Steam keeps on winning
I still have a couple in operation, but mostly it's for ingest. These days all my backups go into a NAS, including my GOG installers. Honestly, given the increasing waves of (sigh) enshittification it's becoming more and more justifiable to keep your own home network services, storage included.
Not misinformation. GOG requires games to be DRM free to sell there, Steam provides first party DRM (being crackable doesn't make it not DRM) and it actively encourages developers publishing on Steam to double down with more GaaS features and secondary DRM in their instructions to developers.
Why do people feel the need to shill for billionaires? I don't get it.
No, you can't.
And that's a big "unless". I actually do have a stored backup of my GOG library installers (of the ones where I don't own a physical copy, anyway). GOG could disappear into thin air tomorrow and I would lose zero access. Not so with Steam.
Oh, no they don't "randomly" dislike Meta. They have very good reasons to dislike Meta. I dislike Meta. I abandoned all my Meta accounts ages ago, never looked back. Like I said, all social media was a mistake.
What I'm saying is that the general tenor of the conversation is to actively dislike Meta, then look for ways to justify Meta federating being bad for everybody else. It's not to think about the consequences of Meta federating and then deciding if it's convenient or not.
I mean, my personal take is that Meta social media sucks, so I'd much rather access the people I know in Threads safely from Mastodon than from a Threads account, if we're gonna put the cards on the table. I don't need to like Meta for that. In fact, that's a stance entirely built on not wanting to have to engage with Meta's platform to reach the people in Meta's platform.
And hey, it'd been a while since people accused me of being a paid shill for anybody. That's some holiday nostalgia for you.
The problems have to do with people not liking Meta. I'm getting an increasingly strong feeling that the goalposts shall be placed wherever they are needed.
Which I suppose explains the tonal whiplash of going from people raging that not enough people were defederating from Meta to raging that Meta is defederating from the usual suspects in less time than it took to get through the Christmas leftovers.
Not that I particularly like Meta. All social media was a mistake, if you ask me. But still.
I think you're misunderstanding what sorts of roles a brand, sales, PR and community management teams actually have, beyond... I'm guessing you're thinking traditional advertising stuff. But also what sort of role they would have under Valve's extremely opaque strategy.
At the absolute least Valve has a ton of third party relations to handle, which I know for a fact they do because I've physically seen the people doing it. So there's that.
They also run one of the biggest esports organizations in the business, or at least they manage it, which is effectively its own standalone thing on the side. They fully run The International, as far as I can tell, and they at the very least fund and organize the CS majors circuit.
They run one of the world's biggest digital service platforms, with an absolutely insane amount of third parties involved worldwide. They have comarketing deals all over the place. Every time you see a game show up on a Steam banner somebody had to have a conversation about that, sign deals, source art, get it cleared... it's a whole mess.
They run everry bit of branding, marketing and community management on Steam. Every sale, every ad, every bit of written copy you see on Steam that is not uploaded directly by a game maker? Somebody made those.
They ship and sell games and hardware. All those Steam Deck OLED reviews and previews you saw? Somebody went and set those up, signed NDAs and embargos, shipped test units, provided review guides, handled questions from the press, got the right info to the right places.
Every campaign, loot box, piece of cosmetics, seasonal event in CS2 or DOTA 2 or any other Valve game? Somebody put those together. Not just the content, the in-store materials, copy, go-to-market plan, the whole deal.
Valve are intentionally obtuse about what they do. They don't put roles next to names on credits. They don't put in credits at all, sometimes. They don't advertise job positions or share what the jobs actually are. They don't easily provide points of contact or names or have roles or tell anybody what they do or how, with very few exceptions. Because it helps their image. It helps sell that one of the biggest online marketplaces in the world (we're talking Netflix big. Amazon big) is somehow an upstart of engineers coming up with ideas on the spot. And that is what we call "a carefully cultivated image".
I absolutely believe that they run lean and flexible. I have no question. But I'd be less suprised to find out that Valve has no cleaning staff than to find they have nobody working on brand, comms or event organization.
Hey! Somebody brought up the "leaked" employee manual, I think I have bingo now.
The guys they have doing dev relations aren't talking development, they're talking business.
And just so I'm clear on how you think this works. You believe that Valve sets up what? Five sales a year? Plus the International. Plus coordinating and financing the CS Majors. Plus actually negotiating all the distribution deals for store placement with third parties. Plus shipping multiple hardware and software products, including setting up preview events and sending out review samples. Plus all the press relations for both games and press queries...
