* Just works
* It's simple
* Cloud saves all of my games (with a few exceptions when the game developer doesn't enable it for whatever reason, this has only been for a few games so I'm not sure why)
* Family sharing - this is HUGE for me. I can't re-buy every single game for my kids, so the fact that they can just play a game I purchased on their own account when I'm not online is an insane life saver.
* Steam sales- yeah maybe they aren't quite as good as they used to be.. but still, before steam started doing sales I was buying $60 games. Now I generally just wait 6 months and never pay more than $20 for a game, usually even less
* You could argue the indie game world would basically not exist without them. Indie games are basically all I even play on steam- and I buy a lot of games
I could keep going on.. but honestly Steam just works. It's not the prettiest, but that's fine. Steam is like a web 1.0 site that does everything you want it to, and anything since then has been web 2.0 pieces of garbage that try to do all this fancy stuff but are unusable or annoying as hell.
Epic Games Launcher is garbage. Microsoft store is garbage.
So yeah it's weird, I am 100% OK with Valve getting the premium whereas I think it's sickening that apple/android do what they do. They are basically a walled garden. Steam is not, there are infinite ways to distribute a PC game.
Probably the oldest tech company that can really say "we are not evil" and instead are actually helping both the consumer and developers.
I don't game very often, but the way Steam "just works" can't be understated enough.
It's not perfect. I've run into weird bugs occasionally, though they were likely the fault of a specific game.
However, it's miles ahead of other game launchers I've dealt with. I'm a casual gamer, so if I end up fighting the game launcher and update mechanism for more than a few minutes, I'm just going to give up and do something else. Steam has come as close as I've seen to streamlining that experience for me.
Untitled Goose Game got me back into piracy after 15 years of abstinence because of the anti-Steam launch. I would have gladly paid were it on Steam.
It just sets up everything for me so I don't have to mess with lutris, various wine versions and whatnot.
I've found that using the libraries included in steam also removed all manual "fiddling" compared to running it with native arch linux libraries.
I have the same experience with Steam. After not using for a few days, it begins downloading hundreds of megabytes of updates and has to restart itself before you can do anything with it.
I never got a fondness for stream as a result and avoid it whenever possible.
On that note, i was really surprised to find out that epic let's you start plenty of your games without having to open the client. That's a killer feature for me. Family sharing is too.
In Sweden we pay a tax on each harddrive and other storage media to cover this sharing. It's alled Private sharing tax. It's distributed between creators by some organisation. Steam and other online stores prevents this law from working as intended. This has put me off Steam from the beginning already.
I believe Steam got so big because they were first to deliver what everyone wanted, buy games without having to wait until release in your country. In Sweden we often had to wait half a year or more before the games showed up. I did not buy games on Steam for years because of the sharing aspects. I wanted to be able to share the good games with my kids or friends. On steam you don't own the games, you only rent them for a one time fee. Steam can take them down at any time.
> Privatkopieringsersättning är en lagstadgad kompensation för det inkomstbortfall som kopiering för privat bruk av musik, film och tv från en laglig förlaga medför för kulturskapare med upphovsrätt i de kopierade verken. Ersättningen betalas av tillverkare eller importörer av sådana lagringsmedier som är "särskilt ägnade för" privatkopiering,[1] som tomma CD, DVD, externa hårddiskar, USB-minnen och mp3-spelare.
A reasonable price has to be found by buying steam keys from [HumbleBundle/GreenManGaming/etc].
I don't play the latest anymore. I will wait a year or two and get it on sale. I get a patched, solid game with well known reviews and the community wiki already filled out(so valuable in many modern games!), for much cheaper AND with that much cheaper price I don't have to worry so much about being gouged because my digital download has to travel further...
But while your point is relevant to the marketing person, it is irrelevant to me as a consumer.
As per most humans of course, I never feel like I have enough. Like many, I have a mortgage and so am required to work until the day I die to keep a roof over my family's head. Not a glamourous roof, but ours.
So when I have friends overseas getting the same digital files as I am for less money, I feel ripped off.
For physical items in Australia you could argue the large distances for transport explain the cost/convenience difference.
But on the internet where the cost of information transport is negligible, a minimum 20% mark up is too blatant for the exact same convenience.
