So You Want to Compete with Steam

http://www.fortressofdoors.com/so-you-want-to-compete-with-steam/

by eugenekolo • 9 years ago

244 215 9 years ago

coldacid• 9 years ago

As someone who does video games in his spare time, this was a very enjoyable read.

FussyZeus5• 9 years ago

Mind you the USERS don't even want a lot of Steam's competition. The GOG downloader is...okay? Origin is almost universally hated and every time one of these big companies announces $NewNotSteam the collective community rolls their eyes and groans, dreading the new application that has to be installed, and kept running so it can update, to accomplish the exact same thing that Steam, GOG, Origin, and uPlay already accomplish because $NewNotSteam's parent company has an executive somewhere that is tired of giving Valve money and had sufficient pull to change it.

wernercd• 9 years ago

Really though... other than perhaps Blizzard... is there any secondary store worth looking into?

Outside of Windows/Android/iStore... There's nothing worth switching.

I've passed up on purchasing games (IE: Mass Effect 3) because it's tied to a shitty NotSteam...

FussyZeus5• 9 years ago

Again GOG's is ok. It's not great, but it's also not an obstruction like Origin is.

eropple• 9 years ago

It's not avoiding Steam, because plenty of games there are given as Steam keys, but I have a $12/mo Humble Monthly subscription. It's literally more games than I could ever play, but there are some really good gems every month. They also have the "Trove", which is a bunch of DRM-free downloads that cycle in and out over time.

I also use GOG when the GOG-tuned Dosbox version of a game is better than the Steam one. I don't use their downloader app.

megaman22• 9 years ago

Just Gog. I find it interesting that it's basically killed a lot of the old abandonware rings that were out there. I played a lot of stuff I discovered on abandonia or homeoftheunderdogs back when I had an old computer that couldn't handle what was on the shelves in stores

discreditable• 9 years ago

Blizzard's client is pretty but has its own drawbacks. I uninstalled it recently after it tabbed me out of a competitive match with a UAC prompt to update itself. The Bnet forums are full of people complaining about that particular issue.

ndh2• 9 years ago

Same here, I won't buy Titanfall as long as it requires Origin.

fellellor• 9 years ago

Origin is the worse. While downloading games, it would often roll back the progress stretching the process into hours. A complete piece of shit that.

FussyZeus5• 9 years ago

I endure it for Titanfall. If it wasn't required, I'd drop it so incredibly fast...

Morizero• 9 years ago

My girlfriend uses it for the Sims. On at least 3 occasions it's taken over an hour to get the game running due to Origin issues. It's truly garbage.

outworlder• 9 years ago

True.

The best thing Steam has ever done was allowing(but not requiring) importing of other games to it. We (as in myself and other users) will voluntarily move to Steam in many cases, just to avoid dealing with whatever download site the game had before, or to get the automatic updates. I've done that with KSP and Elite Dangerous (which has a non-shitty site).

And then Steam added VR - a very good implementation at that, which also supports Oculus Rift.

Updates just work flawlessly, download speeds are good in general, one can move games around, you can backup them if needed, etc.

Other competitors would not only have to match that, but do it better. And still most people wouldn't bother, because of their existing friends and libraries.

The article is spot on.

(Also, Origin is garbage, the only good thing is the name)

lmm5• 9 years ago

I just wish the interface was better for browsing. It's at the point where I'd rather use my browser than their official apps (on both phone and desktop) since at least that way I can open a bunch of recommendations in different tabs.

qplex• 9 years ago

Contrarian anecdote.

I've had no issues with Origin.

It downloads/updates the games and launches them, and hasn't failed at that yet. I don't much care for any other feature.

phreack• 9 years ago

There are plenty of businesses where you can just roll up, make a better yet not more innovative version of the leading app, and just take all of the customers.

Game distribution is NOT one of them, at all, by any stretch of the imagination, at this point in time.

I've saved this article to share every time I hear that pitch.

mrhektor• 9 years ago

Could you give us a few examples of such businesses? Do customers really switch for marginal improvements?

kirillseva• 9 years ago

The usual example of switching Uber for Lyft when the rates on one app are lower than in another

pitaj• 9 years ago

I can give a few more examples where marginal improvements are not enough, which really boils down to "anything with network effects".

