The thing with Steam is - at no point in history it felt like the company is just milking its users. Something that otherwise never happens nowadays. Every single bigger company is just trying to maximize the profit by being borderline abusive, but not Valve, despite their vast dominance. For this very reason they have my loyalty and no exclusives, promotions, pricing plans etc. are going to make me switch.
Not to mention that as Linux user, they might be the single biggest force that made it so that I have more games on Linux than I have time to actually play.
Microtransactions, real money loot-boxes, gambling, NFT marketplace, battlepasses
doesn't milk it's users?
Dota used to have $35 "arcanas", a high quality skin for a single hero which were released intermittently - but that wasn't enough money, they're now placed $200+ deep in the yearly battlepass. If you played any of their games, you'd realise they're one of greediest in the business.
Meh, I don't know. The whole reason Steam even exist is because Valve decided to lock CS 1.6 and later HL2 behind it. It's a long time ago now, but the way I remember things people hated Steam for years before the general perception started to change 15 or so years ago.
Edit: I'm also pretty sure they patched in-game ads into CS 1.6 at some point, but can't remember for sure. Anyone else recall that?
Steam milks developers instead of users, so that does indeed tend to generate value for the customer. The situation isn't ideal, but Valve is certainly the least bad option for computer games. Alternative platforms were mostly implemented by larger studios. The incentive was probably to cut out the middle man of course. Ironic if you look at the state of the IT industry.
Also, Steam has a long term strategy in the interest of customers and I believe gaming in general. Supporting other platforms as Windows for example. They are smart enough to look beyond the horizon and can make predictions for possible developments in the market. I highly appreciate that as a customer.
It's privately owned. The requirement for infinite growth so investors can get rich off other people's work is what kills everything publicly traded. It's what is killing Netflix and what will kill Game Pass.
I love Steam and I hope it's never bought out.
As much as I wish Valve made more games, I'd prefer this to them being publicly traded.
I agree, I've been a happy customer of theirs for ~20 years and always felt like I was getting a good deal, and many of the annoyances of the platform seem mostly imposed by publishers (origin/uplay logins, online/drm requirements etc.)
Plus often the strategies competitors cook up actively put me off, I don't want the additional overhead of managing more accounts/payment options/social platforms I already have more then I want. And making me jump through those hoops to play an exclusive game will more often then not mean I just don't play the game
Valve is a private corporation that is run to make profits for its owners. It is not run to jack up its stock price so it behaves differently from other corporations it runs more like a family run business not a corporation.
> The thing with Steam is - at no point in history it felt like the company is just milking its users.
As someone who purchased Half-Life in a physical box in a retail store before Steam so much as existed and was happy downloading update patches and using a server browser until Steam forced me to create a Steam account and become a Steam user to continue playing Half-Life online, this is true. I feel more exploited than milked.
The question ultimately is: how do you create an ecosystem which fairly compensates and doesn't brutally overwork game staff? Relying purely on game sales is difficult. Games are expensive to produce and gamers, sans whales, are generally quite price sensitive. Gamers are also a famously tough crowd to please. Indie game economics work by saving costs on production, either by keeping art simple so many fewer artists are required or otherwise constraining the game space. Even then, the majority of indie games flop. I don't have an answer, but everywhere I've looked in the games industry, margins are razor thin.
They don't have to milk the user when they do that to themselves. Forgive me if I'm wrong, but it doesn't seem there are many PC-exclusive publishers around anymore for several decades now.
"Felt" is really the right word for this, because almost every bad practice in the industry was pioneered by Valve, particularly in TF2. They're just really good at inducing reciprocity.
Large scale Microtransactions (TF2).
Cosmetic Microtransactions in a Single Player / Coop game (Portal 2).
Loot Boxes (TF2, though they really got bad with CS:GO).
And worst of all, a planned economy that collects "sales tax" and enables children to gamble. Not even "simulated" gambling where all you get is a cosmetic locked to your account. Just straight up gambling. With cashing out if you happen to be lucky and know when to stop.
