Steamed: The case for or against a dominant digital store

If steam ever stops working and my 250 games that I bought there with it, I will just shrug and type www.piratebay.org into my browser and download whatever game I want to play of those I already bought.
At present, I launch all my games through steam, whether bought on gog, retail, gmg, steam, origin, anywhere. It is just a really cool platform with good features. And Valve is an awesome company. Valve and CDP are two companies that I do not mind supporting by buying games from them at all, on the contrary.

I don't own any Steam games that I would be all that sad to lose if Steam went belly up. The only game I can even think of that I would tend to want to "repurchase" (screw you modern concept of digital item ownership!) is Skyrim and I actually bought that in the store. It seems at least plausible that if Steam literally went out of business (not likely at this rate!) that some of the publishers with Steam activated games would find a way to allow you to activate them on some other DD platform.

But sadly game software is just not something you can own in the same way you own a toaster (screw you modern concept of digital item ownership!) because while the underlying software can't "break" like a toaster can break, your ability to use it can "break."

For instance I have original box copies of KQ 2, 3, IV, and V. Can I play them? No. I don't have a PC that has a 5.25" floppy anymore and half of the original media for those games just gradually became unreadable. I keep them on my shelf because they remind me of my youth. And I also bought the re-release boxes of the KQ series when they came out because I figured I'd load them up for nostalgia. I did and I played them for 10 minutes and laughed and quit because they were so terrible.

Video games have proven to be much more ephemeral than I would have guessed when I was a kid.

I would argue strongly that Sherlock Holmes stories and Jane Austen novels are just as relevant as they were when written and I think we can all agree that a physical copy of them may last for many years. I have a 100 year old Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea that's still readable (but worthless incidentally. Damn you modern concept of widely printed classic value!)

But King's Quest III is really hard to play today because the medium (the typical PC of that time) was so limited in what it could do. So owning a game on a DD platform is really no different than owning it in physical form has ever been.


Turning to the question of Steam as monopoly/dominant player I'd have to say that I'm also not worried. Steam provides four or five major benefits that I can name offhand and I only take advantage of a few of them:

1) Friends/multiplayer - don't care. I don't play MP games.
2) Store - great but unremarkable. Amazon frequently has better prices nowadays though poorer presentation
3) Auto updating - best of breed AFAIK
4) Catalog - very good and includes lots of indie games...better than Amazon.
5) Steam Wallet - good stuff. I've enjoyed the GameStop -> Steam trade in thing but I don't expect it to last.

I really expect that Amazon is going to catch up to Steam and eclipse it within the next year or three. I half expect Amazon to buy Steam for half of a small country's GDP at some point.

There are a lot of things I really really like about what Steam has done and I'm extremely glad they did it because DD is mounds better than Physical Distribution for software in almost every case these days.

Yea that kind of sums up how I feel.

As others have noted, I feel more and more like I'm renting my entertainment. Unlike others, though, I'm not that bothered by it. It's not like I can play my betamax or vhs movies anymore, and nor would I want to. Screw tape decks and 8-tracks. Even if steam only kept my games for me for another decade, I would have successfully rented them for a lot longer than I "owned" most of the entertainment I've bought in my life.And it isn't like I'm dying to pass down these games to my children.

Ultimately, I'm renting all my entertainment until I die. Steam actually looks like the most successful attempt at this so far.

Because history shows it is very easy for the hero of one age to become the villain of the next. Steam going from PC gaming saviour to PC gaming prison warden probably wouldn't be Valve's intention, but they could easily make a decision or two that sees things turn around. There was a time when gamers loved EA as well.

Steam is rapidly becoming the de facto market for PC gaming, where if you can't list your title you may as well forget about earning a decent income from your game. Even now the idea that your unfinished indie title has been Greelighted by Valve adds a layer of legitimacy to your game. Lots of players only want to go to one place and Steam is it right now.

There's been the recent news of Newell's intentions to dump Greenlight, let people upload what they want and offer players the ability to create their own store fronts. To increase the amount of "democracy" available on Steam. Is that a good move? I don't know, but wherever Valve chooses to go with Steam, the PC gaming market is pretty locked into following.

Lower prices might mean more sales, but it's not automatic. If you drop your price, you'd hope to increase sales and increase your profits that way, but if everyone else is forced to drop prices as well, there may be no net profit benefit to individual sellers.

I would agree with this if it hasn't been for several titles so far that have gained economic success entirely without Steam, mostly of the payed alpha/beta variety. Of course, they're also trying to get into Steam, but they gained legitimacy without it. As many games as there are that owe their success to getting visibility on Steam, there are plenty that did so without it. Valve's decision to make it so easy to allow purchased games to be added to Steam's catalog when the game goes up is a pretty big win for indie makers everywhere who can promise that their game can be added to Steam once it's accepted.