- Messaging (WhatsApp, SMS)

- Social Media (Facebook)

grigjd3• 9 years ago

Consumables are pretty easy to dive into but often don't leave room for improvement (already been done). Restaurants are similar. Thing is, these aren't businesses to dive into. The more "free" the customer, the more competition that already exists. Remember, if its easy to eat someone else's lunch, it's easy to have your lunch eaten.

c3534l2• 9 years ago

The convenience of having your game licenses all in one place over the long term is too great. The only way you could shut down Steam at this point is create an open industry standard that would allow a license to play a game to transfer seamlessly across platforms. No one wants to buy a game from a website that isn't going to exist in a year and will take your game with you. And no one wants to have 10 different platforms on their computer. And certainly no one wants to have different platforms offer different games that can only be accessed from that platform. But of course the gaming industry has an entire business model built on exactly that: console gaming. It's kind of a miracle that Steam even exists and people are going to be very resistant to replacing it with a completely fractured system of owning PC games.

cptskippy4• 9 years ago

GOG links to your Steam Account and will add games to your library that exist in your Steam Library. It only does this for participating publishers but it's still an effective way to copy your library.

c3534l2• 9 years ago

Well, I guess that explains why people like GOG and hate Origin.

watwut2• 9 years ago

The best thing about GOG is that I am actually able to find interesting games I did not knew they exist before there. Discovery on steam is atrocious.

StavrosK2• 9 years ago

Really?! Oh wow, how did I not know this? Thank you!

AnIdiotOnTheNet7• 9 years ago

But GOG has weird standards for what it will and will not allow on its store. Yatzee had some game he made denied, and Zachtronic's Opus Magnum was also denied.

kgwxd• 9 years ago

No one wants a game that requires a "platform", they just don't realize it or care enough to boycott over it.

dleslie2• 9 years ago

Gamers love relay servers, NAT punching, automatic updates, matchmaking, friend lists, achievements, community forums, screenshot sharing, streaming and more.

Gamers love platforms and what they provide at least as much as they love games themselves.

pjmlp• 9 years ago

Sure they do, this idea is yet another example of how disparate gaming culture is from FOSS.

The identity of belonging to a specific platform, which games are exclusives and social events promoted for gamers and devs alike by the platform holder, are very important facets.

Fnoord2• 9 years ago

I know plenty of people who like Steam, including myself. Netflix also does DRM but it Just Works (tm). What sucks is having many platforms.

For example, cable TV (from whereever you are from), Netflix, HBO, Amazon Prime is 4 already.

For gaming, there is Steam, Origin, Battle.net, GOG that's 4 already.

If you take a smaller "app store" like Origin the question arises why does this even exist? It brings nothing on top of Steam.

If you want to compete with a product you need to compete on price or features. Well, price is zero, so you gotta compete on features. They can't compete on features, so EA enforces you to use Origin. Screw that. I want all my games in one managing app.

The reason Origin and Battle.net exist is because EA and Blizzard want control and keep people within their own infrastructure and offerings. I do get that from Blizzard's PoV. From EA's, not so much.

Plus that only works because they're reasonably big, and I doubt it works on the long term.

Valve, instead, choose to not only distribute their own games but also provide a complete platform for other publishers. They even allow you to import games which aren't on Steam such as Battle.net ones.

GOG specialises in DRM-free games which Steam doesn't.

golergka• 9 years ago

I do.

Before Steam, when I bought a game, the purchase was tied to a physical disc. I'm very bad with physical things: I break them, misplace them, give them to friends and forget about it forever. I don't have any of those physical games now.

I still have Half-life 2 that I bought in 2004 on Steam though.

lifeformed• 9 years ago

I wonder if you could write a wrapper over Steam (and other services) that allows the same benefits of them, but lets you have your own store too. You'd have a launcher that could launch any game on your computer, whether it's on Steam or GOG or Itch or your own service, and a global storefront that merges them all (and prioritizes yours). Would that even be legal?

AlphaSite3• 9 years ago

there have been plenty of meta launchers, but the social aspect and mods, etc are much more important than that and are never provided.

krapp2• 9 years ago

Really, Steam seems to be the closest thing Windows has to an application/package manager[0].

It's almost kind of a shame that it's more or less entirely for games and game development software - something like it with sourceforge/github integration or an API for general purpose Windows installers would be nice.

[0]notwithstanding whatever Windows 10 might have, because I still refuse to touch that, but it's probably not as good as the Steam client.

davvid• 9 years ago

If you're looking for a package manager on Windows, you might be interested in Chocolatey: https://chocolatey.org/

krapp2• 9 years ago

It looks nice, but the whole paradigm of installing software by copying and pasting commands into a root shell is terrible.

