I have several friends who used to work at Valve none of them hate the place, they still have friends there, etc. But they tell similar stories as to why things that normal companies do successfully are impossible at Valve. Perhaps it’s best summed up by something one friend said about her year and a half at Valve: “I first learned who my boss was on the day she fired me.”
Google tried this, notoriously dense grating and then firing basically all the managers at an all-hands. That didn’t work out well at all... And now they have over-steered in the opposite direction!
You're saying that this organization doesn't lead to success, but because they accidentally have a successful money maker, now they can run like this?
I think there is disconnect here. There are successful companies that can operate like this, because this is a good way to get to success.
There's a timeline where startup Valve went through the standard publisher funding model instead and got pressured into releasing the "finished but not very fun" 1997 cut of Half Life, rather than taking an entire extra year (an eternity in game development cycles of that era) to overhaul the whole game at their leisure. Things could have gone very differently right from the start.
Add a bit of arrogance in the mix and you get devs thinking their managers are worthless and managers thinking their teams are useless.
The platform it runs on (Windows) is open, unlike the App Store. Competitors exist on said platform, including a store & game pass run by the platform owner.
The fact that Steam still runs the show is a testament to their ability to just do things better than anyone else. Sure, there is a sort of network effect at play, but there is no other “moat” here - let alone a monopolistic one.
Politics exist in any corporate structure. I'm not sure what's worse though, Valve's tribe-based politics or your traditional corporate game of thrones politics.
Steam is successful because it has good user experience compared to alternatives, and has a lot of major titles.
There is a strong sentiment with many gamers of just not wanting to use an alternative and it is basically a non starter for many other stores. Many complain about the very idea of not all of their games being in the same place.
This isn't necessarily anything monopolistic done on Valve's side. But it would be very hard for another store to make any meaningful impact regardless of how they are.
I’ve met countless gamers who will simply not buy or play a game if it isn’t available on Steam.
Myself included, and all of my gamer friends.
I'm genuinely curious to hear from people who have had what they consider effective management, what did the manager do to make your work better?
This reminds me of the classic essay "The Tyranny of Structurelessness"
There isn't a cost to having multiple stores, you don't even need to keep them running at all time. I get the concerns over the Epic app, but Heroic exists.
Personally I have games on Steam, Xbox (cross buy between xbox and PC), Epic, and EA. Plus Game Pass.
The only annoying part is when I go to install or buy a game, finding where I have it or making sure I don't already own it somewhere. But there are launchers like Playnite to address that.
But it does feel like I am in the minority with this opinion.
That said, the PC gaming landscape has completely warped around Steam. Epic had to offer huge incentives to get EGS exclusivity deals. Smaller games struggle without a Steam release, and even big companies with their own storefronts have decided the sales boost from Steam overrides the 30% cut Valve takes. And Steam is so entrenched at this point that it's difficult to see how a competitor could make a meaningful dent in Steam's market share.
Despite this, if we're going to have one dominant PC gaming storefront, Steam is probably the best we could hope for. Despite my many misgivings with Valve and Steam, it's difficult to imaging the situation improving if the dominant platform was run by a company like Microsoft or Epic. And it's fair to say that PC gaming wouldn't be nearly as big as it is today without the success of Steam.
Cross play solves this somewhat but it’s not consistent.
PC is my main platform but I also have an Xbox (NHL games not available on PC), everything else is on Steam.
I wouldn’t buy a PS5 for an exclusive. TBH exclusivity is annoying and I don’t want to reward it.
When did this happen? Sounds absurd. I’d love to read more if anyone has a postmortem or other sources.
I have not seen that referenced much so I am curious how many people that is the reason vs just some weird loyalty to Steam.
But, as someone who is mostly a couch gamer so my console of choice is Xbox. I can see that, I have a PS5 but all of my cross platform games is Xbox.
I have my PC for a lot of games that I would prefer that setup (for me its a game by game decision), but with game pass and cross buy it already didn't make sense for me to go all in on steam, but some games are only on steam.
So what was the harm in adding other stores when it made sense.
> I wouldn’t buy a PS5 for an exclusive. TBH exclusivity is annoying and I don’t want to reward it.
I don't want to reward it. But I also view myself as a gamer first before any platform loyalties. If I want to play something, that takes priority. So annoyingly I have both under my TV.
rant I am so annoyed at the people complaining about Xbox going Multiplatform as if it isn't a good thing for consumers to not have to buy nearly identical hardware. I don't care that it is how the industry has ran for so long, it's still anti-consumer. end rant
Xbox and Epic don't fall in that category. I don't believe EA does either, but not 100% sure.