Oh, and don't forget paid mods - a concept that has similarities to previous Steam Workshop games, but blew up right in their face when it involved a third party that people usually just joke about having their players fix all bugs for them after ship.
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 was wondering when it would get to Epic, but the article being from 2018 explains it.
But didn’t epic kinda subvert this?
Epic spent ludicrous amounts (I assume) of money on exclusivity deals and giving players freebies. But their store itself sucks. Maybe the dev tools are low friction, the store was far worse than Steam for a long time, and still is.
I just started the client: 30 seconds of loading (okay, that was a lot longer than usual… did new free games arrive?)
Click library: "We know we are slow, so look at this skeleton loader". It’s my fucking library? How can this take seconds to load?
Click a game to find out more: It launches the game. Why do you have a launch button below the game if everything is a launch button? (replace launch with install for uninstalled games) Information is "right click" -> "go to store page". Wow.
Back/forward: It’s a fucking Electron app, you get back/forward for free. No, wait, if you use some dumb JS Framework you don’t, and they don’t. Half the time, back/forward on the mouse does not work properly because they didn’t manually implement the hooks for whatever framework they are using.
Okay, rant over. Anyway, this clearly shows that you can have a high-friction crap-client and still get people by just throwing enough money at devs and players for long enough.
It's worth remembering that Google tried this with Stadia, with levels of investment unimaginable for a regular startup and a product that was superior in many ways (instant games! no hardware requirements!), and still failed.
Of course you can Monday morning quarterback this and point out Stadia's limitations (weak games library, hurr durr Google Reader, etc), but still, the cards were stacked in their favor and they still couldn't pull it off.
I work at Google and I was immediately skeptical of Stadia (I don't work on that product, obviously). Partly from being a gamer myself, thinking about latency, but also because:
* Google has a reputation for abandoning services, and games bought on Stadia would be locked there. What happens if/when Stadia goes under? Who knows, but there's a decent chance of, "tough shit, all your games are gone."
* It's hard to get momentum when you're targeting hardcore gamers, who mostly already have consoles/PC's, thus removing one of your biggest advantages.
I work in the games industry, and honestly I don't know anyone who was optimistic about Stadia. Some people thought no chance, others thought that Google would care enough to keep pushing it for many years and keep spending unlimited money to maybe find success, and I didn't hear from anyone who thought better than that.
Of course I'm not claiming to speak for everyone in the industry, just for people in my network who I either discussed it with or whose opinions I saw online. But it very much isn't the case that everyone predicted success until "Monday morning quarterback"ing.
I wanted to try Stadia. My Google account hails from 2004, when GMail first came out. I am in good standing, and consume a lot of Google services, many of which I pay for.
Stadia would just not accept any credit card I threw at them, including a virtual card I created specifically for this service after the other ones failed. It also even refused those which Google happily uses to charge me for my GWS and YouTube Premium.
It was not a geolocation thing - Stadia happily serviced a neighbour.
Under these circumstances, I gave up. If you make it hard for me to give you money, I simply won't.
You are greatly dismissing the limitations. The technical challenge the met was the bare minimum to start building any kind of credibility to attract consumer, they knew it, and they did it. But still it was the bare minimum.
Once you have the platform, the bare minimum, you can start trying to get customer. You do that by playing on price, quality (within your platform parameters), catalog and since it's subscription base, long term commitment. Basically, either it was a hit, or they had to accept bleeding a lot of money to finalize their market entry.
They didn't push much and price and catalog, and they didn't commit either, as everyone expected.
They pull off a tech demo, they were never serious on the gaming market, and it showed.
The business model was stupid. You paid a subscription for the benefit of being able to buy games on the platform, with you couldn’t access without the subscription. And all of this only works with amazing internet and for games where latency isn’t an issue.
Google never cared about Stadia or marketed it much.
