I find it funny how this article casts Steam as something easy to do, as if its success has been random and just first mover advantage.
Making Steam and making it work is hard. Steam does not have the advantage of a platform monopoly like Apple or Sony stores. They earned their place in the market. And as other said here, Steam is more important for gaming history than Half Life 3 would be.
There's also the review system, the workshops, automatic updates, easy browsing, communities, friend lists, customer service (getting refunds is easier than on any other platform) etc.
The competing platforms biggest problems is that they assume that all they need to do is set up a HTTP server to download games from and add a few discounts/exclusives to get a customer base. But their UX is miles behind what Steam offers.
The hard part is discovery (there is always money for someone who can do a marginally better job matching games to gamers), marketing, financial infrastructure (dealing with returns, credit card fraud, beta keys, review keys, DLC, crowdfunding campaigns, microtransactions), social matchmaking, mod management, etc.
Those are mostly not distributed problems. They are services problems. Steam is all of those things. The core licensing component is only the most obvious part.
Torrents only cover distribution. Ethereum only covers cash exchange.
Steam continues to be the best platform because it shares per-game and per-user cross-game transactional data with everyone. It's kind of hard to explain why this is so important, but it is unique to Steam, compared to all pay-to-play and subscription media as far as I know.
Whereas things like DRM and returns and even royalties differ amongst platforms, and none of those have the same hegemony as Steam does; and the compulsory platforms, like the App Store and Google Play, developers complain bitterly about them in a way I've never heard regarding Steam, which they participate in voluntarily.
I think you're right, there is a barrier for most consumers who love Steam. But for another percentage of gamers, like me, there's zero barrier to entry.
1: I like not having to launch Steam to play my games.
2: I know there are good games that exist that aren't on Steam and am more than willing to go through a CC form or PayPal.
3: I'm slowly getting irrated with games with DRM, online-only, DLC.
I think itch.io is a win for these niches of indie game developers and consumers who buy indie games.
The money games can make on steam is infinitely higher than other platforms - what you're paying for is to get your game on the platform with the most users.
A local game company I knew had a game on the humble bundle, their website, and a few other platform for months - they made a few thousand. Then it got greenlight on steam and they pulled 1m over 4 months.
Steam is not merely a payment processing system, it's an audience.
I think the article summarizes things up pretty well.
Steam is popular because it won a brutal evolutionary battle in the realm of PC distribution. PC games have never had any barriers to distribution, and old distribution methods (physical media, direct downloads etc.) still work just as well today as they did decades ago.
Developers use Steam not because they are forced or bribed to do so, they use it because it is better -- it's just easier to make money by distributing via Steam (it could be any combination of things like the wider audience reach, easy DRM integration, built-in CDN and auto-update, built-in cloud saves, etc. etc.). In a sense, Steam's victory is like that of Wikipedia, GMail, or Youtube etc. It provided something that was for a long time magnitudes better than the competition.
Looking at it this way, I think the article does miss one final way one might "beat" Steam -- a fundamental paradigm shift in how someone consumes games as entertainment. Steam's success depends on the idea that people want to do "PC gaming". That the idea of collecting, downloading, installing, and running games that they choose themselves on general purpose machines they own themselves is attractive to enough people.
I personally believe and hope this idea will stay with us, but I am also from an older era of tech. What beats Steam will not be a better Steam. It will be something else, something that maybe seems obvious in hindsight but impossible to imagine today. Just as a fish does not question the water it lives in, and we the atmosphere we breathe, to truly compete with Steam, one must be something so obvious that consumers would wonder why anyone would ever choose anything else.
I tried to compete with steam. It definitely doesn't work.
Thing is, people are happy with steam. Nobody cares for something else. Doesn't matter if your platform is better. Steam hasn't changed really at all over the years and... to be honest, it works for them.
There’s nothing stopping you selling downloadable games on your own web store either. The hard part is actually reaching an audience and then monetisation (and chargebacks). The ‘Steam effect’ is very diluted these days but a hell of a lot stronger than going without which is why everyone is still there.
it is not too surprising, steam is popular place to both get games and sellgames in indie games community. On the other hand I think that better move would be to make it easier to sell games on steam.
I have two titles on Switch and Steam. What you are saying is incorrect. The process to get approved and launch on Switch is substantially more difficult than Steam, and the quality of titles is as a result much higher.
Because of the lack of curation and quality control, I make a lot more revenue for the same product on Switch than on Steam.
Indie developers complain about Steam because they are the most vulnerable to its problems. They don't have the pricing power to avoid the race to the bottom of sales. But without Steam and the distribution it provides a lot of them wouldn't have a business model.
So on one hand: Isn't it great that there is this easy way for almost anyone to distribute their game; and on the other: isn't it terrible that so many people are distributing their game and driving down the price?
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