I think it's worth adding that Steam's (more recent) refund policy is also a big deal. Even if you don't need it, knowing that it's there can influence buying decisions because it feels more like you can "try before you buy" (although this actually involves paying before you get to try and then putting yourself in a situation where Steam could refuse to give you your money back).
After using Steam almost exclusively for years, picking up a Nintendo Switch was jarring because there's pretty much no way to walk back from a purchase even if you have only played it for a few seconds (or just downloaded it). This also goes with games perpetually sitting at AAA release day price points, release dates often being unclear or promoted more than the actual release and sales affecting your wishlist being undercommunicated in comparison to Steam.
Steam simply lures you back in by sending you that e-mail that the game you wishlisted five years ago is currently on sale at a 90% discount.
In fact Valve has recently decided to shorten the big sales cycle to one every 28 days (plus the small weekly flash sales).
I think the takeaway is that on Windows there is a choice, and people (users and developers) actively choose Steam, whereas on iOS there just is not that choice. The market cannot exercise a preference.
On other hand Steam is just a software that works across multiple OS.
Awful search, awful review system, confusing interface and.. that's it? I don't see how the app store even compares.
Biggest piece of the puzzle is there is no alternative. You are 100% forced to use the app store.
No one forces you to use steam. There is generally always another way to buy a PC game, and if a developer chose to put it only on steam.. well, then that's the developer's fault and not steam's fault (I get that steam is mostly a monopoly on PC, so that's not entirely fair to say, but still.. the developer can always just throw their game on GOG or itch.io etc easy enough).
So Apple's entire store is built upon forcing you to go put your product there, offering no alternatives, and then taking a large cut. Not to mention almost the entire mobile market is a hot piece of trash creating apps/games that are only there to suck up your money in microtransactions/ads or whatever. And Apple encourages that because they want the cut of all the bullshit money they pull out of people.
Steam doesn't do that. Sure you can find some little garbage people put on there, but that's few and far between and not the norm- I pretty much never see that on my daily use.
Steam still operates in a way that provides a great platform for people who love to make games and people who love to play games.
Any comparison to the mobile market of ios/android is entirely disengenious.
For most games most of the time, buying and launching a game via Steam is less hassle than pirating it. It's not the DRM or the price that most people really, really hate about buying games. It's that lots of DRM made the game absolute shit to try to play.
Code wheels, flipping to a particular page of a printed manual to search for the fourth word on the eighth line, putting a CD in a drive to play a game fully installed to your internal drives, rootkits in your games to keep you from copying them, tricks in the disk formats to make it impossible to make a backup, and other industry asshattery made it easier in many cases to pirate a game than to play one you'd actually bought. Valve came onto the scene with a service that would collect your money rather than sending your CC info to every little indie game web page, let you download things on the new higher speed connections, not have a limited number of times to download and install, and will do tech support for the launcher. Then they added features for developers like achievements tracked outside the games, friends lists that work across games and game studios, network saves, and more. First mover advantage can't be discounted here, but making the experience of buying and maintaining your game catalog user friendly was the big selling point.
Steam's value proposition is a single place to conveniently manage all my games, and it works very well as such. It's unobtrusive, comprehensive, manages installs, pre-requisites and updates nicely for me and then gets the heck out of the way.
No publisher-oriented launcher has such proposition. In fact, I put forward that no publisher-made launcher has value proposition of any kind for the consumer - why do I need Uplay, Origins, Bethesda launcher, any of them, let alone all of them? What purpose do they serve, other than an annoying mandatory layer? Why do I need Battle.net for the one game I play on there?
Given the lack of positive value proposition, even seemingly minor annoyances are perceived as massive friction. For example, I find Microsoft's offers infuriating - I cannot understand their subscription tiers or services at all, they all have meaningless generic Xbox names that change every 6 months to a different meaningless set of Xbox names, and completely mangle what one can expect as a PC owner, or Xbox owner, or both. I have no idea which Xbox-named offering or app does what and how they relate. It's like IBM naming everything "Watson". I inadvertently committed to a multi-month months subscription thinking one of the games I wanted is available on the cloud, only to discover I was completely mistaken - and it took me a WHILE to confirm that to my satisfaction. I don't know if they are confusing out of ineptitude or intentionally.
