For what it's worth, I have the exact same feelings. They provide so much value on-top of just being a store, and it does feel like they take the money and re-invest it into their ecosystem to make it better.
They made gaming on Linux as easy as gaming on windows. They improved the controller situation in games. They do the whole remote-play stuff so you can play local-coop games online. They do the family sharing stuff. They do the steam link stuff. And they don't lock any of it down to their first party offerings. e.g.
* They could have easily made steamlink only work with their set-top box, but they just made it an android app.
* They could have limited the controller bindings and tech to only their controller, but they made it work for all controllers.
* They could have forced you to use their VR headset with steam, but they let you use any headset.
I can't think of any other company off the top of my head that has done something similar.
To play a game, select it on the store, pay (with all sorts of payment options), download (from damn fast servers), and press play, that's all. The game sucks or crash, click a button and you are refunded, no need to be always online just for DRM check (eventually you'll need internet, but you have enough leeway so that it is rarely a problem), ads are very unobtrusive and maybe even desirable (suggesting games you may actually like or announcing sales), they don't usually force an update just before you want to play a game (a much too common occurrence), dark patterns kept to a minimum (or at least subtle enough), generally good software quality (in terms of bugs, broken UI/UX, etc...). You bought a game, it stays in your account, Steam has 20 years of history of not screwing you, and to play it, just install Steam on any PC (it it doesn't already have it), log in to your account, download and play, it is that easy. You can even share games (with some reasonable limitations).
Others just have some annoyance here and there. Some always-on DRM, bugs, dubious UI choices, annoying ads, etc... Only Valve seems to understand the importance of not getting in the way between gamers and their games and do the appropriate amount of effort (which is a lot). Not even in the name of profit, because they understand that it is not worth it, if gamers are satisfied, profits will come. Remember, they have piracy as a competitor, and it is hard to compromise against such a powerful competitor.
They perceive the Steam launcher as something positive that provides them convenience. The network effect also makes it hard for game companies not not be on Steam, allowing Valve to enforce some customer-friendly policies like refunds, further making the platform nice to use.
Epic is trying to break through this by giving away endless free games. All other stores are generally forced upon the player through exclusives (you buy the game on Steam, but you still have to install their shitty launcher-store because the parent company owning the game wants some of the store-platform cake), breeding resentment and further cementing Steam's position.
(GOG being an exception, but they don't have enough major/interesting games to get players to use them as their primary platform.)
p.s. thanks so much for hnreplies.com, Dan! It dramatically increased the utility of HN for me. Your creation is fantastic.
pay. download. run in dosbox or something. done.
steam is just a crap I refuse to put up with. and that's the store. imagine the drm.
https://www.gog.com/forum/general/how_to_run_steam_games_off...
Knowing that a not insignificant part of the thousands I've spent on Steam over the years went to fund that.. isn't a great feeling.
The problem is that Steam for all its faults is DRM, anti-cheat, and a well functioning store rolled all in one. Most of the alternate stores are bad in one way or another; Epic launched without a cart, and it still doesn’t have user text reviews. Itch had to redo its whole UI after that one bundle they did that had thousands of games in it.
Notably Valve doesn’t really use its position to make competing games. This is an unknown for most publishers, and Epic pretty blatantly pivoted Fortnite to eat PUBG’s lunch after working with them.
If anything the leading platform for competition as an indie store is the Nintendo eShop. Which is probably why the Steam Deck exists.
Imo Epic is the only competitor to Steam that tries to offer a similar service to Steam. It's just popular to hate on it among pc gamers.
Many people cite a lack of features on Epic's store as the reason, eg no forum feature, but then turn around and decry Steam forums as the worst place on the internet. I don't think the problem is a lack of features (for players, devs have a point), but rather the Epic Games Store isn't cool enough.
Now, once you open Epic you can ignore it, use Explorer open the game folders and launch the games and they run. So it looks like they literally need a way to change a config file to avoid re-downloading 100s of GB of games.
I find it literally crazy. They even scatter .egstore files around so actually scanning for and adding games to the library automatically should be easy.
Steam makes the same task easy, and why wouldn't it it's pretty rudimentary for an installer/launcher to have a easy way for you to tell it where your downloaded games are.
Oh, and the instructions for reinstalling Epic _launcher_ say to just re- download all your games. They're insane.
YMMV.
Steam for example, allows user submitted ratings with explainer text. This is huge for online shopping decisions.
Steam Workshop is easy to integrate mod distribution for games. Etc.
I don't know anyone who actually relies on Steam ratings/reviews to make purchasing decisions. I've always assumed that rating systems on the platform that is selling you the product are not trustworthy. But then again, I find reviews for media to generally be useless.
>Steam Workshop is easy to integrate mod distribution for games.
That's a developer feature rather than a player one though.
Steam also has the features to do social proof of reviews. The reviews contain metadata about if the person got the game for free, and if you click the profile associated with it, you can see all the games a user has played and their achievement progress, which can help signal if they are a real gamer, how far they've gotten in the game they reviewed, but also how far they get in other games they've played to check that they're not a sock puppet.
This has enough value that Epic displays a star rating that is allegedly user generated, but because it doesn't indicate who is doing the reviews, and there is no text, their star rating is a lot more suspect.
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Modding support is also a player feature. Official, well supported modding can make or break a game, and Steam facilitates quite a lot in that regard; Nexus, as an alternative, is ad supported and caps download speeds for mods unless you shell out for a premium membership.
Arguably, it requires an account, and has things like "number of hours played" included in the review.
Far, far more useful than the easily-gamed spam reviews on places like Amazon. Doesn't mean spammy things can't happen, and the aggregate reviews on Steam usually mean what the 14-24 year old demo think
How is Epic a serious competitor or alternative, then?
Have you actually looked at the numbers or are you just parroting memes? In the numbers I'm looking at some divisions are $1M per employee.
It's interesting there isn't a well-known real competitor to Steam (the Blizzard and Ubisoft stores, etc, don't count, because so few external parties publish there).
My gut says the lack of reinvestment could be someone else's opportunity, especially considering many of the longstanding VAC and other quality issues which have persisted on Steam's platform for more than 15 years. However, because of all the necessary catch-up, such an enterprise would be tricky to bootstrap and get to critical mass. Even then, where is the moat?