They also have effective lock-in. I don't buy movies on Amazon or Google play because I don't want to be locked in, or Kindle books without de-DRMing them, but Steam games? 80+ and counting.

Steam's monopoly is also why it sucks, I think. It seems like a textbook example of what happens with monopolies -- it produces an expensive product that could be much better and much cheaper.

Frankly, the publishers that have their own Steam competitors are worse. Steam at least supports Linux well and listens to players more than the publishers. I do wish DLCs were less rampant, but this is a gaming industry issue and less of Steam's wrongdoing. The GoG and Humble Bundle models are proven successes at this point, and I've easily spent 5-10x more on them than on Steam.

Yeah, but to disrupt it you have to deal with gamers who, as a group, tend to be a massive bunch of entitled whiny jerks.

Moderate success? OW sold 30M+ copies, it's more than any other modern FPS, Diablo3 was the fastest selling PC game of all time ect ... They're very successful in video games. They're probably the most successful video game studio. All their titles are big hit every single one.

I think that Valve is more like Apple, Blizzard is still like Google. I read some where that Valve has higher profit per employee than Apple (this could of changed), and Steam reminds me a lot of an App Store model. I also don't think its fair to call products such as Diablo II, Starcraft Brood War, and the Warcraft series (before Wow) "moderate successes".

Valve reminds me of Google because of their fire-and-forget approach to product development. Lots of experiments, many of them launched half-baked and several of them neglected.

Blizzard spends a lot of time iterating on their games internally. They even cancel huge effectively complete products when they're not good enough. That sort of perfectionist product development methodology reminds me more of Apple than Google, although Nintendo is probably an even closer match.

That's a good point, same of the Nintendo comment as well. Thanks.

Its not moderate success, its just success. From product point of view, its hard to compare them to Google or Microsoft as each Blizzard's product was a hit, unlike those two.

> Valve had moderate success, then had a unicorn (HalfLife) which made them a lot of money.

ftfy

Did they actually do anything since then? They have other people on Steam doing the creative work for them.

DOTA 2 and CS:GO are doing very well right now. Good luck on getting them to release a game with "3" in it.

CS:GO is distributed by Valve, but was actually developed by Hidden Path Entertainment. Better examples might include the Portal and Left 4 Dead games.

I view more Blizzard like Apple. They don't do a lot of games, they polished them as much as they can even long after the initial release. And they have one incredible success (iphone/wow) that eclipse financially all other things they have done.