Geforce Now, on the other hand, has a meaningful value proposition to me: it lets me play games on the cloud, on any of my devices, and when away from home. That has benefits and value to me that I can clearly understand. It's seamless, it provides clear value to ME, the consumer, and then gets out of the way.
Same with GoG - it lets me download games DRM free onto my machine and save them for the upcoming apocalypse.
Everybody else is just a pain in my kiester :-/
I generally trust Valve to treat me fairly, but EA, Ubisoft, Konami and Bethesda (ZeniMax) have not earned that same trust.
I never shared the key anywhere, and only installed it on 3 machines over 5 years.
For others: kuna means "pine marten" and lipa is "linden tree" in many Slavic languages
- Steam was first, and because of that;
- They have all the features (both for users, and gamedevs)
- They have all the Games
- They have all the Users
In particular, in the Gamedev side, Steam is not a Storefront, they are a platform, much like say, Xbox Live or PSN. For example Steam provides:
- Friends
- Leaderboard
- Chat (Text and Voice)
- Multiplayer/Network api, which handles routing and NAT punch through
- Update/Install delivery globally
- Savegame cloud sync
- etc, etc
Steam docs are actually public, so go take a look: https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features
If you develop your game for Steam, then Steam does a lot of heavy lifting for you.
The features you listed on the API side have almost all come in before competitors have tried to offer similar features - it's seriously impressive.
Indeed, the prevelance of Steam API is such that competing game markets have to make their own replacement Steam.dll, so that the gamedevs dont have to change anything.
Also Valve was a game company first, and i believe developed the first of these technologies for Half-life 2.
- Valve used Half-life 2 to bootsrap Steam (HL2 install disc came with steam)
- Use Steam to provide online services to HL2
- Then the users of HL2 become Steam users (or the sosial network of Steam, as we say today)
- Expose API to other game companies, which brings more Games, and Users
- Add features and keep ahead of competition
- Alot of the features also come from the fact that Valve develops games, and makes the features for themself first, and then exposes them to everybody through Steam API
And I’m not even talking about Counter Strike: Source, quite a few other influential titles including CoD:MW2 required steam for play on PC.
"They have all the features" isn't the case for game developers. Steam backend for developers and statistics is still pretty terrible.
I'm not much of a gamer - but my five kids are, and I can see the difference. It starts with being multiplatform. Buy once, run on PC, Mac, Linux. Steam's promise isn't cheap subscriptions, or trendy titles. I can buy games with confidence and know they will run - even if school requires a Mac next year or the only machine around is Dad's Linux laptop.
Steam also does a much better job of exposing new titles and player feedback. Shopping Steam is a better experience - even if it isn't as pretty. You know what you are getting when you buy, and the return policy seems fair enough.
It ends with simply working better. For example, last night I loaded up Steam and some PC games from a XBox Live Ultimate subscription. The Steam games worked. None of XBox games would even launch... on a brand new Lenovo gaming machine on Windows 11. Eventually the Xbox app volunteered to fix the messed up installation and ended up leaving 130GB of disk filled with old, inaccessible downloads.
Epic's store shows some promise, but there's a lot of rough edges where it installs some other studio's installer which installs the game. But, the free game thing is pretty nice.
This hasn't been my experience. Plenty of Steam games have fallen by the wayside as operating systems evolve. GOG is slipping in this regard as well, but began as a way to buy and run older games. It also provides some nice pressure for Steam and its publishers to compete and reduce DRM.
Then there is Mac dropping 32 bit support, to which Steam seems to have thrown up their hands.
Steam's copy on a 32-bit title is much better than GOG. It's big, it's in red, it's clear that this title is limited because its 32-bit.
On GOG, you have a small line of text at the bottom of the Mac system requirements. That's way too small a warning (try to find it on this page: https://www.gog.com/game/darwinia)!
It's probably wishful thinking, but I like to think Steam is such a force because Valve have earned and kept the trust of many (initially very skeptical) gamers over the course of _decades_ at this point. I'd rewind the clock to the Before Steam times if I could, but short of that--if I have to pick my poison and choose _some_ platform--it's Steam with zero hesitation.