And I say that realizing it's only a step removed from downloading an installer and running it, but still.

j_s2• 9 years ago

Chocolatey has some slightly-awkward-feeling freemium thing going on; there was a good discussion of Windows installer stuff recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15791781

https://github.com/lukesampson/scoop/wiki/Chocolatey-Compari... (scoop) is an option focused on dev tools, http://boxstarter.org for repaving dev/vm machines.

Proprietary https://ninite.com for normally-installed stuff, not sure if the free edition updates things.

lucb1e• 9 years ago

I've always used Cygwin for installing packages I need on Windows. Unfortunately it doesn't turn it into a proper unix, but it can only do so much under adversarial circumstances.

kenhwang3• 9 years ago

Hell, I wish the Google Play Store/Apple App Store did things half as well as Steam does, like:

- Backing up application data in the cloud (game saves)

- Update priorities (ASAP, before next launch, before everything else)

- Throttling bandwidth use or background updates (because I know you're streaming Youtube and your battery got low and you just want to have enough juice to finish your video, but Google Play Music/TV/Movies/Bloatware must update now, what's a little buffering for the next 20 minutes anyway?)

- Update windows (like when the phone is idle in the middle of the night, not when I'm in the middle of using it)

It doesn't seem like any of these things would be hard to build. I guess "package manager UX" doesn't look good on a product manager resume.

on_and_off3• 9 years ago

So weird you mention all this, in my experience Google Play does a good job with this. The only thing that really irks me is that if an app while you are using the phone, the foreground app should never get updated. Sure, download the delta patch but wait for me to have stopped using it in order to update (or if I am using the app for hours, pick an update message). To be fair nowadays this only happens when I manually start updating my apps.

johnchristopher• 9 years ago

Update windows (like when the phone is idle in the middle of the night, not when I'm in the middle of using it)

No, no, no. That's how I ended up with a laptop burned screen. Or being woken up by whatever music it was playing at that time. Solution: update when I press the button or when I planned it myself.

Razengan• 9 years ago

I wish the Google Play Store/Apple App Store did things half as well as Steam does, like: Backing up application data in the cloud (game saves)

iCloud has been doing that for years, with more features and flexibility for both users as well as developers than Steam.

Update priorities (ASAP, before next launch, before everything else)

Disable auto-updates and let the user decide. Manually choosing updates works better on the App Store than on Steam.

Update windows (like when the phone is idle in the middle of the night, not when I'm in the middle of using it)

macOS, iOS, tvOS and watchOS all let you choose whether to download OS updates in the background and when to install them.

eugenekolo2• 9 years ago

Never thought about it like that, but you're right about it being a pretty decent package manager.

zeusk• 9 years ago

Really, Steam seems to be the closest thing Windows has to an application/package manager

OneCore does have a package manager.

Windows Store (Win10, WP10, Xbox OS) use it and it works great but with old win32 apps, nothing is "standardized" in terms of storage, app state and versioning so that's an open challenge still.

dataflow5• 9 years ago

Really, Steam seems to be the closest thing Windows has to an application/package manager

I don't understand this obsession with package managers. You guys really have less trouble with package managers than Windows installers? It was literally just 2-3 days ago I was trying to update Ubuntu and I couldn't, because of some stupid error (I don't remember exactly) along the lines of "libgl1-mesa-glx depends libglapi-mesa XX.YY but ZZ.WW is present" (again: I don't remember the error exactly). And no matter which packages I tried to upgrade/fix/uninstall/whatever or in what order I tried it, it wouldn't budge. I guess the package dependency graph was somehow impossible to satisfy? I assume because different packages required different versions of the same package? This was not the first time I've ran into problems like this... eventually I just wiped it and restored from a backup. (Which I had made from moments earlier, because, well, did I mention this wasn't the first time this has happened?) To say I don't see what all the fuss and obsession with package managers is about is putting it very... mildly.

SolarNet7• 9 years ago

Well the problem is it sounds like you are dealing with a proprietary gl package. Which sucks because the package mangers can't do anything about that. Blame your graphics chip provider.

You wouldn't have this problem if you didn't give up your freedoms to mega corps (only some snark).

mmjaa6• 9 years ago

Those package dependency graphs are there to protect you. Having to route around the protection is precisely why you should use a package manger properly - to ensure you don't end up with incompatible/borked installation of key elements.

