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So You Want to Compete with Steam

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Re: So You Want to Compete with Steam

#71

Post by wick_works »

dvt wrote: post #46

I'm actually pretty cynical when it comes to this kind of thing (for example, I don't think anyone can really compete with Google Search anymore), but I need to disagree with this article. It fundamentally misunderstands a few crucial elements of how game publishing (and consumption) works. Keep in mind that I am a long-time user of Steam (my account is 14 years old, having signed up literally the day it came out). 1…

2. Speaking as somebody who's had to make builds for pc/mac/linux and bundle them up into each special back-end for each store and then test each one for every single patch, multiplying the process by adding more platforms is a hard sell. Why bother with Desura or whatever when 95% of your sales are gonna come through Steam?

Especially for the model of early access & building community gradually instead of risking it all on a big release --- since you're sometimes putting out new builds weekly the update pipeline becomes a real time factor.

3. If it was a numerically advantageous proposition to scout & invest in indies, we'd see more people doing that. Try for a month going through new releases on Steam and predicting which ones are gonna be successes. It's a near-impossible game, much less if each bet cost you tens of thousands of dollars.

Plus, if somebody offered me such a contract, I'd be deeply skeptical that 100% of their revenue share (plus a straight-up cash bonus even) would beat out what I could get by going with established avenues --- especially if I had something I had good reason to believe was the next Cuphead.

Re: So You Want to Compete with Steam

#72

Post by Zpalmtree »

methodover wrote: post #41

Discord could do it. Discord SHOULD do it. There needs to be a serious competitor to Steam, something with significant enough market share that Steam gets scared. Steam could be so much better than it is -- I'm not saying that it's a bad product, just that it could be better. Discord seems perfectly positioned to take on Steam. They already have incredible adoption in the gaming community. And they have quite a bit o…

I really hope they don't, they have a crappy memory and cpu hog client which takes an age to start up, a very questionable privacy policy and monetization method, and their software just annoys me. I don't want my programs to spam memes at me.

Re: So You Want to Compete with Steam

#73

Post by dvt »

wick_works wrote: post #71
dvt wrote: post #46

I'm actually pretty cynical when it comes to this kind of thing (for example, I don't think anyone can really compete with Google Search anymore), but I need to disagree with this article. It fundamentally misunderstands a few crucial elements of how game publishing (and consumption) works. Keep in mind that I am a long-time user of Steam (my account is 14 years old, having signed up literally the day it came out). 1…

2. Speaking as somebody who's had to make builds for pc/mac/linux and bundle them up into each special back-end for each store and then test each one for every single patch , multiplying the process by adding more platforms is a hard sell. Why bother with Desura or whatever when 95% of your sales are gonna come through Steam? Especially for the model of early access & building community gradually instead of risking i…

> If it was a numerically advantageous proposition to scout & invest in indies, we'd see more people doing that. Try for a month going through new releases on Steam and predicting which ones are gonna be successes. It's a near-impossible game, much less if each bet cost you tens of thousands of dollars.

I think you forget you're posting on YC's forum. YC literally does this (with much higher stakes, by the way). Obviously, the great majority of YC companies don't end up being unicorns, but every now and then you get a Dropbox.

And to address your first point, Steam's SDK (for anyone that's worked with it) obviously sucks. But Valve can afford to release a crappy SDK because they're the big player and they don't care. Obviously, if I made a game distribution platform, the back-end would be minimal and packaging would be programmatic. E.g.: upload your binary, we'll package it and deploy. You don't need half the crap Valve peddles anyway (Steam overlay, chat, etc.)

Re: So You Want to Compete with Steam

#74

Post by kenhwang »

on_and_off wrote: post #43
kenhwang wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hell, I wish the Google Play Store/Apple App Store did things half as well as Steam does, like: - Backing up application data in the cloud (game saves) - Update priorities (ASAP, before next launch, before everything else) - Throttling bandwidth use or background updates (because I know you're streaming Youtube and your battery got low and you just want to have enough juice to finish your video, but Google Play Music…

So weird you mention all this, in my experience Google Play does a good job with this. The only thing that really irks me is that if an app while you are using the phone, the foreground app should never get updated. Sure, download the delta patch but wait for me to have stopped using it in order to update (or if I am using the app for hours, pick an update message). To be fair nowadays this only happens when I manual…

Mine is set to update on WiFi only. And everyday, without fail, the moment I plug my phone into a power source in the evening (could even be to my computer for debugging), it'll start going through and applying all available updates. The performance impact is always noticeable during the duration of the updates.

Other common case is when I pull into my driveway/office and happen to be charging my phone in the car and it gets into WiFi range. Boom, update everything time.

Google supposedly knows everything about my daily routine, and yet, somehow can't predict when I won't be using my phone. Even something super dumb like, screen off > 2 hours && battery > 80% && connected to wifi would make my autoupdate life much better.

Apple has the opposite problem. "Hey, your computer needs to restart, [Restart Now], [Remind me tomorrow]". [Remind me tomorrow] doesn't mean, oh I noticed that your computer went into sleep before tomorrow I'm going to restart it now. Thanks Apple, I had unsaved state open.

Ironically enough, Microsoft seems to have gotten the apply updates/restart frustration down. Maybe it's from all the flak they've gotten over the years.