But the real thing is... I've been a Steam user since I needed to go legit with HL1 to play NS1 on public servers, over 20 years ago. Valve has never screwed me over in that time. Never. They treat me like a valued customer, like they like my business. I mean, not like I'm a VIP. Just like they actually like their users, and want them happy.
I guess the lock-in of my over-600-game library doesn't hurt. But the reason that number keeps climbing (that's an average of 30 games a year!) is because Valve keeps redeeming my trust, better than literally any other business I've dealt with, ever. I've abandoned my accounts with other services because the $20 or $200 of games wasn't worth the hassle of dealing with companies that were obviously actively trying to fuck me short-term and damn the long-term.
Praise be to St Gaben. The crazy part is, I actually mean it.
Valve uses its 30% cut extremely effectively by continuing to invest in the happiness and convenience of its customers and, just as importantly, its developers. For instance the profits of smaller developers dramatically increased after the new discovery/search features landed, enabling exactly the kind of people who would love your game to find it easily. Contrast that with every other store where it's basically impossible to find anything but the most mainstream top sellers.
Maybe Epic could afford to actually make the Epic Games Store a useful product if they took a higher cut of sales?
The lock-in cost is real and literal. It's far easier to migrate to a different voice comms system (which is free, usually), since you only have to convince your existing social network to create an account on the new thing.
That said, buying certain games can lock you into using Windows. So there's that. But it's far better than buying games on modern consoles, which force you to use some special-snowflake hardware just to access the game you bought.
It's impossible to completely prevent all classes of lock-in, but it can be minimized. I would argue that my personal lock-in is minimized, across the axes I care about, by buying everything from Steam and GOG. No hard Windows dependency, no silly hardware dependency, and I'll almost certainly still have access to my games in 40 years.
And as long as Valve does not burn that trust (there have been a few hickups in the very first years, but quickly forgotten), their lead can only grow. You can't throw money at the problem of potential customers wondering what the chances are that the service will still be around in five years. I'd even say that throwing money would only increase doubt: the more money invested, the higher the threshold of success required to be considered worthwhile of continuing.
FWIW, I did not mean that Steam is necessarily the literal first game marketplace, but to my (limited) knowledge it was the first one that got large enough to become the "default" option.
The Microsoft store was obviously not designed by the Xbox division and was hostile to gamers wanting to enable modding or customize the installation.
Likely because Microsoft wanted a locked down app store to sell their Surface devices to schools and business.
Steam does things like converting Ps4 and Nintendo Switch controller input to Xbox 360 input, offering forums where people discuss patches and mods, and other features Epic seems uninterested in offering for whatever reason.
steam sits in my tray. it asks me to hit the update button when there's an update, and then it updates itself and I don't need to go somewhere or else or get hassled to find out why the heck there's an update to "Your Phone" app that I didn't know was on this computer and why microsoft thinks I should install it.
at least they've managed to get the windows store app itself to run a little better than the last few years. It was as guilty as any app of being a slow unstable POS.
steam just kinds of win by default by not being a massive pile of shit.
Steamworks SDK was one of the very first companies to offer that functionality pre-baked into their offering "free" of charge when companies chose to list on Steam. After a while, it became the default over time.
For many game companies, what usually happens is that initial investment is easy to go along with for the start when spinning up their game store (Origin, Bethesda.net) but eventually hard to maintain as it's hard to commit developers to maintain platforms.
They don’t really have to. They’re still private right? What are they going to do with even more money?
It actually feels good that the 30% cut Steam takes out of my purchases partly goes to improve my Linux desktop experience. Better for me as a user than if they were taking a smaller cut and focusing on Windows only.
1: Valve has been sponsoring work on Wine, Wayland, KDE, mesa gfx drivers, dxvk, and others.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/nonfree-games.en.html
Obviously kidding, Valve's efforts will IMO greatly expand Linux's target audience which is laudable. Seems to me that limitation was one of the main pullbacks for Linux adoption, especially in non-developer circles. Requiring dual-booting just for games on the Windows partition is not a convenient band-aid, and Stallman's solution never was one at all.
Valve is just simply the only company you CAN trust, and that's their massive competitive advantage and something Microsoft and Apple and Google with their trillions of dollars can't buy. When they make a decision that makes people upset, the CEO will directly talk with customers on sites like Reddit. They've been a force against the imposition of heavyweight DRM. They've voluntarily introduced liberal policies like family sharing and offline play that other companies refused to implement. Valve is an honest company in an industry full of conmen operating at a loss.