GeForce Now, Luna, PSNow, XCloud, etc. are doing much better. Stadia is just the neglected stepchild of game streaming, not representative of the overall health of the technology.
I should note that Google by no means invented game streaming. OnLive did it ten years ago, and today there are still other small providers like Shadow.tech, Parsec, Paperspace...
I think Nvidia has the real advantage here though, being the only ones who can produce those gfx cards at datacenter scale. Unless one of the other providers want to develop their own chips, they're always at the mercy of Nvidia. Even during the COVID GPU shortage, Nvidia was able to keep GeForce Now sustained with enough hardware while the other providers struggled... Shadow had a waitlist of several months, for example.
It's interesting how the sentiment towards Steam changed since it's inception. I remember back when we had to use WON to play counter strike, then it got shut down and we had to move to Steam. But steam forced you to upgrade to CS 1.6, we liked 1.5 so we "boycotted" it and played on dodgy private servers and eventually WON2 (I think that's what it was called).
I remember not playing Half Life 2 for a while because it required Steam and I refused to install it. I eventually gave up and joined (17 years ago according to my account) and over those 17 it's one of those services that just got better and better.
Linux gaming is now in the "it just works" territory. They fixed controller support (no more using dodgy drivers to make your PS3 controller behave like an xbox 360 one). They added support for online in local only co-op games (one person streams the game to the other, the other person sends controller input).
There are so many cool tech features built into steam that I really can't imagine using anything else at this point.
I think you're mixing up a few things about the 'sentiment' here because of the timelines. If Wikipedia is correct enough Steam launched in autumn 2003 and as you say, for CS.
All of us who didn't play CS did not care at all about Steam. Then late in 2004 HL2 came, that was a bigger draw but still, for many of us who didn't buy it.. don't care.
My Steam account is from 2009, but I distinctly remember that I tried to sign up some years before for no good reason (maybe to grab a name) and couldn't get past the unreadable Captcha and because I STILL had no pressing reason (around 2006?) I let it go.
I'm not saying I'm a hardcore Steam user, maybe more like a casual user who buys some games from time to time and I didn't feel a pressing need to sign up for the first ~6 years of service and at some point they had enough benefits that people signed up and bought games.
TLDR: Steam was a niche product for many years so the current discourse about "the default game purchasing platform" is completely different than "publisher-owned distribution platform for 3 games"
I generally won't use any game store that doesn't have text reviews, they're so so much more useful than just numerical scores/star ratings.
I especially like being able to read negative reviews on games that look appealing to me to identify whether the primary complaints about them are actually things I'm likely to care about.
Idea for a competitor: let users post video reviews!
User-posted video reviews sounds kinda useless to me, just because it'd be hard to skim, but they'd also be low quality enough on average to where you wouldn't want to sit through a bunch.
For me the main thing lacking in all popular Steam "competitors" (looking mostly at the epic games launcher right now) is lack of reviews.
A store without reviews is mostly useless for exploration, while the Steam review system is excellent. I very often wait for a game to come out on Steam just because I want to see the reviews before buying.
You read game reviews for that ? I just YouTube gameplay videos or intro or whatever. I'll watch a narrated review, but just reading about the game is kind of irrelevant for me. Maybe in the old days of game magazines, but these days - videos do a way better job of telling me what I'm in for.
Even if you were to do all these things (including have superpowers), you still wouldn't be able to compete with Steam. They have built up too much consumer trust over the years, to the point that people automatically view competitors with suspicion. For competitors to succeed, Steam will have to start being aggressively anti-consumer.
For me the killing feature of Steam is its longevity. I still have in my library the games that I bought in 2008. It means that I can reasonably expect my library to work for the rest of my life. I can't say the same of any other store, much less some newfangled startup.
The only conditions under which I can imagine switching to another store is if publishers would suddenly stop releasing their games on Steam en masse. And I mean en masse, not just one or two popular publishers.
Before I learned about GOG I bought all my games from steam.
