[Kolja]

I think it's pretty amazing that Valve managed to create something of this type (a store/launcher/software platform), targeted at an easily annoyed[citation needed] group of people (gamers), running for this long, that is mostly used by choice and not universally hated.

That's what happens if the buyer is also the user, I guess.

[MattRix]

The fact that they’re a private company helps a lot. There’s less incentive to extract money from customers in new ways that are lucrative in the short term but damaging in the long run.

I think their company structure also helps, where employees generally don’t work on things unless they actually want to. This means that you don’t end up with designers redesigning UIs that don’t actually need it, etc.

[everdrive]

I think about this a lot. I don't have _that_ much invested in Steam. (about 30 games) But if they ever go public, it's all over. I can't think of a public tech company that doesn't cannibalize its user base until it becomes unusable garbage. There's also the fact that Valve has done more for Linux gaming than anyone else. If Valve goes public, I'm probably done with PC gaming for the rest of my life.

[Kolja]

You are right, Valve being private removes a lot of the incentives to mess with Steam in ways I would consider negative.

[pixl97]

Eventually the people that run it now will age and die, and one day the vampires will move in to suck its corpse dry. May not be our problem but will be someone's problem.

[xeonmc]

    Eventually the people that run it now will age and die, 
    and one day the vampires will move in to suck its corpse dry.
    May not be our problem but will be someone's problem.

There's gotta be a fourth verse here that completes it.

[jareklupinski]

  Anyway, thanks, Past. Signed, The Present...

  P.S. Maybe The Future can stop them?

[yencabulator]

I offer the classic "This too shall pass."

[meristohm]

Why put off today what can be done to stop them?

[treyd]

It's possible that the company could be converted into a worker cooperative, which wouldn't be much of a stretch given their current (largely hierarchyless) company structure. There is no reason it wouldn't work.

[oliwarner]

They're a storefront that charges ~30% and they're pretty dominant in their market.

They make enough money —they're practically printing it— to never need investment, and they don't seem to piss it away like your FAANGs.

Which is all to say, even down the line, why would they risk it all for more money? Might seem naive but private ownership allows them to maintain this course.

[DanielHB]

I wonder how much money they have in the bank compared to Nintendo.

Main problem of being too successful is that you can't let money sit in the bank, especially if you are a public company.

[TapWaterBandit]

On the one hand it will be sad if Steam declines as it is overall a fantastic service for gamers. On the other, they definitely occupy a close-to-monopoly like position in the market so it might be good to have that opened up.

[hiatus]

> they definitely occupy a close-to-monopoly

I think this has changed, at least in my view recently. I find a lot more of my time spent on games in Xbox Gamepass than on Steam these days and have a bunch more launchers as publishers have pushed games to their own platforms.

[mhh__]

They also mostly tend to do things when the time is right rather than when they think other people think the time is right — they can be quite conservative both in tech and game design but that also means they don't ship broken crap too often which is surprisingly rare in the industry.

[Zetobal]

Artifact, Steam machines, Steam Link... they have a lot of misses with relatively low quantity output.

[hiccuphippo]

Steam controller. I waited for them to release a v2 with embedded battery and better build quality and it never came. I guess the Steamdeck benefitted from it, but I'd still like it as a controller.

[yencabulator]

Oh, very much so. Because of vision issues, I need to plug my Steam Deck into a monitor to play comfortably, but the USB-C connection isn't reliable enough while actually using the Deck as a controller. I need an external controller for my deck, but one that's as good as the Deck (non-negotiable requirements: gyro, back buttons). I wish I could just order a Steam Controller v2 (with two sticks, just like on the Deck).

[Arrath]

I love my steam controller to this day.

[baq]

Artifact… yeah.

Steam machines… yeah, maybe but no, not really? The first iteration yes, but the steam deck is a very successful handheld steam machine after all.

[MrGilbert]

I remember that, in the beginning, there were some concerns:

- "I need to download a lot of data, I want discs!"

- "I will be forever bound to Valve. What if they go out of business?"

I think the first point got kind of obsolete, because broadband is readily available compared to 20 years ago. And the latter also lost importance, I guess? At least I don't read that any longer.

[birracerveza]

>And the latter also lost importance, I guess?

It's still a very valid complaint, and will forever be as long as you're tied to Steam's server being up and willing to give you the content you paid for. That may not always be the case, for example if financial embargos prevent Valve from actually providing the service in your country. It's more like you're paying Steam to use their service rather than actually buying the game. Right now people are not worried about Steam exit scamming and thanking us for all the fish, because it's a very solid service that basically has a monopoly on PC digital game sales, plus the Steam Market being a money making machine on its own, plus the Steam Deck providing further leverage on game sales.

