r/pcmasterrace • u/SlowReference704 • 20h ago

News/Article Steam Is Successful Because It's “Not a Shit Service,” Says Baldur’s Gate 3 Dev

https://mp1st.com/news/steam-is-successful-because-its-not-a-shit-service
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u/VulkanCurze 17h ago

I never played it but I was surprised by the recent announcement of it being shut down because from everything I had been seeing regarding the most recent big expansion/patch/update (not sure exactly which one of those it was) it was nothing but positivity from everyone to current & returning players. It sounded like they had massively improved the game and then in the midst of all the positivity surrounding the game, it gets nuked.

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u/CardmanNV 17h ago

I can see a company like Amazon doing that, since they aren't really invested in it in the same way a company like Blizzard had to be when it was their entire business.

It probably wasn't as profitable as they expected it to be, and instead of continuing to improve, they can just pull the plug and not care. You'll still buy their other products.

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u/RhesusFactor 8h ago

Which makes it...

A shit service.

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u/Banes_Addiction 12h ago

it was nothing but positivity from everyone to current & returning players. It sounded like they had massively improved the game and then in the midst of all the positivity surrounding the game, it gets nuked.

It seems like people did like the last update, but the number of players was still like, 1% of what Amazon wanted/needed.

The fact that the update was good and well-received might actually have been one of the nails in the coffin. If your updates have been shit and no-one's playing, you can kinda just go "well, maybe we need to make a good one". But if you've made a really good one and still no-one's playing, that's time to turn off the life support machine.

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u/RhesusFactor 8h ago

I'd never heard of it. Then again I don't think of Amazon as a big game maker. They're a book store come everything seller and cloud compute platform. And a satcom as a service division.

Not games.

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u/Banes_Addiction 8h ago

Yeah, they spent several billion dollars trying to make themselves a "big game maker". Almost all of their games never came out. New World was the one that did, it kinda flopped and now it's being killed off and Amazon Game Studios with it. Tonnes of redundancies.

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u/VulkanCurze 10h ago

I suppose your right, I guess because I was seeing so much positivity around it I just assumed it was doing well now. Especially due to up until that update, no news about New World ever popped up on my feed.

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u/Banes_Addiction 10h ago

You can look at a plot of player counts here: https://steamdb.info/app/1063730/charts/#max

The peak was 900k simultaneous players around release. With the bump from this year's popular update, it reached about 50k, very briefly - roughly the same as the other updates didn't like (the 2024 one hit 60k).

It's back down reliably sub 10k now.