Steam made it easy to buy, download and play games. So much of the competition was focused on preventing piracy to the detriment of the user experience. Steam was buy, download, and play all your games in one place with a minimum of bullshit. Then they implemented Steam Greenlight. It let some smaller studios get onto a major platform and proved out that there was a demand for those titles. They were then smart enough to realize that trying to gatekeep those studios with the “Greenlight” process was stupid and opened the flood gates.
Really, this goes back to Gabe Newell’s comments about piracy (a decade and a half ago [1]):
We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem,” he said. “If a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US release, and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate’s service is more valuable.
Steam was a real competitor to LimeWire/Kazaa/etc. The other options, at the time, were stuck in the mentality of treating their customers like pirates. And once people bought into the Steam ecosystem, getting them to buy into any other ecosystem was almost impossible. Steam’s main trick wasn’t building a community, it was building trust. Users trust Valve to not fuck them over. That’s a hard thing to create and it’s fragile. If you look at a competitor like EA’s Origin, many folks won’t even consider it. EA’s reputation of fucking customers is well established. No one wants to sink hundreds to thousands of dollars into a storefront with such an anti-user reputation.
This is the same reason why Netflix was good to start. It answered the service problem. Now with the fracturing, licensing, pricing, blah, blah that’s no longer the case
Yup. With the ease and low likelihood of being caught, piracy has become a pressure relief valve on shitty content practices. Make things too hard to get and people will recognize that setting up a VPN and torrent client aren’t all that hard. Make the experience really bad, and you’ll get dedicated people creating entire software platforms to lower that barrier to entry for piracy even further. Sure, some of those software platforms will get knocked down, but they usually result in the code being released and other folks come along and build on them.
As consolidation and enshitification rise, I expect us to see piracy rise again as well.
Also, it’s just well thought out tech. Can play it like a controller. Touch screen is good. Customisable controls and the track pad for mouse based games is chefs kiss.
I remember in the early days I tried out several different services trying to do the same thing as Steam. None of them really worked. I would have been willing to run multiple apps for different games back then, but each one individually made me go “Eh, too much hassle.”
Actually, I dropped Steam as well in the early early days. The technical problems I ran into were so unacceptable that I had resolved to boycott them forever. Couldn’t say no to all of the bangers they were putting out, though, so I came back to try again and they had gotten much better.
Steam made it easy to buy, download and play games. So much of the competition was focused on preventing piracy to the detriment of the user experience. Steam was buy, download, and play all your games in one place with a minimum of bullshit. Then they implemented Steam Greenlight. It let some smaller studios get onto a major platform and proved out that there was a demand for those titles. They were then smart enough to realize that trying to gatekeep those studios with the “Greenlight” process was stupid and opened the flood gates.
Really, this goes back to Gabe Newell’s comments about piracy (a decade and a half ago [1]):
Steam was a real competitor to LimeWire/Kazaa/etc. The other options, at the time, were stuck in the mentality of treating their customers like pirates. And once people bought into the Steam ecosystem, getting them to buy into any other ecosystem was almost impossible. Steam’s main trick wasn’t building a community, it was building trust. Users trust Valve to not fuck them over. That’s a hard thing to create and it’s fragile. If you look at a competitor like EA’s Origin, many folks won’t even consider it. EA’s reputation of fucking customers is well established. No one wants to sink hundreds to thousands of dollars into a storefront with such an anti-user reputation.
This is the same reason why Netflix was good to start. It answered the service problem. Now with the fracturing, licensing, pricing, blah, blah that’s no longer the case
Yup. With the ease and low likelihood of being caught, piracy has become a pressure relief valve on shitty content practices. Make things too hard to get and people will recognize that setting up a VPN and torrent client aren’t all that hard. Make the experience really bad, and you’ll get dedicated people creating entire software platforms to lower that barrier to entry for piracy even further. Sure, some of those software platforms will get knocked down, but they usually result in the code being released and other folks come along and build on them.
As consolidation and enshitification rise, I expect us to see piracy rise again as well.
Also, it’s just well thought out tech. Can play it like a controller. Touch screen is good. Customisable controls and the track pad for mouse based games is chefs kiss.
Its nice to own. Nice to play.
I remember in the early days I tried out several different services trying to do the same thing as Steam. None of them really worked. I would have been willing to run multiple apps for different games back then, but each one individually made me go “Eh, too much hassle.”
Actually, I dropped Steam as well in the early early days. The technical problems I ran into were so unacceptable that I had resolved to boycott them forever. Couldn’t say no to all of the bangers they were putting out, though, so I came back to try again and they had gotten much better.
Same thing happened with music too, music piracy cratered with the success of Spotify.