To be clear here. I am referring to the being forced after buying a game. None of these, to my knowledge, you were forced to use after buying the game on Steam. Unlike Ubisoft.
But that's the issue. The competitors are fine. They aren't significantly better though. The only one with a compelling USP is GOG with their "no drm, download the installer, own the game even after we go under" pitch. Everyone else is just a steam clone with some exclusives and freebies. Without a compelling advantage network effect makes Steam the clear winner. It's where your other games are and it's where your friends are.
But that only holds true while Valve doesn't screw up. Their competitors can't be much better than Steam, but Steam could absolutely make horrible decisions that cause people to leave. But they don't. Their organizational inability to make decisive action without wider support has lead to an incredibly stable, predictable platform.
- Duplicate all the Steam shop features
- Integrate your social framework with Discord
- Add a proper overlay browser
- Make game ownership ephemeral until first play (meaning you can give away games in your library, or duplicate games in a bundle)
- Shim with Steam Input
- Better looking “Big Picture”-style mode
- Built-in game streaming, paid either with subscription or per-minute via wallet
There’s probably tonnes other that I’m forgetting. The above would take a ridiculous amount of dev hours though.
The big mistake Epic made (is making) is that their store is more beneficial for developers, mostly by taking a lower percentage. But those savings are barely passed on to the consumer, and even then, consumers don’t care about that. They’ll happily pay 10-20% more to have their game on the superior platform.
I don't buy people's excuses about them just exploiting a monopoly. Epic was gunning for them, Microsoft was gunning for them, all the big publishers tried to compete on PC game distribution, consoles try to take market share from PC, GoG and others exist. The failure of their competitors to unseat them doesn't mean Valve had it easy.
Google, on the other hand, is what you get when you try to optimize for employee happiness across the board. Their business has been successful (the monopoly argument seems more applicable in this case, at least in the last decade), but product quality is in the toilet and employee happiness ultimately couldn't be maintained in the face of bureaucracy and layoffs.
I really doubt that hurt their adoption. Yes, it pissed people off, but that doesn't mean it suppressed adoption. Being slow and clunky, sure, but you're probably not going to get anywhere without some high value exclusives.
I tolerate steam on my laptop because they were the first. I hate Epic and other launchers when I just want a game.
I will wait until it gets to steam. And have even skipped free games because I don’t want the mental load.
But it is interesting that we have 2 groups of gamers.
One that is so used to and accepting of a practice to not only sometimes buy 2 nearly identical boxes to play exclusive games but also complain when one of them does the right thing and is ending the practice (see drama about Xbox).
One that complains about installing another piece of software with no cost.
Why do these 2 groups of gamers have very different opinions on this.
Valve alone has made it possible to game full-time on Linux as a first class citizen and has greatly improved a lot of the Linux desktop experience which is more than enough for me to be willing to continue to only buy games from them.
Basically making it so no admin work comes to me and everything goes smoothly.
By "things" do you mean "build an even moderately successful PC game distribution platform"? Because no one else has managed to do that. Epic, EA, Xbox, Ubisoft, and a dozen others have tried, none of them reached 10% the popularity of Steam, and if they still exist today its because they have one keystone game keeping them alive.
Or, by "things" do they mean "make successful games"? Because Valve does that too; they produce games that have far more and longer success than most publishers. They've had failed projects, sure; its funny how when projects fail in hierarchically structured companies, as they do every day, we just put our hands up, retro it, and move on; but when they fail at Valve it has to be because they don't have managers, right?
Do your friends mean "be profitable"? Couldn't be that; Valve is tremendously profitable by any account. Highly productive? No... they're also that. Loved by customers? Strike three, Valve also checks that box.
I guess you could argue that "things" means "build twenty different directly competing messaging apps". Got me there, Google's army of managers did manage to do that when Valve couldn't.
It's true that a product shipped early is bad forever, but a product never shipped is certainly not a success by any metric either.
My suspicion is that the way the studio runs means that the stuff they eventually ship is high quality, but a lot of potential smash hits wither and die because of process dysfunction and staff attrition.
On the other hand, if you're a successful middleman taking 30% of everyone else's revenue, you don't really need to be good at making games anymore. You can leave that business if you want.
Yeah, probably a healthy mix. The achievement and stats consolidation is via word of mouth and conversation I have had over the years. I don’t have data to back that up. I’m sure the /r/pcmasterrace folk would have something to say about it though.
I totally agree with your rant. It’s ridiculous that folk want to complain about this.
