I mean, most people would say free games are pretty consumer-friendly, but whatever, these goalposts have been moving for ages.
Steam was threatening game devs with pulling them from the store if they undercut Steam prices just last year (see above). They restated that you don’t own your games and that you can’t transfer them to anybody on your death just last year. They rolled out additional revenue share improvements for big publishers in 2018, keeping the worse conditions for smaller games. I personally saw a Steam rep tell a roomful of indie devs that they should be translating their games to Chinese out of pocket or risk not getting as prominent store positioning well within this decade. Steam also keeps selling loot boxes today, which I’ve always been less concerned about, but most people seem to think is a bad thing. That’s extra funny in this context because Epic specifically was shamed into removing them from their games a while ago and severely punished for what was seen as selling those to kids just as Steam was keeping that whole thing in place for CS2. Like I said, would kill for the MiB ray Gaben invented.
Look, I’m not here to say that Valve is a dark empire bent on world domination, but they are a money-printing machine privately owned by a billionaire that sure would like to keep growing his yatch collection. I think Valve has been more successful than anybody else at making their platform software and a lot of their money comes from cutting cost via automation and squeezing captive devs while focusing hard on their user-facing feature set. On the big picture, though (no pun intended) I don’t see that much air between them and any other large publisher or first party platform holder.
I mean, most people would say free games are pretty consumer-friendly, but whatever, these goalposts have been moving for ages.
Steam was threatening game devs with pulling them from the store if they undercut Steam prices just last year (see above). They restated that you don’t own your games and that you can’t transfer them to anybody on your death just last year. They rolled out additional revenue share improvements for big publishers in 2018, keeping the worse conditions for smaller games. I personally saw a Steam rep tell a roomful of indie devs that they should be translating their games to Chinese out of pocket or risk not getting as prominent store positioning well within this decade. Steam also keeps selling loot boxes today, which I’ve always been less concerned about, but most people seem to think is a bad thing. That’s extra funny in this context because Epic specifically was shamed into removing them from their games a while ago and severely punished for what was seen as selling those to kids just as Steam was keeping that whole thing in place for CS2. Like I said, would kill for the MiB ray Gaben invented.
Look, I’m not here to say that Valve is a dark empire bent on world domination, but they are a money-printing machine privately owned by a billionaire that sure would like to keep growing his yatch collection. I think Valve has been more successful than anybody else at making their platform software and a lot of their money comes from cutting cost via automation and squeezing captive devs while focusing hard on their user-facing feature set. On the big picture, though (no pun intended) I don’t see that much air between them and any other large publisher or first party platform holder.