Still wild to me how competition shoots themselves in the foot. It's even worse than streaming services.
this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2024
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I remember when 9 million was a lot.
I remember when 1 million is a lot.
It's still crazy to me that this is the same program I used to browse CS zombie mod servers. There was no real store to speak of then.
I love steam, but let's get real here for a second. Valve will change some day. Enshitification is inevitable.
GabeN will not live forever. The vultures circle endlessly, and one day they will win. There is no good ending here (for now).
Consider building a tower, downloading everything youve purchased on steam, and keep it offline. Maybe have a 2nd set of hard drives as a backup. Put these priceless artifacts in your will.
Plan accordingly and enjoy the ride while it lasts.
They will never go public so enshittification rules don't necessarily apply
Never say never, but I don't think it's going to happen while Gabe is in charge
I doubt gabe would choose a successor that would make steam public either, though.
Maybe, maybe not. As equity holders get older they may be looking to cash out so they can fuel their retirements.
I don't think that's something Gabe is interested in, but we're talking about what will happen when he dies.
Sure, but hopefully that's a very long time away, and there's always piracy. Hopefully Gabe lasts for another 20 years or longer. Hopefully he has a high-quality person as a successor.
I love steam, but let's get real here for a second. Valve will change some day. Enshitification is inevitable.
Steam is an example where I'm not sure when it would happen.
It already comes with a hefty fee of 30% per sale on the platform. I don't think they can raise that without serious backlash. And there also isn't really a need, Steam prints money. It prints money because it's where users are. Users are there because they like the features. Some good features are only there because of laws (e.g. refunding); Valve can't remove these.
So how would you make the service even more profitable?
Enshittification happens because corporations want (more) money out of a service that built a userbase. These were often running at a loss. To turn a profit, they need to change.
Steam can sell you licenses to games you don't own already. It's up to each publisher. Valve doesn't care, they just deliver.
They could add a fee to re-download games, a subscription requirement to use friend invites, start throwing spam notifications on your screen/in your email inbox about “sponsored content”, upload your browser history for better ad targeting, etc. the list gets pretty long pretty quickly. Just look at what the Epic store does right now (hint, it’s almost all of those things already).
The Epic "Store" barely qualifies as such, no wonder they're trying to get at least something out of it
Think of it more like Netflix. Netflix was great, then the market fractured and Netflix enshitified in response.
What it would take here is for a publisher to become a real distributor in the space, but competition is weak right now. Just like it really took Disney wading in to disrupt Netflix, it would take someone equally large, like Microsoft, to disrupt Steam. Sorry Ubisoft, but you don't cut it.
Publishers already tried this (EA, Ubisoft, etc) and it didn't really work. They came back to Steam.
because they didnt learn, in order to make more profit per sale on your platform, you either:
make a platform consumer friendly enough that people are willing to use it (the part that is most important)
or
make a game thats "good enough" that people will use your platform as a service (e.g Riot)
EA and Ubisoft (mostly) failed at both.
That's why I think it has to be someone who owns a bunch of publishers, like Microsoft. Like how Disney is not just Disney, but also Pixar, Marvel, ABC, ESPN, etc... It's why people shit on Paramount+. There's just nothing there worth watching.
Arrg matey!
I don't play many AAA games but I'm forever gutted that the fight to make them able to be pirated is a losing battle. I want to pay for my indie games but on occasion I look online at the crack status of AAA games from oecen 2-3 years ago and they're still not playable.
It creates a weird dichotomy where people who pirate or at least don't buy expensive games don't take part in the mainstream gaming conversation at all, which is totally different from the rest of pirated media.
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steam survey says 1.92% is on linux. So there's about 736,651 linux users on steam?! neat
https://partner.steamgames.com/ says there are 132 million monthly active Steam users, so that's more like 2.5 million Linux users on Steam.
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Many of those Steam Deck, I bet.
Bazzite on my desktop and a Steamdeck here!
Wild that the video game industry is so big, and this still isn't even 1% of people on earth.
Also keep in mind this is peak concurrent players. I imagine the MAU is much higher, since most of the world doesn't game at the same time.
This is just steam. It's estimated that about 3 billion people regularly play video games.
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