Link. A very interesting read and not, as it first sounds, an anti-steam article. Just a nervous speculation about where the company will be in a decade, when digital distribution is king and Steam are the only ones doing it, holding a monopoly on the gaming industry. And the risk that will incur of unreasonable action on their part should they so choose.
compared to the major publisher shits valve have done no wrong, personally i see them and thier philosophy regarding gaming and gamers in whole a good thing.
I think the bigger problem isn't that Valve/steam have tried to establish a monopoly, rather that nobody has even attempted to better steam, handing them the effective monopoly by default. I really dread to think what digital distribution would have been like if Valve hadn't kicked them into line. IMHO, Steam is still fairly bad in places, such as allowing third parties to add multiple layers of DRM on top of steam. But i can barely imagine what EA/MS/and so on would have dumped on us without Steam to keep them in check.
When games were released in shops, there won't have been all these Games, Gamestations etc selling all the games at different prices. Competition will arise when there is little else in the way of selling games.
But if you were to realistically gauge this, if say Valve starting unreasonable actions, the backlash I predict would be a bit harsh no? Of course the fact that no one has bettered them is still a bit disturbing.
It's up to the publishers to choose whether or not to make Steam necessary. It's not Steams fault for providing a good service. Not sure I like these anti-competetive lawsuits, I get the feeling they make things worse for the consumer in the end. Like in that article, he says how AMD giving away processors would have been anti-competitive, and therefore bad. Personally if AMD offer me a free processor thats a damn good line of marketing, and arguably the most competitive thing they could do. To better it Intel would need a massively better product, or the offer of additional freebies. GFWL is a far worse offender in this area, adding nothing of use and generally a lot of unnecessary hassle. Took me an hour to get into Red Faction Guerilla, nightmare. The only part of this that scares me is the last line of your quote, what if in 10 years time Gabe decides to roam the earth and the like of EA manages to get a foot in the door... *shudder*
I doubt that last line will happen, Valve doesn't seem to have issues in terms of money any time soon.
My point exactly, what if they all take very early retirement and buy a lake to race their yachts on??
Well it's not like Steam's going to go bust. Although your point is valid in the question of who will succeed them.
The article and myself both agree completely. That's not the problem. See above dialogue for the problem: whoever succeeds the Valve team and takes it over in the end. Huge monopolistic company deservedly in posession of everyone's trust and in total control of the entire gaming market, suddenly taken over by uncaring arrogant cocks like the ones who ran microsoft during the 90s. It's gonna be epic.
^ This. The problem is that all the alternative DRM systems are so widely hated that they don't seem to be able to get a foothold, effectively causing Steam's store, which tags along with the DRM, to be the default. We need to distinguish between two completely different facets of Steam's services - the DRM/developer link, and distribution/storefront. The former is the bit of Steam I'm not worried about. DRM is DRM and updates are updates; it doesn't matter who's supplying them as long as it works properly. Steam's is the least offensive DRM/patch system and as far as I'm concerned if it was split from Valve, and headed up instead by a consortium of games publishers (so that all games used it) I would be happy. It works, and that way it wouldn't advantage Valve over other studios or distributors. The latter is the problematic part; Steam risks becoming a monopoly because it also represents a a digital distribution system that has virtually no effective competitors. That's only a matter of pricing - give people better prices elsewhere and they'll buy there, especially if they can use Steam for the necessary DRM anyway (I, being unwilling to pay £40 for MW2, bought it for considerably less online and logged it to my Steam account). D2D and Impulse are being squeezed out by Steam's attempt to combine these two halves. In theory, there's no issue with buying games from D2D that use Steamworks; you just have two distributors in the same way that I buy my games from more than one physical shop. But in practice the article's right; the more people that use Steam for DRM, the more their competitors in the retail market suffer. Really, what we need is a division between those two halves - that safeguards the Steam DRM that we all know and love, and at the same time it doesn't prejudice the other download-distribution retailers.
And what exactly is this DRM you are talking about? Other than the fact that you have to login to your own account to access the content? Or is that simply what you mean? Or am I missing something...
That's exactly what I mean; DRM ties each game to an account from which it can never be transferred (which is tied by the EULA to a single individual and can never be transferred) which can only be accessed in one place at any given time and requires a password. It is the very definition of practical rights management. But you illustrate the point exactly. We're so used to Steam as a Store that we don't really consider it DRM in the same company as the Rockstar Social Club, SecuROM, or the undeniably terrible GFWL.
Steam for what its worth is a brilliant system and ive had it since it was released and it was a buggy peace of crap back in those days. DRM on steam is in certain games having to install games for live when using steam is anoying for one. logging in is irelivent. Auto login Cheesecake.
On a slight tangent...yeah, does anyone remember how terrible the Steam client used to be a few years ago? Man, it was terrible. Anyway. One thing that confused me in retrospect is why the article names the new Steamworks endeavour as part of the problem. It looks like a great idea to me, and foreshadows a good direction in games development.