I also don't think something like Desura would be as successful as it is without Steam. It offers a lite way of offering an indie game with secure payments and troublefree updating, while also borrowing some of Steam's conveniences like CD key registration.

They didn't start hating EA until it was warranted, hence the question regarding Steam. Anyone who complains about EA will be met with at worst tacit agreement. Complaining about Steam is met with confused looks a lot of the time.

I dunno if that's entirely true vis a vis "one place to go." Amazon, the other platforms, I think there is plenty of market share there (as much as 50% according to some sources). Also, being PC-only amid a field of console options helps keep them honest, IMO. Big Picture clearly shows they are concerned about people jumping ship to console gaming.

According to that other dude it is, but I am in the skeptical boat.

If they move sufficient numbers it's all good, according to several indie developers (the creators of Terraria come to mind).

In reference to the other thread - GFWL breaks games. It broke Fallout 3 completely, rendering it unusable due to random crashes until I found a mod which removed it from the game. More recently, it absolutely refused to load Dark Souls unless I manually changed a command line network parameter every time I wanted to play the damn game. To compare it favourably to Steam boggles the mind. Say what you want about Steam and Valve's plans for world domination, they don't break games like Games for Windows Live. Whoever created that abomination should be punched in the head for each game it infected.

I really, really like GOG, but Steam has made bargain bin gaming possible on a level it never was when I was a kid. Teenage me would be sick with envy at the cool stuff that present day me can get cheaply, and even though I dislike DRM, so far Steam has been about a thousand times more reliable and accommodating than iTunes, which keeps breaking and wiping out music. I've never lost a purchase to Steam, but I've definitely lost stuff to Apple.

And I don't think they'll drive the other services out of the market unless they get openly predatory, which I don't think they have the clout for yet. Can they really stop people from using Amazon? Could anyone?

...apparently, I love Big Brother. Oh, well.

Perhaps, Valve planted its spore sacs in your brain organ and let its tendrils spread through your flesh so you would truly understand and become part of Steam. You do seem happier and more fulfilled.

I just went through my first real experience with Origin. Where it took me 3 separate attempts to actually buy the game I was interested in (DeadSpace 3), and then once I was able to finally buy it, Origin failed to finalize the sale and send me the code for the online component. I had to deal with the absolutely awful EA customer support just to get the reference code that should have been sent to me when I bought the game. Interestingly, Origin still doesn't show that I ever bought/ordered the game. It's in my game library, just not my order history.

If Steam puts crappy service like this out of business, I have no issues with that. I get the theoretical robber baron concern, but at this point, Steam just works better. It deserves to own the market.

Happier.

Fitter.

More productive.

On Steam, the DLC for Unity of Command only works for the Steam version of Unity of Command, which I don't have because it wasn't on Steam at the time. I think this is true of most (all?) games that don't activate on Steam. I'm loving Steam a lot less at the moment. The DRM feels a bit draconian.

http://redeem.unityofcommand.net/redeem.php

May help you. Typically if something was not on Steam, then is available on Steam and has DLC that doesn't work on either, Steam makes available a way to create Steam keys to convert your copy of the game. That page is supposed to take your key from *anywhere* and hand you a steam key.

It's a bit wonky, but seemingly common due to how steam keys work. In some expansions (GSB, AI War) I recall being able to use DLC keys bought from the developer right in the steam application, but I'm unsure why they could do that fine and everyone else has issues. Probably something to do with the keys just unlocking content, but the base game downloading it all already?

edit: that link apparently only works if you bought from unityofcommand.net or matrixgames. If you used Gamersgate, the key won't work which is pretty ass.

With something like AI War you simply buy a key from Steam rather than the content, which is why the DLC works regardless of where you buy it. The content is always in the game, it just needs to be unlocked.

At which point I will buy it for $3 and wear the hell out of it. See? Steam sucks.

Thanks, but guess where I bought it!

DLC is kind of thorny on the technical side since the way it integrates with the main game depends on how the main game was distributed and installed and handles its own DLC to begin with, so it's simply easiest to have DLC on Steam only work with games also bought on Steam. The cases where it works best is when the DLC is its own self-contained zip or exe installer, but Steam just doesn't work that way. Valve would have to go out of their way to have DLC distributed in a way that would work with a game bought on some other service, and there's little incentive for them to do so.

It is definitely annoying when you see a game go on sale on Steam with a bunch of DLC included, and you're hesitant because you want the DLC but already have the base game from somewhere else, though.