[0] https://store.steampowered.com/charts/topselling/global - in top 100 games by revenue for 12 years
I actually also believe that Google Play and Apple App Store as marketplaces also provide "enough value" to potentially justify a fairly high price tag, but in their case it's not actually fair because the problem is that nobody else is even allowed to try to provide similar value at any cost. For example, both Google and Apple provide "free" push notification infrastructure, which is sort of necessary: if everyone was running push notification infrastructure, it would be pretty bad for battery life. However, the net effect is that you're being forced to price all of the value that they provide as platforms, into their marketplace, whether or not your app needs or wants their "value", and that's the problem. This doesn't quite compare to the situation with Steam, and I think that warrants more recognition.
Frankly, Steam sucked ass when it first came around. It was relentlessly mocked, and the only reason people tolerated it was because you needed it to play Half Life 2. But... they never stopped improving it. And frankly, even if this makes Valve a "worse" company from a position of investors and onlookers, it has made Valve a better company for consumers to be able to trust. It's pretty obvious that not every product or service Valve puts out is fantastic, but in the same token that things which are easy at "normal" companies are impossible at Valve, things that are impossible at normal companies appear to be possible at Valve.
I hate to romanticize it too much, but I'm not even a huge gamer, and I still feel like Valve has done very well by most of their consumers and developers. If anything, the biggest trouble they seem to have is deciding how exactly to moderate/censor the Steam store, given all of the different external pressures. Now that is a tough problem and they've had a tough time figuring it out.
The failures of other companies trying to emulate or capture that market do not a monopoly make. There is no real moat for Steam beyond customer loyalty and the fact that nearly every competitor sought to gain market through anti-consumer moves (exclusivity) rather than value-adds, and almost universally with shittier software to boot. There are a few notable counterexamples (GoG is a good store, value add, respectful of customers; but just didn't have the juice to establish itself beyond indie/abandonware games; Itch.io is doing fine in its niche).
Just because customers prefer a product does not mean it's got an unimpeachable moat.
That happened in 2001, and is arguably the reason Eric stepped up to take the reins from him.
People talk about feature parity, but that’s irrelevant when slashing Valves cut by 1% is enough to get the vast majority of publishers and developers to stay on board.
They are such an unimpeachable monopoly that Microsoft, makers of the OS that Steam predominantly relies on for consumer spend, also bows to them. After all they’re large enough to get a new cut from the normal distribution terms.
And the result is that users overwhelmingly prefer to use Steam, with alternatives largely relegated to at best grudging acceptance for those games that require alternative launchers. Since companies are reluctant to post numbers, it's hard to tell what the exact situation other than "Steam is well over 50% of the market", but the next largest is probably GoG, especially if you exclude self-publishing from statistics (if you include it, the popularity of Fortnite might push Epic Game Store into second place). And note that GoG is pretty much the only store that offers users a specific value proposition to use them over Steam: GoG is DRM-free (better publisher/distributor split is a value proposition for developers, not users).
You say that you've never seen anything get done faster or better as a result of something a manager did but you've probably had managers that were working preventing interference, saying no to last minute requirement changes, pushing back on deadline changes, etc.
As for Counterstrike 2; I'll believe anything you're rambling about actually matters when it spends just 24 hours outside of the top 5 most played games on Steam. Its #2 right now. Dota is #3. You're welcome to channel Trump and argue that they're cooking the books on their player-counts, but that's about the only argument you've got that has any chance of being right.
GOG's great but they're not big enough to move any needles.
Steam puts some of that 30% to work making wonderful things like the SteamDeck, and as a game dev I get a big audience and amazing things like free access to the Steam Datagram Network. So when I want to buy or sell a game, they're overwhelmingly my first choice.
Why do you think long time players of CS use FaceIt to play? That should immediately strike you as odd that the most dedicated demographic of the game is not even using Valve's servers. And do you really think people would still play at the rates they are if there were no skins?
>they're cooking the books on their player-counts
They are not, however some non-zero amount of the player base is bots farming free weapon case drops.[0][1] At one point these were making hundreds of thousands a week. No other game has this issue.
>that's about the only argument you've got that has any chance of being right.
Do you even play this game? It seems strange to make a claim about a game you have never played. Everyone who plays this game agrees that Valve has failed to make the game better and after almost a year people still agree that cs:go was better, although Valve deleted cs:go from steam so nobody can play it anymore.
[0] https://www.pcgamesn.com/counter-strike-2/csgo-case-drops
[1] https://www.dexerto.com/csgo/csgo-community-mocks-player-cou...