Nowadays I only buy from steam if:
1) it's not on GOG, AND
2) it's a game I desperately want to play
I don't think condition #2 will ever be met, because no matter how hard I try to get addicted to video games I just get bored and do something else.
I buy from GOG because I like the idea that I actually own (not licensed, like steam) and can play the games I purchased even after game stores all shutdown.
I am amazed that Epic is not mentioned even once. Epic does all that: bribes developers, bribes players by giving away games for free each Thursday, even AAA's now and then. The Super Power that Epic has is their Unreal Engine Ecosystem. And all the money. And that is it!
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.
It’s interesting that since this was written the epic game store was started and I think it’s quite successful. Although, just like the article predicted, epic did it with lots and lots of money.
Got my deck on Monday. Valve just made me an Arch Linux user / console gamer with a handheld that can play my PC games. Oh, and my friends list, game library, and save files transfer over too. Steam wins and I'm a happier gamer for it.
I had my issues with Steam, but lately a new one come up, I have an old laptop with Steam and Half Life installed on it, so when we had do go on vacation my son wanted to take the old laptop to play some Half Life if bored, but Steam decided to upgrade and fuck itself, then I discovered that Steam Client uses Chrome and the client is no longer compatible with the OS on the old laptop.
I did not had the tiem to screw around with cracks or some way to find an old client, fuck Valve, if your new client is not compatible with the OS then fucking stop update it, or make it possible for someone to continue playing the game, maybe a super simple Launcher that does not need Chrome.
In cases such as this, which there are a lot, I guess finding a niche if possible would be a good approach. Cater to people who get lost in the big ocean that is steam searching for the one small pond that is you. Whatever that may be.
[+] [-] laurencei|3 years ago|reply
Previous discussion (215 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16173199
[+] [-] globalreset|3 years ago|reply
Not to mention that as Linux user, they might be the single biggest force that made it so that I have more games on Linux than I have time to actually play.
[+] [-] ninjinxo|3 years ago|reply
Microtransactions, real money loot-boxes, gambling, NFT marketplace, battlepasses
doesn't milk it's users?
Dota used to have $35 "arcanas", a high quality skin for a single hero which were released intermittently - but that wasn't enough money, they're now placed $200+ deep in the yearly battlepass. If you played any of their games, you'd realise they're one of greediest in the business.
[+] [-] afroboy|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zppln|3 years ago|reply
Edit: I'm also pretty sure they patched in-game ads into CS 1.6 at some point, but can't remember for sure. Anyone else recall that?
[+] [-] raxxorraxor|3 years ago|reply
Also, Steam has a long term strategy in the interest of customers and I believe gaming in general. Supporting other platforms as Windows for example. They are smart enough to look beyond the horizon and can make predictions for possible developments in the market. I highly appreciate that as a customer.
[+] [-] ClassyJacket|3 years ago|reply
I love Steam and I hope it's never bought out.
As much as I wish Valve made more games, I'd prefer this to them being publicly traded.
[+] [-] mojzu|3 years ago|reply
Plus often the strategies competitors cook up actively put me off, I don't want the additional overhead of managing more accounts/payment options/social platforms I already have more then I want. And making me jump through those hoops to play an exclusive game will more often then not mean I just don't play the game
[+] [-] xbmcuser|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dmos62|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RunSet|3 years ago|reply
As someone who purchased Half-Life in a physical box in a retail store before Steam so much as existed and was happy downloading update patches and using a server browser until Steam forced me to create a Steam account and become a Steam user to continue playing Half-Life online, this is true. I feel more exploited than milked.
[+] [-] Karrot_Kream|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ReptileMan|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sublinear|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yellow_lead|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gcanyon|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] a3w|3 years ago|reply
Still, the EULA states that steam is a subscription, for currently 0 (USD|EUR) per month. So at any time they might increase that fee.