...with zero sales/PR/community management staff.
Am I getting that wrong?
Man, messed up as it is to refuse to put proper credits in games, you certainly see how that feeds into their, again, very carefully curated public image.
EDIT: To be clear, it's hard to know what anybody does at Valve if you don't work at Valve, or at least routinely with Valve. I'm not gonna stand here and say that all of the guys working on that don't also... I don't know go build 3D models or code store features when they're not doing that. But they absolutely do that. And they absolutely have a PR strategy, which is mostly "shut the hell up, keep the black box a black box". Again, so much to learn from them about how to handle PR, especially in tech and gaming.
No, you're not listening to me.
Epic. Took the lootboxes. Out of Fortnite.
Altogether. No loot boxes. None. They're gone.
So no, they're not pushing that line further. They were actually relatively early in reacting to regulator pressure by backing off from those. I'm gonna guess because they were caught having poorly designed underage checks and slapped with an exemplary fine, so it's not like they didn't get strong external incentives.
But if your argument is that Epic does it worse on a purely moral standpoint... well, you're objectively wrong and have been for about four years. The more interesting question is why do you not know this?
That's been my point all along. Valve's big win is branding. Their brand is absolute solid gold. They get a crazy amount of free passes no matter what they do. They're not bulletproof against controversy, but they're maybe the closest to that I can think of in the games industry.
Plenty of competitors have been more consumer-friendly than them in specific issues. EA started unconditional refunds when Valve was actively whining about regulators wanting them to do them. Epic backed out from loot boxes while Valve is actively adding them to new games. They are known to be the worst profit sharers, and it gets rougher the smaller a dev is... They're great at features and they do take very compelling stances in specific issues (many of them driven by the lifelong blood feud between Gabe and his former coworkers at Microsoft), but they are disproportionately seen as a league above every other first party regardles of facts.
That the kind of branding work you build a masters around right there. It's nuts.
Oh, they are not. Their DRM wiki page for devs goes "this DRM is easily crackable, we really recommend you use secondary DRM on top of it, see how to do that below". I linked to that elsewhere.
Which is... you know, fine, but definitely one of the reasons I always check if a game is on GOG first before buying it on Steam.
I haven't looked at Fortnite in ages, but I'm pretty sure there aren't any loot boxes in it anymore. They first let you preview them before buying and now I think it's all direct purchases for cosmetics and a battlepass. CS2 launched this year and it's still loot boxes all the way down.
So... how does the statute of limitations work now? Is Fortnite now cool with you but CS2 isn't? Or is it more that whatever Epic does is bad and whatever Valve does is good?
EDIT: Also, add "destroying the previous game to replace it with a fake sequel that is really just a patch" to their list of crimes against gaming. They didn't invent that one, because I see you there in the corner, Activision, we haven't forgotten about you, but it sure does suck.
Ah, so if it's crackable it's fine?
Somebody tell Denuvo, they're off the hook.
Seriously, why try so hard to go to bat for a brand name? I get that everybody wants to root for something these days, but I'm too old to pick sides between Sega and Nintendo and I'm mature enough to reconcile that Steam can have the best feature set in a launcher and also be a major player in the process of erasing game ownership and the promotion of GaaS.
Blending the storefront with a DRM solution? No, that was them.
That's their entire call to fame. They first turned their auto-patcher into a DRM service, then they enforced authorization of physical copies through it and eventually it became the storefront bundled with the other two pieces. If somebody did it before them I hadn't heard of it, but I'll happily take proof that I was wrong.
None of the pieces were new, SecuROM and others had been around for years, a few publishers had download and patch managers and I don't remember who did physical auth first, but somebody must have. But bundling the three? That was Steam.
To this day I see that and I go "oh, hey, remember Tank Girl?"
Am I alone in this?
Oookay, so we're all cool with MTX cosmetics, loot boxes, battlepasses and lacking full ownership or transferability of games, then?
I'm just trying to figure out if the things Valve is doing right now are fine for everybody or just for Valve.
Which again, is my problem. I'll keep saying it, because having to argue for reality makes it sound like I'm a hater. I like Steam, I think Valve games are generally great (and it's a shame they've stopped making them), and I think Valve's management is a good example of many of the pros of a private company (look at Twitter for all the cons).
But holy crap, no, man, they are THE premier name in GaaS. Everybody is taking their cues from Valve, Epic or both in that space. Their entire platform is predicated on doing as little as possible and crowdsourcing as much as possible to keep the money machine churning. Corporations are not your friends.
