alt Hacker NewsI'd like to have an honest conversation about this, but imo Valve is no better than the iOS app store: it aggressively rent seeks and has essentially destroyed the shareware model (which was the best way to discover software in the 80s-90s). It has also willingly been complicit in underage gambling via loot boxes for more than a decade now.
I think Gabe Newell is a visionary for building Steam in 2003, way before Jobs had the same idea, but absolutely everyone and their mother hated Steam back then. I remember the memes on IRC and various forums (and I've been on Steam for a very[1] long time, the first or second day it came out I think). Two decades later, props to them and their useful acolytes for gaslighting the entire gaming community. No idea how Gaben is regarded as some sort of Christlike figure these days, but here we are.
Maybe it's just a "lesser of two evils" thing, as companies/platforms like EA and Ubisoft are the absolute scum of the earth.
Replies
"has essentially destroyed the shareware model (which was the best way to discover software in the 80s-90s)"
funny, I was thinking the same thing with "shareware model" replaced by "warez model".
Shareware died before Steam. Steam launched in 2003 and didn't sell any 3rd party games until 2005. Nobody gave a shit about shareware in 2003. Nobody gave a shit about shareware in 2010 when Steam seriously became useful as a place to play more than the Orange Box and Counter-Strike.
I hated Steam when I first encountered it, but it's not a requirement to publish a game on PC/Mac/Linux. Nor is the process to install non-Steam games full of scary warnings like Google Play even on their own platform SteamOS. And they do let publishers give keys to 3rd party stores to sell unlike virtually every other platform. They aren't perfect but they are nowhere near what Apple does with iOS.
> imo Valve is no better than the iOS app store
You can't buy the top search result position on Steam. That alone sets them far apart for me.
If you think they aggressively rent seek then you do not know the history of game publishing.
"destroyed the shareware model". You know that they only sell games, and just have the games that they made in the list too(them just being amazing and popular). It's not some easy task as recovering old systems when there are every type of games imaginable. Even if valve made a option to do that, no one will since other companies don't do anything like that.
As someone who worked in game dev in 2008, we loved Steam, for the same reason we loved the iOS App Store. We take it for granted these days but the ability to self-publish on a first class platform and receive 70% of the sales revenue literally redefined the indie game dev industry.
Use of the term ‘rent seeking’ is, in my experience, often correlated with a sense of entitlement and a lack of appreciation for what is actually provided. It’s only rent seeking if no additional value is added which is clearly not the case here.
Steam is just a storefront. They hold no monopoly position or power. It's not comparable to iOS app store. Devs are free to list their game on any other storefront concurrently.
> it aggressively rent seeks
I don't know about the rest of your claims ("shareware was the best way to discover software" is really a personal opinion), but this is just factually false.
Unlike iOS, where you cannot publish an app unless you pay the 30% cut, there is nothing that prevents you from developing and a Windows/MacOS/Linux game yourself. You can simply choose to not use Steam - but the benefits of developing and publishing with it (myriad SDKs, game servers, networking, social features, trading cards, anti-cheat, achievements, payment methods, reviews, discovery, forums, launchers, updates, CDN, and on and on and on...) are so overwhelming that it is simply worth it for the vast majority of gamedevs.
Fact: Steam is not rent-seeking - the value that they provide is tremendous, and you are not forced to use them, which makes them non-rent-seeking by definition.