No, I do not think Installers are better than package management. By far, package managers are a key factor in system stability.

JohnStrange• 9 years ago

I'm changing my system soon and I can tell you that I'm very, very happy that most of my games are on Steam. I remember that manual installation from DVD used to take minutes to hours, and I just don't have the time for this any longer.

Right now, my biggest nightmare are VST plugins. They are in fact the reason why I didn't upgrade my PC from an i7 920 for years. I estimate it will take me at least a week of full spare time use to deinstall them on the old machine and re-install them on the new machine. Steam would make many people a huge favor if they managed to enter the pro audio market, which still comes with their own installers, licensing schemes, DRM, spurious hidden support services, etc. All the bad stuff, exclusively for honest customers.

majewsky2• 9 years ago

You guys really have less trouble with package managers than Windows installers?

Hell yeah. I remember when I had to set aside entire weekends to reinstall a Windows machine. These days, when I need to reinstall one of my Linux boxes, I just fire up the Arch installer, and instead of installing the "base" package group as the manual instructs you, I install my configuration package for that machine which pulls in all applications (from the kernel and coreutils all the way up to Steam) and contains all configuration. When I recently reinstalled my notebook to enable full-disk encryption, it took me around 30 minutes, of which most time was spent downloading packages, and downloading /home from the backup storage. Net working time was maybe 5 minutes. I actually watched a movie while doing it.

The issues that you're seeing are because the particular package manager you encountered is shit. (Or rather, because Debian's/Ubuntu's byzantine packaging processes create a ton of pathological cases.) I've never had such problems on Arch. (Except for those cases about once a year when they restructure something and the package manager is confused, in which case you go to archlinux.org and the most recent news item contains the magic shell incantation that immediately resolves the issue.)

Maken2• 9 years ago

I have run into this kind of package dependency lock-down sometimes when installing updated graphic drivers and build systems (usually from non-official repositories), and I have been able to solve it by reverting the problematic packages to older versions until I hit a well-formed dependency tree.

I only hit a similar problem in Windows once, when it hung up installing a new C++ runtime, and since then I could neither install another C++ runtime nor rollback it (restore system did nothing), resulting in applications randomly crashing or refusing to run because they were loading the wrong C++ libraries, and the only solution I found was reinstalling Windows again.

Yizahi2• 9 years ago

I remember running in circles trying to install one app on Debian and getting "hey, you need libtrpc, error", ok, apt-get it, "hey, now I need libc6 for libtrpc, error", ok, apt-get it too, "hey, your libc6 already present, what do you want from me, error". Of course each error was 5 lines long. I was doing lots of tries and asked on SE too but in the end it didn't work. And it couldn't even tell me all dependencies together, only on separate tries for each package. So much for glorified protection and usability.

shultays• 9 years ago

I released a game on Steam, they did some testing for me and gave feedback like

  On our tests we saw that the game does not run if the PC does not have following libraries, check those tickboxes on that page to install them as well

It really is a package manager

sli2• 9 years ago

If we're counting third parties, what about chocolatey? It's not my favorite package manager around, but it does do the job.

PostOnce• 9 years ago

What if Steam had to, by law, share your game library with other services?

i.e., just like you can take your phone number to any other phone company, or how banks in europe have to share info, you were able to take your game library with you to any other game distribution service?

Perhaps the same could be done for iOS/Android portability

grahamburger2• 9 years ago

I've often wished that this would happen for movies / music. When I buy a streaming movie on Amazon I'd like to be able to transfer it to Google Play or vice versa.

joshtynjala• 9 years ago

Check out Movies Anywhere.

tambienben• 9 years ago

You wouldn't transfer a car to Google Play, would you?

euvitudo• 9 years ago

Except the way the movie/music folks look at it is probably the same way they look at VHS, DVD, Blu-ray and BR 4K and so forth or vinyl, 8-track, cassette, CD, etc... Apple, Amazon and Google are yet another "format" as it were. More platforms means more money for them.

It's not about the customer--none of them cares, except at that moment in time the customer forks over the cash for it.

on_and_off3• 9 years ago

I would love this.

Could be extended to a lot of services tbh : Music Libraries in Spotify Contacts in Facebook

One of the reasons I love GOG is Connect : got a game on Steam ? Now you have it on GOG too.