If he were still alive and running the company I do think that subject would probably come up, yeah.
But honestly, it's not a cutoff problem. Steam changed how games are marketed forever. I don't like the ways that went. I don't like that they killed physical media. I don't like that they killed ownership.
Those things are still happening. It's not over. They are still pushing that process. Today.
And then there's the MTX they're still pushing today. The loot boxes they're selling today. The race-to-the-bottom sales. The UGC nightmare landscape. It´s all in there right now.
And again, I am cool with that being the world we live in. I'm even much more friendly to many of those concepts than the average gamer, I just don't pretend Steam is not doing those things.
I don't hate Steam. But Steam's vision for what gaming looks like is not mine. I don't particularly like it and I absolutely need a viable alternative to exist alongisde them indefinitely.
I found my Riva TNT 1 in the attic the other day.
I am pretty sure I had a Riva 128 before that one, though.
Fortunately you go through this enough times and you just start to accept that yeah, you're pretty old. The constant joint pain helps.
That's a hilarious thought. Valve is primarily an online storefront company that runs organized sales events multiple times a year. Their marketing arm is ruthlessly efficient. They invented maybe half of the GaaS strategies in the books and are arguably still one of the best at deploying them.
And they do have at lest one more vector of PR. Normally you'd think third party relations is a different category, because it's a business-to-business thing, but when you get as big as Steam and have effectively removed or crowdsourced all greenlinghting and discovery you're in a different space. Like Unity, Valve has a small ninja army of dev relations guys they send around the world to events and gatherings to deliver the good word of our lord Valve and ensure that indie devs know what they're supposed to be doing to fit within their strategy. I assure you you haven't heard more refined PR-speak in your life.
But again, they're amazing at being quiet and keeping up that image of "just a buncha engineer underdogs in a room fixing the games industry, ya know?" I don't hate them, or even dislike them. I don't hate any game publisher. Games are games, it's an entertainment industry, it doesn't warrant love or hate of companies or corporations, beyond the larger questions of how copyright and IP work in an online world. But this idea that Valve is a magic wonderland with no agency on how their image is handled or moneymaking strategy or community management is... a lot.
I was there, I was an adult. I was mad and I was online enough to know I was not alone. In fairness, some of the being mad part was from people being locked out by login and server issues, which is a slightly different kind of mad.
But I personally did not play HL2 for a while because I was boycotting Steam. I remember so distinctly holding the box in my hand and going "hell no" at seeing the "Steam mandatory" sticker on it and putting it back.
You're technically right that I wasn't always online, though. It required you to go online to authorize it, as you say, but that was more than enough. I already had a standing veto on anybody attempting it.
I pirated HL2 when it came out entirely in protest of Steam. I don't know how long it took me to relent, because I don't have my Steam account on hand at the moment, but I think it was a couple of years at least. Honestly, to this day I still default to GOG, so I'm still a bit testy about it.
Oh, there's a ton to say about why Disney get a reputation for being a litigious nightmare but Nintendo gets more of a connection to beloved franchises in a lot of the gaming community, but that's precisely why they're a good counterexample to Steam when you're talking about branding associations.
Nobody is shilling? This entire post is called "Steam keeps on winning", sharing a link to an article about how other competitors are becoming less relevant. The shilling is gleeful at this point.
And hey, no, I don't claim that CDPR is "the holy grail". You want me to give them crap? I have multiple active grudges. Why is Galaxy so slow when fully packed? Why can't I cull games imported from integrations if they're not gonna bother to cache the DB and insist on auditing on load? Why is the browser in their launcher slower than opening their own store on Firefox? Will they ever stop with the surveys about the Discovery view? It's bad enough that you started inserting ads in the launcher, you don't need to pester me about it every time I open the thing.
I don't need GOG to be perfect to tell you Valve isn't your friend. GOG is, though, actually DRM free. Steam is not. They will let you upload a DRM free game if you want, but they don't recommend it, they actively want you to use Steamworks, and even when you do that, they recommend you add a second layer of DRM to your game.
That sucks.
They also overmonetize their games aggressively, insist on rather toxic MTX and aggressively crowdsource as many parts of their business as they can, just like any other tech startup.
And they have the most feature-rich launcher, great controller support and it's cool that they want to safeguard against Windows having a monopoly on PC gaming.
Neither of those big companies is my firend or yours and if they want either of us to sell their product they should pay us for it.