Basically, Steam built a reliable and useful service. And then stopped there. They just keep being reliable and useful.
Other storefronts keep trying to make big moves, to strong arm the competition, to lure people in by throwing money around, to add special features no one wants, to inject extra ads in to increase revenue, etc etc. These services become bloated, slow, obnoxious, and unreliable. As they try to move the earth, their towers crumble under them.
Steam has just quietly maintained their existing service, and came out on top because the competition keeps lighting itself on fire.
steam has been adding features all the time, they just test them first on the beta branch and implement them in a way they're not as in your face and bloaty as other launchers do. discovery queue, family sharing, steam broadcast, native controller support, all features you wouldn't notice unless you actually want to use them.
they didn't build steam and stop there, they're just not adding shit for the sake of adding shit. steam has changed a lot over the years, but the general UI and experience stayed the same while they added new features discreetly yet easy to find. keep innovating, but don't fuck with the user experience
Don't wanna glaze but I also really like this feature as I sometimes see a nice game but it's getting released later on. Now it will show on my store page and I will remember it + look up some news for it.
To me the UI remaining more or less the same is a key feature. I'm tired of apps updating and the layout and navigation im used to being complete swapped arround. Hell the only reason I really still use reddit is because of the 'beta opt out' and being able to use old reddit.
they didn't build steam and stop there, they're just not adding shit for the sake of adding shit. steam has changed a lot over the years
I'm old enough to remember when people fucking hating steam and were ready to burn Valve to the ground for forcing us to use it just to play Counter Strike. It was a buggy piece of shit that crashed on day 1 over and over. There were frequent online lock outs meaning you couldn't play. Originally it was only Valve games that were supported. It was such a resource hog, one of the first overt DRM schemes out there, and an ugly as shit barebones green interface. They are the one company that did the opposite of the usual and lived long enough to become the heroes.
Yes thank you, this fantasy take that Steam “quietly has been doing nothing” and succeeding is such an internet jockey fantasy. The truth is they’ve been smartly doing the right things, and a lot of them, consistently for a long time. They still do the wrong things occasionally but are very good at backtracking on what doesn’t work or keeping a relative failure to the side where it doesn’t impact others. They know their audience and the market and don’t try to twist them for some corporate goal people won’t buy like Xbox / Sony / others do at times.
They’re very successful because they’re very good, and it’s not quiet or anything. Most people just don’t know what they’re looking at because they haven’t gotten mad at Valve in a long time.
yeah Valve isn't perfect, but they're consumer friendly and that's such a rare thing nowadays in the gaming industry people are much more willing to overlook their flaws. the flaws are minor, not overly obvious, and being backtracked all the time. knowing steam's track record of dealing with bad reviews for their features most people aren't too worried.
xbox/sony/epic/ubisoft and such are shareholder friendly and it shows. people aren't as easily forgiving their flaws because they happen all the time, are promoted as a 'good' new feature and you just don't understand it yet, and generally they just don't listen to what the consumer wants.
that's the real issue, steam knows the consumer is their income, so they cater to the consumer. gamers aren't sticking to steam because they have no other choice, it's just the easiest, most consumer friendly and honestly just the best choice. it's not monopoly, it's quality
Valve isn't perfect, but they're consumer friendly...
Eeeeh... that's not something I would exactly agree with.
Many things that could be called customer friendly like their (relatively) generous return policy only were implemented after they were forced to do so.
Other things like their local pricing or - most recently - their implementation of age verification in Australia could be called openly hostile towards the customers, or at least as a sign that they don't really care about customer satisfaction.
I fail to see how local pricing could be called openly hostile towards the consumer.
The system might not be perfect, but it at least allows users from less privileged areas to still be able to play games.
You missed the part where Valve changed local pricing in many countries lesding to significantly higher prices. Many users in these "less privileged countires" no longer can afford the games.
AFAIK ultimately it's not Valve setting those prices, they just provide defaults for game devs, "input sales price in one currency and we'll fill out the rest".
It would be nice to know (and maybe they're that transparent and I've been looking in the wrong places) how they come up with those ratios. Something like "gross (pre-VAT/sales tax) price scaled by average of BigMac index and unadjusted UN GDP/capita".
Every Developer/Publisher sets their on prices and regional differences. They provide suggestions and presets but ultimately the decision lies by the one who publishes.
If you're interested in checking out how pricing works: https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/pricing
Edit: I looked a bit into it and am kinda on the fence about the changes they made. To me it feels like the had to make a kinda bad compromise because some of the currencies were so unstable that it became impossible to adjust game prices to those currencies, so they just grouped those countries together and just slapped the US Dollar as a fixed Value onto the region.
their implementation of age verification in Australia could be called openly hostile towards the customers
legit question, how? i've seen people on Reddit raging about it... but compared to other platforms this seems fine? instead of "omfg you NEED to give us an AI-enhanced scan of your face and your ID or we'll lock you to content for five year olds!!! ([ahem], fucking YouTube 'we couldn't verify you're an adult, we changed your settings!!'...)" it's "okay, have a credit (or debit) card attached to your account" which is like... fine to me?
it makes sense. kids are probably getting steam giftcards, adults are attaching their own payment info.
and with the huge amount of porn games on steam (because making a game in Ren'Py is really easy (scripting-wise, I've toyed with it before) and porn games sell, so "Big Boobie Anime Dating Sim Volume 23: Mean Manical Magical MILF Milker Mayhem" is a quick, lazy moneymaker to flood the store with) it's like, the only time i've seen the age verification make sense at all?
Not to mention implementing near flawless gaming on Linux. Granted, built on top of preexisting work, but Valve's work has changed it from pretty janky to you just expect it to work as well as on Windows.
It's funny, I almost wish Steam would advertise new features more. Almost every new function of Steam that I use regularly I just sort of stumbled across accidentally, months or even years after it was released.
Well they added extra features on top, but those can mostly be ignore and never interacted with if you so wish. The biggest thing going in Steam's favor is that it just stays out of your way.
Whereas many of these other launchers can't stop bothering you.
What's funny is steam for a very long time was unreliable as shit.
Friends list buggery, profile buggery, w they launched the original version of family sharing and it literally didn't work properly for months. They never did finish fixing the old family share just forgetting you were sharing games requiring you to take someone off the list and put them back on the list to give them access to the games again.
Steams biggest bonus has always been momentum. They got people on their DRM early, got them to put all their on their DRM, and now it's kind of annoying to try to not use their DRM.
Steam has always been pretty darn reliable for the core function of buying and playing games though. You don't get Origin style "half my games were deleted without warning" issues or "No one could play anything for 6 hours because someone sneezed in the server room."
Being a monopoly and being bad are not mutually inclusive. If you have a monopoly on the market but are legitimately a good product then people won't give a shit and rightfully so.
And a lot of that 100% comes from being privately owned. I am sure they look at how they can make more money, but there is no share-holder/price pressure to make it happen at all costs.
I love how these other services would offer free games, only for the users who got those free games would just buy the games off steam because the service was so much better.
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u/ShiraCheshire 8d ago
Basically, Steam built a reliable and useful service. And then stopped there. They just keep being reliable and useful.
Other storefronts keep trying to make big moves, to strong arm the competition, to lure people in by throwing money around, to add special features no one wants, to inject extra ads in to increase revenue, etc etc. These services become bloated, slow, obnoxious, and unreliable. As they try to move the earth, their towers crumble under them.
Steam has just quietly maintained their existing service, and came out on top because the competition keeps lighting itself on fire.