YeOakAye• 9 years ago

That would be great...

Assuming it would work both ways, I would consolidate, on Steam, all the games I currently have on Origin, Bethesda Launcher, Battle.Net Launcher, Epic Games Launcher, uPlay, Twitch Desktop App, a few I've forgotten, and whateverthefuck Rockstar's GTAV launcher is called.. Though that's probably not what you had in mind.

yAnonymous• 9 years ago

What if Steam had to, by law, share your game library with other services?

Then players would move all their games from crap clients like Origin and Uplay to Steam.

pbhjpbhj5• 9 years ago

You'd need to pay Steam a librarian fee, or something. People would buy games on the low cost markets with the crap management and low user numbers, then transfer to eg Steam. Steam pick up the costs of updating, managing users, etc., and the other sellers get the money from sales.

discoursism• 9 years ago

This article is full of good observations. A shorter way to say it is that the distance between Steam and "perfect" is not very large, and there isn't enough margin to be had to justify the cost of building something to close that gap. And that's assuming you can identify the features that would bring you to perfect from where Steam is.

I cannot even imagine a game distribution product that would get me to switch from Steam, unless there were Very Important games on it I couldn't get on Steam, or unless the prices were at least 10-15% lower.

larsiusprime7• 9 years ago

unless the prices were at least 10-15% lower.

Article's author here :) You couldn't even do this, because every distributor I've ever heard of reserves the right to match your full retail price. So you can't even cut your margins in a bid to pass on the savings to the consumer.

So yeah, it's tough out there.

jhanschoo• 9 years ago

The article takes pains to point out that itch.io pretty much has better tooling, but Steam has walled-garden effects that probably even "perfect" is not good enough.

grawprog• 9 years ago

As specific as this is to steam competitors this seems like good advice for trying to get into any crowded niche market. A friend of mine lately found the random hobby of promoting dog toys and such through instagram. He started with pretty much nothing but pictures of his dog and over a few months has begun working with different manufacturers and distributors to make and sell custom products and to distribute existing products and I've watched him do almost everything described in this article to succeed.

He's spent his own time and money to help big name companies get more customers, helped smaller companies expand their business without much incentive to himself at first other than a mention here or there or some free products, in turn he used those products to gain more business for those companies and eventually became well known enough to start getting small amounts of cash and more expensive products. Eventually these companies trusted him enough to make some of his custom designed things and get commission on their sales.

I'm kind of getting sick of hearing about instagram but it's been cool watching him grow this weird little business he's been doing.

AlexDanger• 9 years ago

I wonder if CD Projekt heard the same arguments when they started GOG? Certainly they leveraged The Witcher and anger around DRM to gain traction. But they've found a sustainable niche that does not depend on going head to head with Steam's colossal network effect.

Steam is generally pretty great. But off the top of my head I can think of two areas where Steam arent delivering;

- Greenlight. Good idea, didnt work as planned. Room in the market for some kind of Greenlight/Kickstarter hybrid?

- Gaming for kids and educational software. A Kahn Academy approach but with games instead of lessons.

larsiusprime7• 9 years ago

Article's author here.

GOG.com got started in 2008, which was critical to their success. Steam had much lower market share back then. If GOG started today I would give them much, much, lower odds of succeeding.

And consider also that Desura, Direct2Drive, Impulse, etc, which also were around in that rough time period, are all dead and gone.

Chathamization• 9 years ago

GOG only started selling newer games in 2012, and even then it started only selling a few. Before that, it was a place to buy old games (hence the original name, Good Old Games). I think GOG's success was because for its first few years, it was selling games that simply weren't available on Steam or anywhere else at the time. When it did finally go up against Steam, it already had a decently large customer base, and was able to set itself up well a a DRM-free Steam alternative.

gnoupi• 9 years ago

Also, let's not forget another point, is that CD Projekt was already a large distributor/localizer in Poland long before they had their RED division: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CD_Projekt

So they didn't really start out of nothing when it comes to having connections with game developers.

Kronopath• 9 years ago

There’s a fundamental difference in how GOG got started though, and it’s buried in their acronym, which used to stand for “Good Old Games”. They were focused on providing access to classic/retro PC and DOS games, something that Steam didn’t do and much more in the “blue ocean” territory. It’s only later that they started to accept modern games on the service.

barbs2• 9 years ago

- DRM-free standalone binaries. That was a big draw for me at least.

methodover3• 9 years ago

Discord could do it. Discord SHOULD do it.