But there's a nonzero chance they can just ... close. Which was a very real possibility when they launched. Now, not so much, but the future has always new and exciting ways to fuck it all up at a moment's notice.

[Brybry]

My concern is mainly what will happen after Gabe Newell retires or dies.

[baq]

From the precious little that has been heard about what he’s doing nowadays he’s been quite checked out already for some time.

[NikolaNovak]

That's where GoG is still an important alternative... Even though for whatever reason, I don't enjoy its launcher as much. And steam deck has completely changed my weighing between GoG and steam :-(

[NamTaf]

Lutris really helps in that regard. For very minor additional janitoring, it can recreate much of the same plug-and-play, Windows-on-Linux seamlessness that you get with Steam.

[everdrive]

And there's no launcher for Linux :(

[johnnyanmac]

> And the latter also lost importance, I guess? At least I don't read that any longer.

People got comfortable, and that comfortability is great. Until it isn't, and then it's a travesty. Then it all repeats again and people never learn not to put all their eggs in one basket.

That's just the result of the flow of time. I remember a little over a decade ago when Blizzard was considered one of the best companies out there and that they always delivered quality titles. Stuff changes (and also, sometimes people can be very fickle).

[bodge5000]

> "I will be forever bound to Valve. What if they go out of business?"

Not that this isn't a valid concern, it certainly is, but I guess what we've learnt is that you don't need to be bound to Valve for games to be bound to a big corporation.

Look at Minecraft, which was never on Steam. You could've brought that a decade ago, and now you're told you need to bind yourself to Microsoft to continue playing it.

[KallDrexx]

The concerns weren't completely unfounded. My college apartment's internet was so bad I had to return HL2 to the store because it wouldn't decrypt it (the network was swampped with college gnutella traffic and the apartment complex had no idea how to handle it).

[goalieca]

Steam shipped a version of counterstrike that glitched a lot less in windows whereas the cd version I got from ATI with my graphics card didn’t even work reliably. That was the gateway game for me.

[fomine3]

Even if Valve is alive, there are other risks. Some game may be deleted in the future due to cancelling. Your account is banned for some reason.

[Kolja]

I remember having those concerns. And Steam performance did take a few months to solidify if I remember correctly, so not everything was unfounded. Before it, only MMOs had login screens separating gamers from gaming ;-)

Nowadays, the only problems I have with Steam stem from my credit card's security mechanisms.

[hiccuphippo]

I do wonder what happens to my library once I die. Can my family inherit it? Is it gone? Is it against the ToS to give my user to my children?

[DharmaPolice]

Their biggest achievement was getting other companies to sell through their store. This allowed gamers to build up their back catalogue on Steam. Their launcher has all the problems as the other ones but they're forgiven because most of us have large collections within Steam now. Even when the same game is on sale via Epic for a slightly lower price I'll usually get it on Steam because that's where most of my other games are. It is a choice, but a warped one.

It's kind of like Netflix vs other streaming platforms except Steam has a much better moat.

[kaesar14]

Really no major complaints, it's an amazing platform and always has been. Imagine if we'd been stuck with a solution made by Microsoft or something.

[infinitezest]

Big fan of Steam here but I wouldn't say it was _always_ amazing. In the beginning, it was a friends network that was almost always down and a launcher for games I already owned and played without a launcher for years. I hated it for a long time but it is a great platform right now.

[DanielHB]

Steam was universally hated when it launched, even more than other launchers are hated today (uplay)

The perception changed when Steam started allowing 3rd party games and had cheaper prices (through blink-and-you-miss it discounts of course, so they can still milk launch-day hype) than boxed copies and the indie explosion that digital distribution allowed

[yjftsjthsd-h]

> targeted at an easily annoyed[citation needed] group of people (gamers)

It helps that everything else is so much more annoying.

[johnnyanmac]

>that is mostly used by choice

Ehh, people use IOS by choice too. An "ethical" walled garden is still just that, walled.

GOG and itch are great platforms as well, so I think people can sometimes miss the trees for the forest and remember the bad experiences.

[hospitalJail]

Stop using the phrase 'walled garden'. Its marketing jargon that promotes anti-consumer behavior while promoting ideas of delicious fruits and beautiful flowers.

[johnnyanmac]

>Its marketing jargon that promotes anti-consumer behavior

If consumers choose to stay in it, then that's their choice, no? I see it just as much as a scathing commentary as it is a flowery euphemism. No different from "golden handcuffs".

Regardless, I'm not too interested in going into a rabbit hole of word games. If "closed off software ecosystem storing 3rd party products you purchased" is a preferable terminology, feel free to substitute that phrase in.

>while promoting ideas of delicious fruits and beautiful flowers.

Sounds like a good things to promote.