Plus, I think Steam is a superior product.
That being said, I also try to buy on GoG as much as possible, since I really prefer to have DRM-free games and I want some competition in the market.
I have an Xbox Game Pass subscription, but will never buy anything from the Microsoft store because their products are bundled into encrypted archives (so no modding/changing games). Plus, it has a nasty habit of leaving 40+GB binaries on my system that can't be deleted from within Windows.
Unless the publisher pulls it or pushes an update cutting music because of license deals expiring. Or gets a stealthy replacement with a worse remaster. Or your OS drops 32 bit / x86 support.
Steam provides the game. It "will be around for a long time."
It is not Steams job to ensure the game runs on every device or OS version for eternity however. That is up to the publisher of the game.
If you install Steam on an older version of the OS that does have 32bit/x86 support, Steam does its job.
I do think however that Steam should add clarification to the "game requirements" to specify OS version or hardware however.
So even if your game is 64-bit, you still need 32-bit libraries and OS support to run the DRM. Sucks when either your OS doesn't support 32 bit (MacOS, OpenBSD), you don't want to add 32 bit multilib, or you're doing funky emulation on a non-x86 machine where you can only effectively emulate x86_64 (see: ppc64le).
These are all niche situations (the last one almost facetiously so), but the point stands. I really wish valve would release a 64 bit client on Windows and Linux :/
That's not true. I have a game that was pulled by the publisher (legal issues, don't know the details). But everyone who bought it can still download it and play it. Pulling it in this case just means no one can buy it anymore.
It was actually shocking to me when I found out that stuff I bought on other online stores wasn't available anymore for whatever reason. For this reason I still buy stuff on steam but I don't have enough trust to buy anything in another store.
The music cutting issue is valid. However, it can be overcome by leaving the game downloaded and turning off updates for it. Plus, the game will always be available, which was my point.
But the flip side to that is Steam also automatically moves games up a tier. So a base game bought at launch might get automatically updated to a special addition which includes all the DLC and/or texture pack updates.
> Or your OS drops 32 bit / x86 support.
I can still download the game, which is all steam promises. From there, I can make it work via VM.
Apple obsoleted all 32 bit iphone apps a few years ago, so not even remotely comparable to steam in this area imho.
Just imagine, alternative app stores, you keep almost all the convenience of the apple one, for free.
You can also give keys away, but if you do that too much, they do apparently limit you ;)
Another thing: The store app is not a disaster. Compare it with Windows, Epic… Those are all horrible apps that mostly behave like browsers, but then differ in some ways (in addition to the often bad performance). Hell, for a long time, the back button did not work in the Epic store. Steam managed to have their store not be a disaster pretty much since its existence.
And Windows/Epic are not even the worst examples. I remember when Origin started, they had no language setting and forced you into whatever GeoIP decided. I don’t even remember what my issue with UPlay was, but the experience was bad enough that I would never again play a game that uses it.
As a consumer, Steam is a much better platform than any of the alternatives. I prefer to buy games on Steam, all things being equal.
As a dev studio, Steam takes 30% and Epic takes 12% (7% if you use Unreal engine).
Sure, thats needed for Steam Deck these days, but other vendors basically not support Linux at all, let alone contribute back!
There is no option to force consumers to use the other products with regulation. They will only be driven by the competence/exclusives/network effects of other platforms. Maybe the end outcomes of having multiple options will simply be a partial result of how competent the other development teams are in comparison to the larger and objectively better platforms, in spite of the fact that consolidation is considered bad in principle. It seems to be getting harder and harder for even large entities like Bethesda to create successful alternatives in spite of all the resources they have.
The blowback that multiple companies have gotten for choosing to release games as Epic Game Store exclusives and Discord becoming gradually ubiquitous are what I would consider examples of this phenomenon. Average people simply want to use the larger, better platforms, and they aren't convinced to move when alternatives exist.
Because of the sheer size of platforms like these, success might just be defined in terms of momentum and ubiquity by now. You would be up against convincing a subset of millions and millions of people that you can deliver a functionally superior platform, and if their friends decide not to move, then they would have good reason not to move also. Developer cuts tend to be criticized, but I would think that most users of Steam wouldn't even be aware of such issues since they stay local to the development side and don't impact their experience, and so they keep using Steam anyway.