There needs to be a serious competitor to Steam, something with significant enough market share that Steam gets scared. Steam could be so much better than it is -- I'm not saying that it's a bad product, just that it could be better.

Discord seems perfectly positioned to take on Steam. They already have incredible adoption in the gaming community. And they have quite a bit of experience at this rate too. (Maybe I should go work for them and push this line from within...)

barbs2• 9 years ago

How likely do you think it would be for Valve to buy Discord?

scott_karana• 9 years ago

Depends on how much funding Discord has already raised, I bet. Their VCs are generally going to want a massive exit, and I bet the valuations after previous raises are non-trivial. Guessing that Valve is adverse to acquisitions in general too, for their weird cultural reasons.

EDIT: $725 million. Not cheap.

https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/07/discord/

xahrepap• 9 years ago

I think HumbleBundle could do it. They already have a store, they just have built it on Steam's platform and/or standalone apps. I don't think it'd be THAT difficult for them to pivot, would it?

larsiusprime7• 9 years ago

Humble has already pivoted, towards a subscription service. They're doing pretty well for themselves, but they're moving away from trying to compete head-on with Steam. IMHO, this is an excellent move for them. That said, they are extremely reliant on Steam keys for their business so anything they do that might directly antagonize Valve would put their business in mortal jeopardy.

jimminy• 9 years ago

Twitch is trying to do it.

They turned the Curse application into a game/mod store that also integrated custom servers that essentially mirrored Discord's application.

They also are using Twitch Prime and other service integrations to promote it. And they are well backed, which isn't something that could be said about Discord.

methodover3• 9 years ago

Twitch/Curse hasn't really taken off with the community as much as Discord has. It's hard for me to pin down exactly what has put people off of it...

thinkingemote• 9 years ago

Well backed as in owned by Amazon...

kuschku4• 9 years ago

Isn't GOG already starting to compete with Steam? (Of course, from the DRM-free angle).

They're an ever growing market, backed by a publisher with a strong lineup, just like Steam was in its early days.

larsiusprime7• 9 years ago

(Author here)

GOG is a great service; their main limitations is that many AAA publishers absolutely refuse to release without DRM, though this is sloooooowly eroding, somewhat. GOG can't go back on their DRM-free promise without a revolt from their audience, but it also limits what big-ticket games they can sign.

I like GOG a lot, they've carved out a nice niche for themselves, but from every developer I've talked to, they're still a fraction of Steam's market share. I don't expect them to take over anytime soon, but I'll always support them and hope they continue to grow.

Zpalmtree• 9 years ago

I really hope they don't, they have a crappy memory and cpu hog client which takes an age to start up, a very questionable privacy policy and monetization method, and their software just annoys me. I don't want my programs to spam memes at me.

methodover3• 9 years ago

I haven't experienced those issues with the client (on iOS or Windows). What's wrong with their privacy policy as compared to other chat services? Same question for monetization. And I don't understand the memes comment.

dvt3• 9 years ago

I'm actually pretty cynical when it comes to this kind of thing (for example, I don't think anyone can really compete with Google Search anymore), but I need to disagree with this article. It fundamentally misunderstands a few crucial elements of how game publishing (and consumption) works. Keep in mind that I am a long-time user of Steam (my account is 14 years old, having signed up literally the day it came out).

1. The gamers

Gamers are by definition quasi-technical and, by their very nature, will be welcome to (at least) trying out a new client or platform. I, and most of my friends, and probably most of Twitch, have not only Steam, but also GOG, and also the God-awful Origin, and Epic's launcher, etc. So installing a new client so I could play some games I like is really not that big of a deal. Steams social aspects were always secondary to its game delivery platform -- besides, most people use Discord to keep in touch, no one really takes Steam's "social network" seriously. I think that's a non-issue.

2. The developers

If you're an indie dev that's toiled for the past 3 years on a small game that you hope will make it big, you will release it on every platform -- let me say that again: you'll release on Steam, on Itch, etc. On every. Single. Platform. If you (really) want to sell AAA games, you can just be a run-of-the-mill distributor at first, and just sell keys. Worrying about developer friction I think is fundamentally misguided.