Re: So You Want to Compete with Steam

#75

Post by kakarot »

j_s wrote: post #58
davvid wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're looking for a package manager on Windows, you might be interested in Chocolatey: https://chocolatey.org/

Chocolatey has some slightly-awkward-feeling freemium thing going on; there was a good discussion of Windows installer stuff recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15791781 https://github.com/lukesampson/scoop/wiki/Chocolatey-Compari... (scoop) is an option focused on dev tools, http://boxstarter.org for repaving dev/vm machines. Proprietary https://ninite.com for normally-installed stuff, not sure if the fre…

Free edition of Ninite only installs 32-bit applications, unfortunately.

Re: So You Want to Compete with Steam

#76

Post by johnchristopher »

kenhwang wrote: post #33
krapp wrote: post #16

Really, Steam seems to be the closest thing Windows has to an application/package manager[0]. It's almost kind of a shame that it's more or less entirely for games and game development software - something like it with sourceforge/github integration or an API for general purpose Windows installers would be nice. [0]notwithstanding whatever Windows 10 might have, because I still refuse to touch that, but it's probably…

Hell, I wish the Google Play Store/Apple App Store did things half as well as Steam does, like: - Backing up application data in the cloud (game saves) - Update priorities (ASAP, before next launch, before everything else) - Throttling bandwidth use or background updates (because I know you're streaming Youtube and your battery got low and you just want to have enough juice to finish your video, but Google Play Music…

> Update windows (like when the phone is idle in the middle of the night, not when I'm in the middle of using it)

No, no, no. That's how I ended up with a laptop burned screen. Or being woken up by whatever music it was playing at that time. Solution: update when I press the button or when I planned it myself.

Re: So You Want to Compete with Steam

#77

Post by j_s »

kakarot wrote: post #75
j_s wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chocolatey has some slightly-awkward-feeling freemium thing going on; there was a good discussion of Windows installer stuff recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15791781 https://github.com/lukesampson/scoop/wiki/Chocolatey-Compari... (scoop) is an option focused on dev tools, http://boxstarter.org for repaving dev/vm machines. Proprietary https://ninite.com for normally-installed stuff, not sure if the fre…

Free edition of Ninite only installs 32-bit applications, unfortunately.

Thanks for the heads-up, it's been quite a while since I've needed it.

How has this limited your experience so far? I'm not really well-versed on even the expected impact this has on commonly used applications... is there any?

Re: So You Want to Compete with Steam

#78

Post by kenhwang »

johnchristopher wrote: post #76
kenhwang wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hell, I wish the Google Play Store/Apple App Store did things half as well as Steam does, like: - Backing up application data in the cloud (game saves) - Update priorities (ASAP, before next launch, before everything else) - Throttling bandwidth use or background updates (because I know you're streaming Youtube and your battery got low and you just want to have enough juice to finish your video, but Google Play Music…

> Update windows (like when the phone is idle in the middle of the night, not when I'm in the middle of using it) No, no, no. That's how I ended up with a laptop burned screen. Or being woken up by whatever music it was playing at that time. Solution: update when I press the button or when I planned it myself.

Google Play already has the option for manual updates. It will prompt that an update is available and you can press the button to install.

Re: So You Want to Compete with Steam

#79

Post by zeusk »

krapp wrote: post #16

Really, Steam seems to be the closest thing Windows has to an application/package manager[0]. It's almost kind of a shame that it's more or less entirely for games and game development software - something like it with sourceforge/github integration or an API for general purpose Windows installers would be nice. [0]notwithstanding whatever Windows 10 might have, because I still refuse to touch that, but it's probably…

> Really, Steam seems to be the closest thing Windows has to an application/package manager

OneCore does have a package manager.

Windows Store (Win10, WP10, Xbox OS) use it and it works great but with old win32 apps, nothing is "standardized" in terms of storage, app state and versioning so that's an open challenge still.

Re: So You Want to Compete with Steam

#80

Post by flukus »

kenhwang wrote: post #74
on_and_off wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So weird you mention all this, in my experience Google Play does a good job with this. The only thing that really irks me is that if an app while you are using the phone, the foreground app should never get updated. Sure, download the delta patch but wait for me to have stopped using it in order to update (or if I am using the app for hours, pick an update message). To be fair nowadays this only happens when I manual…

Mine is set to update on WiFi only. And everyday, without fail, the moment I plug my phone into a power source in the evening (could even be to my computer for debugging), it'll start going through and applying all available updates. The performance impact is always noticeable during the duration of the updates. Other common case is when I pull into my driveway/office and happen to be charging my phone in the car and…

There's also that they treat all wifi as the same. I saw my data allowance for a 2 week cruise in a few weeks, it's 250MB total. I wonder how many people burn through that on updates alone. As annoying as windows can be about applying the updates, at least they let you set if a connection is metered or not so it won't download. If only steam and everything else didn't ignore the setting.

> Ironically enough, Microsoft seems to have gotten the apply updates/restart frustration down. Maybe it's from all the flak they've gotten over the years.

Not IME. When I shutdown my computer to go away for Christmas holidays windows decided that this was the perfect time to apply updates. Fortunately it completed on the bus ride and not the flight.

I think we've gone well passed the point of what computers should do on our behalf, everything they try and automate lately just ends up aggravating me.

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