[+] [-] LtWorf|3 years ago|reply
You mean like to "solve the cheaters problem" they made so that free users in tf2 can no longer use the chat, while it's still full of cheaters?
[+] [-] sascha_sl|3 years ago|reply
Large scale Microtransactions (TF2).
Cosmetic Microtransactions in a Single Player / Coop game (Portal 2).
Loot Boxes (TF2, though they really got bad with CS:GO).
And worst of all, a planned economy that collects "sales tax" and enables children to gamble. Not even "simulated" gambling where all you get is a cosmetic locked to your account. Just straight up gambling. With cashing out if you happen to be lucky and know when to stop.
Oh, and don't forget paid mods - a concept that has similarities to previous Steam Workshop games, but blew up right in their face when it involved a third party that people usually just joke about having their players fix all bugs for them after ship.
[+] [-] jabbany|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Semaphor|3 years ago|reply
But didn’t epic kinda subvert this?
Epic spent ludicrous amounts (I assume) of money on exclusivity deals and giving players freebies. But their store itself sucks. Maybe the dev tools are low friction, the store was far worse than Steam for a long time, and still is.
I just started the client: 30 seconds of loading (okay, that was a lot longer than usual… did new free games arrive?)
Click library: "We know we are slow, so look at this skeleton loader". It’s my fucking library? How can this take seconds to load?
Click a game to find out more: It launches the game. Why do you have a launch button below the game if everything is a launch button? (replace launch with install for uninstalled games) Information is "right click" -> "go to store page". Wow.
Back/forward: It’s a fucking Electron app, you get back/forward for free. No, wait, if you use some dumb JS Framework you don’t, and they don’t. Half the time, back/forward on the mouse does not work properly because they didn’t manually implement the hooks for whatever framework they are using.
Okay, rant over. Anyway, this clearly shows that you can have a high-friction crap-client and still get people by just throwing enough money at devs and players for long enough.
[+] [-] rippercushions|3 years ago|reply
Of course you can Monday morning quarterback this and point out Stadia's limitations (weak games library, hurr durr Google Reader, etc), but still, the cards were stacked in their favor and they still couldn't pull it off.
[+] [-] TulliusCicero|3 years ago|reply
* Google has a reputation for abandoning services, and games bought on Stadia would be locked there. What happens if/when Stadia goes under? Who knows, but there's a decent chance of, "tough shit, all your games are gone."
* It's hard to get momentum when you're targeting hardcore gamers, who mostly already have consoles/PC's, thus removing one of your biggest advantages.
[+] [-] swores|3 years ago|reply
Of course I'm not claiming to speak for everyone in the industry, just for people in my network who I either discussed it with or whose opinions I saw online. But it very much isn't the case that everyone predicted success until "Monday morning quarterback"ing.
[+] [-] unionpivo|3 years ago|reply
I play lots of games, have over 1000 of them on steam, and jet somehow stadia only had 5 that i was interested and already had on steam.
But hey, lets try anyway, so I try to subscribe and: its not available here.
Almost no promotion, most of my friends(some of whom live in USA where I presume stadia does work) who also game didn't even know about stadia.
And then when they didn't6 just autowin all the customers, they kind of just let it go.
[+] [-] DocTomoe|3 years ago|reply
Stadia would just not accept any credit card I threw at them, including a virtual card I created specifically for this service after the other ones failed. It also even refused those which Google happily uses to charge me for my GWS and YouTube Premium.
It was not a geolocation thing - Stadia happily serviced a neighbour.
Under these circumstances, I gave up. If you make it hard for me to give you money, I simply won't.
[+] [-] tuyiown|3 years ago|reply
Once you have the platform, the bare minimum, you can start trying to get customer. You do that by playing on price, quality (within your platform parameters), catalog and since it's subscription base, long term commitment. Basically, either it was a hit, or they had to accept bleeding a lot of money to finalize their market entry.
They didn't push much and price and catalog, and they didn't commit either, as everyone expected.
