[reitzensteinm]

I've sold 7 figures worth of game copies over my career, through Steam, the App store and my websites in roughly equal quantities.

This completely misses the value proposition of Steam. Collecting a million dollars of game sales through Stripe or PayPal is not hard, nor is dealing with payment issues a large overhead, even if you're paying the people replying to the emails programmer salaries.

Supporting the game itself is an order of magnitude greater even if it's decently written. Steam doesn't prevent that support, it just obfuscates the customer's connection to you so if you don't care you can mostly get away with ignoring them (at your peril, as it will invite bad reviews).

Steam puts you in touch with an immense audience. That's the value they're bringing to the table, and it's a big one.

[baroffoos]

Essentially steam has created an almost walled garden. You already have all of your games on the steam client so if a game is sold on another store its inconvenient. Another part is steam has a lot of eyes looking at their store. Everyone checks steam for new games so if you are not on that store then people wont see you.

Its an unfortunate system because steam isn't actually providing that much value but they have just managed to centralize everything on their platform.

[nostalgiac]

> Its an unfortunate system because steam isn't actually providing that much value

I have to heavily disagree with that.

Other than as you mentioned, the huge amount of eyeballs on all of their library content which you just won't get anywhere near close to. Along with people already having credit on their steam account so they can instantly buy a product without entering payment info.

There's also the distribution and update mechanisms which are such a huge win for the customer as well as developers.

I can also guarantee you, if Steam didn't exist, there would be other 'central store/repo's' that would absolutely be trying to enter this space. Providing an easy location for gamers looking to find new content. It's a win/win/win for all of Valve, Developers & Customers.

[baroffoos]

>Other than as you mentioned, the huge amount of eyeballs on all of their library content which you just won't get anywhere near close to.

We should have had search engines like google for games.

> Along with people already having credit on their steam account so they can instantly buy a product without entering payment info.

Browsers these days have a payment API and stores the users credit card details which can be used on any website.

>There's also the distribution and update mechanisms which are such a huge win for the customer as well as developers.

This could have been done without centralization similar to how package managers work, the games repo would just be added to your client and downloaded from that.

So I guess I could put it yes valve has added value from what there was before but its totally possible to replicate all the value easily without centralization.