It's what I want for the Apple App store, too. Don't charge any less, just make it worth it.
It's less bad than the App Store since game devs technically have a choice, but in effect it's often the same.
That said, I did forget until now that GamePass exists - Microsoft isn't really challenging Steam anymore, they're doing kind of an end-run around them with their games subscription service, and it frankly kinda rocks. But for those who still want to outright purchase games, they still sell on Steam, because, again, Valve have made it worthwhile to pay the 30% to at least get the userbase and marketing bump.
They simply started out well and managed not to loose their lead.
You cannot release an app for iOS absent iOS app store.
That's the problem. Apples becomes the gatekeeper instead of your own technical prowess
I would be quite surprised to hear that Microsoft didn't cut some sort of Very Good Deal with Valve.
From the dev side they also make it easy to have a game on steam and still sell it elsewhere. Steam keys are free to generate, so you can sell for any price or anywhere, but it keeps users stuck to the steam platform.
Steam has also never not let me play a game just because some service is down. Yes it locks you out after an extended period offline, but I'm not crashing out of a game because I lost internet for a second or some DRM server crashed.
First mover, just works, not too bloated, all your games are on it.
It's possible to build a better storefront/launcher, but for some weird reason, every competing one except GoG fails point #2 or point #3.
If I were in the market for a PC gaming rig today, I'd either use Xbox Cloud Gaming or buy a gaming laptop. As someone that always maintained a desktop gaming PC for 40 years.
Also services like steam are naturally sticky/monopolistic because there's a network effect with the games. Consumers don't want to have multiple services that do the same thing, so if you have a handful of games on steam, may as well use it for all.
There really needs to be protocols for ownership etc, such that the UI is decoupled from the ownership aspect. otherwise network effect makes it monopoly-esque. It's a principle that promotes greater competition across many types of businesses
It just works and doesn't get in the way. In all my time using Steam, I've never had a case when it wasn't maxing out my bandwidth during a download. The only friction I can remember is with Half Life 2, which required you to use Steam to decode the files installed with your physical DVD and that took ages. But that was the first real game ever shipped on the platform. On the dev side, Steam seems pretty easy to integrate.
It does help, but not because of the internet. From memory they were the first digital game shop. They basically invented the market for shops for digital content. Apple would copy it some years later with the iPhone app store.
I also believe, that over long Steam might me sold by Microsoft. MS and Google are building a different stack/ecosystem.
But how is it that on PC, where we have a mostly open field on which anyone can participate freely without a gatekeeper's blessing, Steam managed to consolidate so much of the gaming marketplace that even a titan like Microsoft is throwing the towel and bowing to Steam's cartelish 30%? I get that being the dominant two-sided marketplace of a given space is a strong network effect and moat, and consolidation is certainly convenient for users (I like having all my purchased games on a single account), but intuition tells me Bethesda doesn't need Steam's exposure to sell games or make new arrivals known (their announcement will go viral regardless), similarly to Riot, Mojang, Epic and co not listing on Steam. So I've always found it surprising they were dual listing their games in the first place, but the fact they're now entirely giving up on direct selling is a testament to Steam's might in the gaming industry.
Is Steam's product particularly good and hard to reproduce from the publisher's PoV, even one backed by Microsoft, to the extent it is hard to compete against with something like Microsoft Store? Or is this just another case of being early enough to establish the initial brand and let the self-fulfilling network effect kick in - with the userbase acting like gravity to bring in more users and developers - until it's large enough that sheer force of habit/inertia makes it quasi-"indisruptible"?
Either way, I found it fascinating how Valve turned into Steam, whether it was accidental or not, what a homerun pivot. Seems that is the way of the Internet, being first matters more than just about anything, having the superior product (not claiming there is one for game stores) is irrelevant if you're remotely late, it just won't matter how much cash you pour into a Microsoft Store or a Google+. My gut tells me Microsoft is salivating at the idea of buying out Steam, seems like a perfect fit for the conglomerate if it wasn't for the scrutiny it would bring their way while they are positioning themselves as the good FAAMG.