They pull off a tech demo, they were never serious on the gaming market, and it showed.
[+] [-] dontlaugh|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] solardev|3 years ago|reply
GeForce Now, Luna, PSNow, XCloud, etc. are doing much better. Stadia is just the neglected stepchild of game streaming, not representative of the overall health of the technology.
I should note that Google by no means invented game streaming. OnLive did it ten years ago, and today there are still other small providers like Shadow.tech, Parsec, Paperspace...
I think Nvidia has the real advantage here though, being the only ones who can produce those gfx cards at datacenter scale. Unless one of the other providers want to develop their own chips, they're always at the mercy of Nvidia. Even during the COVID GPU shortage, Nvidia was able to keep GeForce Now sustained with enough hardware while the other providers struggled... Shadow had a waitlist of several months, for example.
[+] [-] doix|3 years ago|reply
I remember not playing Half Life 2 for a while because it required Steam and I refused to install it. I eventually gave up and joined (17 years ago according to my account) and over those 17 it's one of those services that just got better and better.
Linux gaming is now in the "it just works" territory. They fixed controller support (no more using dodgy drivers to make your PS3 controller behave like an xbox 360 one). They added support for online in local only co-op games (one person streams the game to the other, the other person sends controller input).
There are so many cool tech features built into steam that I really can't imagine using anything else at this point.
[+] [-] ThalesX|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wink|3 years ago|reply
All of us who didn't play CS did not care at all about Steam. Then late in 2004 HL2 came, that was a bigger draw but still, for many of us who didn't buy it.. don't care.
My Steam account is from 2009, but I distinctly remember that I tried to sign up some years before for no good reason (maybe to grab a name) and couldn't get past the unreadable Captcha and because I STILL had no pressing reason (around 2006?) I let it go.
I'm not saying I'm a hardcore Steam user, maybe more like a casual user who buys some games from time to time and I didn't feel a pressing need to sign up for the first ~6 years of service and at some point they had enough benefits that people signed up and bought games.
TLDR: Steam was a niche product for many years so the current discourse about "the default game purchasing platform" is completely different than "publisher-owned distribution platform for 3 games"
[+] [-] hardware2win|3 years ago|reply
Rockstar/xbox/epic/blizzard site in order to play it, wtf.
I would pay 1$ if steam created those accounts on some their random ass emails and just let us play
[+] [-] iruoy|3 years ago|reply
https://www.fortressofdoors.com/so-you-want-to-compete-with-...
[+] [-] p1necone|3 years ago|reply
I especially like being able to read negative reviews on games that look appealing to me to identify whether the primary complaints about them are actually things I'm likely to care about.
Idea for a competitor: let users post video reviews!
[+] [-] TulliusCicero|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MauranKilom|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cube2222|3 years ago|reply
A store without reviews is mostly useless for exploration, while the Steam review system is excellent. I very often wait for a game to come out on Steam just because I want to see the reviews before buying.
[+] [-] moonchrome|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Jweb_Guru|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eterevsky|3 years ago|reply
The only conditions under which I can imagine switching to another store is if publishers would suddenly stop releasing their games on Steam en masse. And I mean en masse, not just one or two popular publishers.
[+] [-] b0afc375b5|3 years ago|reply
Nowadays I only buy from steam if:
1) it's not on GOG, AND 2) it's a game I desperately want to play
I don't think condition #2 will ever be met, because no matter how hard I try to get addicted to video games I just get bored and do something else.
I buy from GOG because I like the idea that I actually own (not licensed, like steam) and can play the games I purchased even after game stores all shutdown.
[+] [-] dschuetz|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] junon|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] growt|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andrewclunn|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] simion314|3 years ago|reply
I did not had the tiem to screw around with cracks or some way to find an old client, fuck Valve, if your new client is not compatible with the OS then fucking stop update it, or make it possible for someone to continue playing the game, maybe a super simple Launcher that does not need Chrome.
[+] [-] davidkuennen|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
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