The Valve and Steam Platform Discussion Thread

[mk0]

Does it though?

Note that even before steam added the review nagging feature in 2019, the ratio had still been decreasing.

In my mind, there are two possibilities to explain why the difference in the ratio has decreased:

1. Users have started to take more initiative in leaving reviews.
2. Steam reviews hold less sway over users than they used to.

One demands more effort than the other, so #2 sounds more plausible.

I would also assume that users who are early adopters are more active in leaving reviews than other users. If you look at the data from this perspective, then the data says that the indie market has become more niche over time. If demand was larger than supply, then you would see more users who would otherwise be late adopters taking risks in trying lesser known games and the difference in the ratio would increase to show that.

 

[DalekFlay]

I really dislike it when people claim that Valve saved PC gaming. Its like saying that Amazon saved reading. I couldn't care less if PC gaming is a profitable business, which is the only thing that Valve "saved". I found pc gaming much more enjoyable when there was a handful of releases a year made by enthusiasts.

PC gaming in the early Xbox 360 era before Steam was mostly utter trash. Cheap and fast ports of games made for consoles for the most part, along with shittier and shittier DRM schemes. Steam making PC more profitable again not only led to better ports of multiplatform games, but a shit ton of indie PC focused games, and mostly less annoying DRM. Your post is literally retarded.

 

[Silly Germans]

I really dislike it when people claim that Valve saved PC gaming. Its like saying that Amazon saved reading. I couldn't care less if PC gaming is a profitable business, which is the only thing that Valve "saved". I found pc gaming much more enjoyable when there was a handful of releases a year made by enthusiasts.

PC gaming in the early Xbox 360 era before Steam was mostly utter trash. Cheap and fast ports of games made for consoles for the most part, along with shittier and shittier DRM schemes. Steam making PC more profitable again not only led to better ports of multiplatform games, but a shit ton of indie PC focused games, and mostly less annoying DRM. Your post is literally retarded.

The Xbox 360 came after Steam, so what is "PC gaming in the early Xbox 360 era before Steam" even supposed to be ? I'll assume that you mean something around the years around 2001-2005. All those years have good PC games and the shitty ports existed alongside Steam for a long time. How is Steam the reason for improved ports ? You attribute a ton of things to Steam without any explanation. I don't share this very one-sided, overly positive point of view about the effects of Steam on pc gaming.

 

[BlackAdderBG]

PC gaming in the early Xbox 360 era before Steam was mostly utter trash. Cheap and fast ports of games made for consoles for the most part, along with shittier and shittier DRM schemes.

How is that different from now?

All the pc gaming is dead shit never included MMOs or free to play games. They were another category "online gaming". Even in that time PC gaming was way more profitable that all consoles combined.

 

[DalekFlay]

The Xbox 360 came after Steam, so what is "PC gaming in the early Xbox 360 era before Steam" even supposed to be ? I'll assume that you mean something around the years around 2001-2005. All those years have good PC games and the shitty ports existed alongside Steam for a long time. How is Steam the reason for improved ports ? You attribute a ton of things to Steam without any explanation. I don't share this very one-sided, overly positive point of view about the effects of Steam on pc gaming.

Steam didn't become the Steam we know overnight, it was a good bit into the 360 era before it got an influx of AAA games from other companies and introduced Steamworks features.

 

[Cross]

The Xbox 360 came after Steam, so what is "PC gaming in the early Xbox 360 era before Steam" even supposed to be ? I'll assume that you mean something around the years around 2001-2005. All those years have good PC games and the shitty ports existed alongside Steam for a long time. How is Steam the reason for improved ports ? You attribute a ton of things to Steam without any explanation. I don't share this very one-sided, overly positive point of view about the effects of Steam on pc gaming.

Steam didn't become the Steam we know overnight, it was a good bit into the 360 era before it got an influx of AAA games from other companies and introduced Steamworks features.

I think the point he was making is that the success of Steam hasn't led to the return of the sort of PC games we were getting prior to the mid-2000's decline of PC gaming. Valve was never in a position to save that side of PC gaming because by the time Steam became a real succes, almost all of those developers had either shut down or transitioned to exclusively making console games.

 

[DalekFlay]

I think the point he was making is that the success of Steam hasn't led to the return of the sort of PC games we were getting prior to the mid-2000's decline of PC gaming.

What you're talking about has a lot more to do with certain genres going mainstream than it does PC specifically, but no, Valve could not stop the winds of change we all must suffer. However I would make the point that without Valve saving the PC platform from possible irrelevance, perhaps none of the "incline" games we've seen in typical PC genres (Pillars, etc.) would have been possible.

 

[Clockwork Knight]

I couldn't care less if PC gaming is a profitable business

You should, enthusiasts like money too and if there's a chance to make money they are less tempted to do something else to pay the bills.

