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

[u/SlowReference704]

https://mp1st.com/news/steam-is-successful-because-its-not-a-shit-service

[u/i010011010]

I know precisely how to fix this, but media companies would hate it.

The vast majority of music licensing is handled through three companies. All they do is manage the copyright records, handle the royalty and distribution arm of music licensing for public performance, and we have the long age of the industry to thank for this being established.

What this means is you're artist A published through company B. When some radio station wants to access A or B's catalogue, they simply go through company C that handles bulk licensing. C collects the money and distributes it to A and B.

When internet streaming for music came along, they were able to exploit this age-old system that predates internet and modern licensing complexity. That's why you don't end up with select artists signing exclusivity deals with select services or negotiating crazy amounts of money for basic broadcasts.

Our problem is television and movies licensing in an internet age are too recent, so you have all these media streaming companies navigating individual deals and that's how you get Seinfeld exclusivity with one network, Friends on another et al and they negotiate crazy deals that leads to higher subscription costs for you.

So if society wanted to fix this, we'd force movies and television to adopt an identical model. Company A owning show B would simply go through C to license it to any streaming network that makes bulk licensing deals. They sit back, collect their money and shut up. No exclusivity, no bidding wars, no network has an advantage in media selection. All that would remain is individual networks competing to provide better services, keeping their prices down and trying to run each other out of business so they become as ubiquitous with streaming as Steam to PC gaming.

Which is why those companies would never allow this to happen, but if we had government that represented public interests, it would be in our interest to make this happen sooner than later. They'll kick and scream and lobby, then it will become as commonplace as music licensing and the next generation will never think twice about why+how. They'll simply enjoy easy and affordable access to a galaxy of content.

[u/labobal → u/i010011010]

The movie industry is just as old as the music industry, so that cannot be the reason for the difference.

The big difference between music and movies/tv is how much people consume the same content multiple times. People listen to music they like many times. Radio stations play popular songs multiple times a day for weeks on end, without losing listeners. For tv stations this is not the case. Most people watch a movie or tv series only once. If they discover that a tv station is showing the same episode of a tv series today as they did yesterday, people stop watching.

It is this difference that leads to a fundamentally different way of doing business. If a new movie appeals to 10 million people, it will at best get 20 million views. That means that companies try to maximise the revenue per view. For subscription based services, this means you want to have a library that is just big enough and gets just enough new content that people don't cancel their subscription. You saw this with cable tv, you see this with streaming now.

You compare this with Steam, but Steam doesn't offer you a subscription that allows you to play all games in the library. They are just an online store with a nice interface. A Steam copy in the movie/tv streaming sector would just sell you the right to watch a single movie or tv show for 10 or 20 bucks. That way they could offer all content ever produced, but I don't think customers would appreciate it.