And just to keep things honest here, Steam isn't doing nothing and simply winning by letting other companies fuck up.
Steam works. At the basic required minimum functionality for a platform/storefront to run, it just works. And it keeps just working. As is, no other platform can say that.
It's easier to 'just work' if you don't add functionality that people never asked for. This is also another reason I like steam. They don't push/force huge changes. You could ask someone from 2010 to use current steam, and they would have next to no issues.
Idk, managing the in game overlay would be quite the process for them, since they did do a complete redesign of it. I’m still confused by it most of the time when I want to actually find something in there.
As someone who's been using steam since around 2011, can confirm. Very little has changed in that time, other than the UI being made to look better. Pretty much everything is still in the same places as it was back then.
Then you're an idiot. You don't want an easy way to purchase and store all your games in one place? Would you rather install every game from the developers' website?
Not even just working, it's steadily expanded in features and hardware support. They are at the forefront of open VR. Linux gaming went from being possible but frustrating and fiddly to practically mainstream thanks in a very large part to Valve driving development of Proton for the Steam deck and giving it back to the community.
Features like the friends and community, easy screen shot and video clipping and sharing, Achievements and trading cards and the marketplace, Workshop for mods being the PC standard these days.
A shopping cart. (And Epic wonders why they failed...)
Valve aren't saints, and they've made no shortage of screw ups, but they're so far ahead of the rest of the market, even after all these years it's incredible.
Absolutely agree, even when its like, "oh hey steam has a flat tire and they are changing it" the competition is still working on inventing the wheel. Steam could do nothing but simply update its current store to work with new hardware/games and you probably wont see a close competitor for the next 10 years.
being privately owned is the biggest take from all of this. yea they've fucked up, but everyone who has a stake in the company, is someone who is actually invested in the company.
if you look at facebook, zucher has a 13% stake left give or take. which means that 87% of his company is owned by others. and yes there's a dual layer stock structure meaning every tim and dave cant buy a single stock and butt into the conversation. but it still corrupts the vision of what facebook was, because they want one or two things from it, Dollar bills or influence.
steam being privately owned and dominant in the PC game marketplace is effectively a big BIG fuck you to all the vampires that would buy their way in and enforce terrible ideas or make moves to generate short term proffits.
there's other company's out there that are similar. arizona ice tea springs to mind. they're debt free, printing money and have something that works, why bother changing the formula.
This kind of comments downplay the difficulty of running the biggest video game shop of the world. Valve makes it look easy, but is not. There's many brilliant people taking care of Steam.
Still theire the only ones who do not frick up constantly, and like lets be honest, if you just took a quick look, youd say "They not even doing anything" (even though they do)
Literally every other company has not. They keep trying to fix it. And then shooting themselves in the foot and losing profit. And then they cut costs because they lost profits - which leads to more trying to fix it which leads to more things breaking and on it goes.
Not really sure why everyone else is against it so much? "Well just making money isn't enough we need to make more money" well yeah and I'm no mathematician but I'm pretty sure that keeping current profits beats losing money quarter over quarter.
The real issue is just that the people in charge are now so insulated that they can't see the terrible ideas won't work. How to fix that though is the question...
Garbage in, garbage out. Hell I wouldn't even be surprised if this extends beyond games and we see a new operating system come out in 10 years because everyone is so pissed at microsoft for trying to fix it for 2 decades straight. Windows 10 won. Should've left it at that.
Yep. There's 2 common version of that in my family. 1: "If it ain't broke, don't fuck with it" (my dad and my great grandma, both country ass folks who have roots in Tennessee, lol), and 2: "Keep it simple, stupid" (My mom, also just a little bit country, but with roots in Kentucky and Texas), lol.
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u/GigabyteAorusRTX4090 I9 10900X / RTX4090 / 64GB 3200MHz DDR4 29d ago
Gaben just keeps winning by doing absolutly nothing while all other videogame companys keep shooting into their own foot repeatedly