First reaction: oh cool.
Later: … oh NO.
If Microsoft is anchoring one of its largest gaming properties to Steam, then what are their eventual intentions for Steam & Valve? :(
Sunsetting the Bethesda.net launcher and migrating to Steam
171–180 of 404 posts
Re: Sunsetting the Bethesda.net launcher and migrating to Steam
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
The block chain may be able to validate a license to a copy of the game, but that doesn't encompass hosting/delivery of content. The actual content of NFTs, tiny PNGs, are still hosted behind a URL. Putting 60+GB AAA titles out there for all time isn't something a Blockchain itself can solve. I also don't know how IPFS people would feel if they became the CDN for commercial software.
I think it's reasonable to believe that third party CDNs would pop up in the world. The feature would be that it's structurally decentralized in a way that decouples content creators from delivery.
What would be the business model for the CDNs? If they're paid by the publisher, you're back to the game vanishing when it's no longer profitable for them to provide it. If they're paid by the user, this feels a worse user experience than the centralised status quo of steam.
Re: Sunsetting the Bethesda.net launcher and migrating to Steam
#173Is there a technical reason why Steam is a such a force in the space? People, myself certainly included, often criticize Apple for taking 30% of developer revenue for merely existing in it's walled garden. Right or wrong, they control the ecosystem, so their ability to monopolize and heavily tax the App Store is unsurprising, they're exercising their pricing power as much as they possibly can. But how is it that on P…
Really simply? Because it's worth it. Nobody's "bowing to" Steam, they could sell off their own website for free, if they wanted. But Steam offers enough of a marketplace, enough tooling, and enough promotion that it's worth it to sell there. It's what I want for the Apple App store, too. Don't charge any less, just make it worth it.
Exactly. I choose to use Steam because it's good.
If you have an iPhone, you don't choose the AppStore. You're stuck with it.
Re: Sunsetting the Bethesda.net launcher and migrating to Steam
#174Is there a technical reason why Steam is a such a force in the space? People, myself certainly included, often criticize Apple for taking 30% of developer revenue for merely existing in it's walled garden. Right or wrong, they control the ecosystem, so their ability to monopolize and heavily tax the App Store is unsurprising, they're exercising their pricing power as much as they possibly can. But how is it that on P…
Steam-
* 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.
Re: Sunsetting the Bethesda.net launcher and migrating to Steam
#175Is there a technical reason why Steam is a such a force in the space? People, myself certainly included, often criticize Apple for taking 30% of developer revenue for merely existing in it's walled garden. Right or wrong, they control the ecosystem, so their ability to monopolize and heavily tax the App Store is unsurprising, they're exercising their pricing power as much as they possibly can. But how is it that on P…
In addition to everything people already said, another important part: Valve is a private company, so they don't need to answer to nagging institutional shareholders. I guarantee if they weren't, Steam would have been corrupted long ago.
Re: Sunsetting the Bethesda.net launcher and migrating to Steam
#176Is there a technical reason why Steam is a such a force in the space? People, myself certainly included, often criticize Apple for taking 30% of developer revenue for merely existing in it's walled garden. Right or wrong, they control the ecosystem, so their ability to monopolize and heavily tax the App Store is unsurprising, they're exercising their pricing power as much as they possibly can. But how is it that on P…
Steam still fulfills Gabe's promise.:
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.
Re: Sunsetting the Bethesda.net launcher and migrating to Steam
#177Origin needs to do the same, their integration with steam is awful.
No worries, Origin will be replaced soon... by the even more awful EA Desktop Client.
I don't know about that. The fact that they released a bunch of EA games on Steam (most notably recent Battlefield games) made me think they're about to sunset Origin. But that was a couple years ago at this point so who knows
Re: Sunsetting the Bethesda.net launcher and migrating to Steam
#178Thank goodness. Bethesda's launcher was uniquely awful in a number of unpleasant ways. Slow, prone to crashes, bad user communication, not suitable for use on small monitors. The worst of the launcher apps I have used - and there are so many! I remember when it was in vogue for every game maker to build their own launcher or even full Steam clone - when EA pulled all its new games from Steam to get people to use Orig…
It's kind of weird how the same companies that can squeeze all possible computational abilities and use every tick that exists to force a computer to show amazing graphics with complex logic behind can't make a simple GUI. Well, even Steam nowadays is kind of a wrapper for a browser.
To be fair steam has always been a wrapper around a browser for its store content etc. Maybe the outer chrome has been pulled into that though…
Re: Sunsetting the Bethesda.net launcher and migrating to Steam
#179Kill all the launchers. Ubisoft, Rockstar, Bethesda (RIP), Epic. I really hate these mediocre "me too" wannabe social network / launchers. I'm actually surprised this hasn't been rolled into the Xbox launcher, which still exists right (on PC)?
They do it because Steam's 30% cut is ludicrous.
Re: Sunsetting the Bethesda.net launcher and migrating to Steam
#180Is there a technical reason why Steam is a such a force in the space? People, myself certainly included, often criticize Apple for taking 30% of developer revenue for merely existing in it's walled garden. Right or wrong, they control the ecosystem, so their ability to monopolize and heavily tax the App Store is unsurprising, they're exercising their pricing power as much as they possibly can. But how is it that on P…
I think part of the reason is that Steam is pretty utilitarian, not selfish. Valve is actually pretty much a force for good and haven't tried to use any very dark patterns to make more money. Steam is nice and its developers care to make a program that works well.
> haven't tried to use any very dark patterns to make more money
They don’t really have to. They’re still private right? What are they going to do with even more money?