 

[Silly Germans]

I couldn't care less if PC gaming is a profitable business

You should, enthusiasts like money too and if there's a chance to make money they are less tempted to do something else to pay the bills.

It is a double edged sort in my opinion, at the same time you get many more people that are mostly in for the money and these people, as the past has shown, are very likely to establish new "standards" that aren't exactly in the interest of gamers/enthusiasts.

I think the point he was making is that the success of Steam hasn't led to the return of the sort of PC games we were getting prior to the mid-2000's decline of PC gaming.

What you're talking about has a lot more to do with certain genres going mainstream than it does PC specifically, but no, Valve could not stop the winds of change we all must suffer. However I would make the point that without Valve saving the PC platform from possible irrelevance, perhaps none of the "incline" games we've seen in typical PC genres (Pillars, etc.) would have been possible.

I disagree mostly with the notion that PC gaming was dead. It was a niche and didn't grow like consoles, but it wasn't down to nothing. I find it also strange that you mention PoE since i would take this rather as an example that shows that it is possible to do PC niche games without something like Steam. Crowd funding allows you to check the market before you go into full production. I don't see how Steam paved the way for that. Is Steam supposed to be the only reason why people own a PC ? And you seem to consider Steam not be a part of the "winds of change" and even as opposed to it. This is something that i see very different. If anything Steam embraced all those practices and increased the acceptance of it, while making a ton of money along the way as beneficiary.

 

[PulsatingBrain]

The fact that there's money to be made in PC gaming is a net positive. You made a dumb point, it's not the end of the world.

 

[Dexter]

I think the point he was making is that the success of Steam hasn't led to the return of the sort of PC games we were getting prior to the mid-2000's decline of PC gaming.

And you say this based on what? The time he is talking about is when Black Isle had just gone bankrupt, along with developers like Looking Glass, Sierra, Mucky Foot, Sick Puppies etc. Lionhead Studios was unprofitable with PC releases and got bought by Microsoft to produce console games. Bullfrog was closed by EA due to Dungeon Keeper 2 underperforming, Westwood the same after C&C: Renegade and Earth & Beyond, also Origin. Most Strategy developers were in trouble (Ensemble, New World Computing), Adventure game developers that didn't outright close shop were trying their hands at 3D and hoping to be popular on consoles with more action gameplay as console games were increasingly replacing or pushing out PC games from shop counters, making it increasingly harder for even interested people to find out about and buy titles they'd want. Digital Distribution didn't come in time to save Troika and a few others either, since Valve had just started publishing third party games with stuff like Rag Doll Kung Fu and Darwinia the year Vampire: Bloodlines released. Even over half a decade later when Steam was still kinda choosy who they let onto their platform you'd hear from smaller specialized publishers/developers like Daedalic that they'd probably go bankrupt without Digital Distribution sales from big platforms like Steam, essentially begging to be let in: https://www.gamersglobal.de/news/50198/daedalic-ohne-steam-sind-wir-bald-pleite-upd

Nowadays there's enough of an audience on PC alone to make developing games like Two Point Hospital, Evil Genius 2, The Banner Saga, Frostpunk, Jurassic World Evolution, Battlefleet Gothic: Armada, War for the Overworld, Grim Dawn etc. profitable along with CRPGs of often dubious qualities, increasing high quality ports of console games, Remasters of old games like Age of Empires, Command & Conquer and lots of Indies. Without a successful Digital Distribution market those games would likely not exist. Large AAA Shooters and the likes would have survived on consoles, games like those wouldn't have.

 

[Ninjerk]

That's not even touching Steam Sales and the emergence of GOG because Steam couldn't be arsed to secure the rights to sell those old games (including long forgotten incline).

 

[Spectacle]

If digital distribution had become the standard 5 years earlier then many more of the studios making the great PC games we enjoyed around the turn of the milennium might have survived. If digital distribution had become the standard 5 years later, gaming might be 99% mobile and console today. Steam wasn't the hero we deserved, but it was the hero we needed.

 

[Silly Germans]

Was the internet infrastructure already there 5 years earlier ? I only have knowledge about the miserable situation in rural Germany and the majority of people there didn't have internet connections suited for gaming or downloading back then, if they had internet at all.

 

[BlackAdderBG]

Piracy saved PC gaming, it was just a matter of time some company would capitalize on it. Piracy also made the internet cheap and fast.

 

[Infinitron]

Apparently this is new: https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/community#6

Q: Can I use the Steam community to let customers know of non-Steam versions of my game?

A: In the game you ship via Steam, and in communications on Steam, you may only promote the Steam version and its availability via Steam, and not other distribution outlets. This applies both to full versions of your game and to content patches that change the existing version.

