Re:The Long, Slow Decline of BitTorrent (2017)
by aetimmes on Tuesday February 13, 2018 @12:08AM
(#16364903)
Valve have absolutely nailed the consumer-centric business model. Gabe Newell was the first person I heard the concept of "piracy is a service problem" from and they've turned it into their core competency.
However, centralization of the marketplace, even from a publisher standpoint, isn't a Good Thing. Steam's degree of control over the game publishing platform market is pretty pathological from the view of developers.
A better solution from the content creators' standpoint is a marketplace with competitors. In gaming, this doesn't really exist (maybe GoG/Humble?) but in streaming media delivery, it does (Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Video).
Re:The Long, Slow Decline of BitTorrent (2017)
by wpietri on Friday February 16, 2018 @02:56PM
(#16395514)
Sure. Consumers like this and Steam likes this, because they get a cut of everything on their platform. But game makers are maybe not so interested in having their industry collapse into a monpsony situation, where their choices are 1) give Valve whatever Valve wants and accept whatever Valve gives them in return, or 2) don't make games.
Free markets don't promise perfect efficiency in each case. They promise to be reasonably efficient on average. They also don't promise perfect happiness for just one side of the market; they're a means of reaching a compromise between all participants.
Steam gets this so right - games change price all the time, go on sale etc.
It's the same phenomenon you see with landlords - rental properties go unoccupied for huge periods of time because they believe they'll get a better deal just in the future - with media we've let absurd copyright durations do the same damn thing, and probably at the expense of artists and content creators who I want to support.