 

[DalekFlay]

Was the internet infrastructure already there 5 years earlier ? I only have knowledge about the miserable situation in rural Germany and the majority of people there didn't have internet connections suited for gaming or downloading back then, if they had internet at all.

I think his point was more "if it could have been..." and not necessarily saying it actually could have been. In 1999 (5 years before Half-Life 2) I would not say DSL was at all common, even in big cities. I know I was playing Diablo 2 and Unreal Tournament with dial-up and I lived near downtown Pittsburgh.

 

[Spectacle]

Apparently this is new: https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/coFrom mmunity#6

Q: Can I use the Steam community to let customers know of non-Steam versions of my game?

A: In the game you ship via Steam, and in communications on Steam, you may only promote the Steam version and its availability via Steam, and not other distribution outlets. This applies both to full versions of your game and to content patches that change the existing version.

From the wording of it it sounds like it's aimed at developers offering "18+" patches that unlock nudity and sex in their SFW steam versions.

 

[Silly Germans]

There is a very interesting figure about the desktop pc market on wikipedia. It does support the correlation of market growth with digital distribution on desktop pc's. But it also shows that pc gaming was never dead. It was pretty much stable over a long time. I understand of course that a stable size is bad since the number of "fish in the pond" increased with time and inflation doesn't help either, so the effective share for developers got smaller, but it certainly didn't die off. The desktop segment even seems to start growing again before Steam was a big thing. If anyone has proper sources feel free to share them.



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_industry#Economics

https://en.wikipedia.org/api/rest_v.../d9a1179314e6d147ab3cfc6a0c86ff12e4af9038.png

I am always surprised by the gigantic number of the mobile gaming sector. What demographic is actually spending all that money ?

 

[DalekFlay]

Keep in mind that profitable PC gaming is not the same as "number of desktop computers," for a wide variety of reasons ranging from the quality of GPUs versus new consoles to piracy. One of Steam's biggest feats was encouraging people to pay for games by competing with piracy as a service.

Also you keep saying we're alledging PC gaming was dead, but I don't think anyone ever said that. More like sliding toward irrelevance in the overall market.

 

[karoliner]

Whales

 

[LESS T_T]

I understand of course that a stable size is bad since the number of "fish in the pond" increased with time and inflation doesn't help either, so the effective share for developers got smaller, but it certainly didn't die off. The desktop segment even seems to start growing again before Steam was a big thing.

I wouldn't be surprise that stability and growth was mostly contributed by explosion of PC online game market, especially in Asia/China from early 2000s.

IMO 'PC gaming is dead' narrative was more about you can't do anything other than multiplayer games anymore. The success of Steam, the foundation of centralized digital store that gives developers access to built-in distribution service and audience, certainly made PC gaming a better place than where it was going to. (You probably can say that it was bound to happen without Valve anyway but I'm still glad it was led by the company led by nerds and programmers, not by the companies taken over by the suits like EA.)

 

[BlackAdderBG]

I am always surprised by the gigantic number of the mobile gaming sector. What demographic is actually spending all that money ?

Asian retards.

 

[Immortal]

I really dislike it when people claim that Valve saved PC gaming. Its like saying that Amazon saved reading. I couldn't care less if PC gaming is a profitable business, which is the only thing that Valve "saved". I found pc gaming much more enjoyable when there was a handful of releases a year made by enthusiasts.

This is a pretty shitty take.
Pre-Steam the thought of a self-developed Indie titles was basically unheard of. Unless you mean scratching pong games onto a floppy for your three friends in the chess club.

Consider also that Steam was handling Payment processing / server space / money conversion and access to a digital market mid 2000's when people still unironically used AOL, I think it's safe to say they were offering something pretty valuable ahead of it's time.

Also as for your Publisher / Gamestop shilling - Fuck buying game cd's.. that shit was scuffed. I hated keeping track of them and if a CD broke you were fucked. Updates were sketchy as hell and publishers would shit can their servers on a whim, EA especially - meaning you had to hunt down your latest patch on some geocities tier file archive hosted by a guy named sephiroth53. (Assuming Securom didn't just fuck you cause the handshake server was gone)

I'm not gonna say Steam "Saved the World" but diminishing their impact on computer gaming because it feels trendy. lol fuck off retard.

 

[Spectacle]

Pre-Steam the thought of a self-developed Indie titles was basically unheard of. Unless you mean scratching pong games onto a floppy for your three friends in the chess club.

That's nonsense, in the 80's and 90's there was loads and loads of what we'd now consider 'indie' games being distributed as shareware. Most were trash, of course, but there were some gems and the market was big enough that many people could make a living by giving out what was essentially meaty demos for free, letting those spread through peer to peer copying, magazine disks, etc, and then selling the remaining 2/3 of the game by mail order.