3. How to win

Imo, winning would look something like this: scout indie developers building the next big thing (they'll be a lot of false positives, so a lot of $$$ helps here). Make them sign contracts to only distribute through your platform. Do this for like 10 or 20 games, even if the contracts suck for you (hell, I'd give them > 100% revenue share). Now you're funneling people through your platform to play the newest "Cuphead" or "Super Meatboy" or "Dark Souls" -- obviously this isn't easy, but I do think you could hypothetically compete.and slow.

earenndil3• 9 years ago

If an indie game that gets crazily popular is on both your own store and steam, everyone will buy it on steam because they have no incentive to buy it from your store.

dvt3• 9 years ago

Have you read (3)? Contracts would stipulate to only distribute through your platform.

wick_works• 9 years ago

2. Speaking as somebody who's had to make builds for pc/mac/linux and bundle them up into each special back-end for each store and then test each one for every single patch, multiplying the process by adding more platforms is a hard sell. Why bother with Desura or whatever when 95% of your sales are gonna come through Steam?

Especially for the model of early access & building community gradually instead of risking it all on a big release --- since you're sometimes putting out new builds weekly the update pipeline becomes a real time factor.

3. If it was a numerically advantageous proposition to scout & invest in indies, we'd see more people doing that. Try for a month going through new releases on Steam and predicting which ones are gonna be successes. It's a near-impossible game, much less if each bet cost you tens of thousands of dollars.

Plus, if somebody offered me such a contract, I'd be deeply skeptical that 100% of their revenue share (plus a straight-up cash bonus even) would beat out what I could get by going with established avenues --- especially if I had something I had good reason to believe was the next Cuphead.

dvt3• 9 years ago

If it was a numerically advantageous proposition to scout & invest in indies, we'd see more people doing that. Try for a month going through new releases on Steam and predicting which ones are gonna be successes. It's a near-impossible game, much less if each bet cost you tens of thousands of dollars.

I think you forget you're posting on YC's forum. YC literally does this (with much higher stakes, by the way). Obviously, the great majority of YC companies don't end up being unicorns, but every now and then you get a Dropbox.

And to address your first point, Steam's SDK (for anyone that's worked with it) obviously sucks. But Valve can afford to release a crappy SDK because they're the big player and they don't care. Obviously, if I made a game distribution platform, the back-end would be minimal and packaging would be programmatic. E.g.: upload your binary, we'll package it and deploy. You don't need half the crap Valve peddles anyway (Steam overlay, chat, etc.)

muzani2• 9 years ago

Also a huge point to consider is that games also have to be as cheap as Steam. I used to buy pirated DVDs once upon a time because the real thing would cost about a month salary. Now Steam games in third world countries are so cheap I just buy a bunch I don't intend to play.

Even the discount sites and Humble Bundle aren't able to match up against Steam in third world countries.

andybak• 9 years ago

https://isthereanydeal.com/ regularly shows me titles on my wishlist that are cheaper on somewhere other than on Steam.

muzani2• 9 years ago

Steam sells up to 4 times cheaper to people who live in certain poorer regions, and this also gets the usual discount. So some old game sold for $10, might get a 75% winter sales discount, plus a further 75% off in poor countries, down to about 60 cents.

It's clever because it takes purchasing power into account. So a game that's about 1 hour salary in the US would cost about 1 hour on a Indonesian salary as well.

This is going to be really hard for many competitors to match.

hellbanner2• 9 years ago

We sell our game on itch http://QuantumPilot.me Developer chooses what cut to pay to itch, which is nice. DRM free, easy to setup -- 5 minutes compare to 5 hours with Steam.

Itch supports indie game dev by letting community manage "Game Jams": http://itch.io/jams

Their site + client is open source: https://github.com/itchio

kasbah• 9 years ago

The client seems to be open source but their site doesn't. https://github.com/itchio/itch.io is just an issue tracker.

hellbanner2• 9 years ago

My mistake, thank you

sergiotapia• 9 years ago

Steam has lost that "discovery" aspect to it. It's now mainly weaboo garbage, early access and PUBG clogging up the trending and leaderboards.

I feel like I can no longer discover cool titles or great things people are buying on the site.

dageshi• 9 years ago

Yes, an entire industry of youtubers volunteered to take care of discovery and curation for games, valve saw that and decided to "just" be the video game version of Amazon and take care of sales and distribution.

cyborgx7• 9 years ago

Which is a decision I agree with. I feel like the ones who sell the products and the ones who recommend the good products shouldn't be the same people.

aeoost• 9 years ago

You can subscribe to curators whose recommendations will populate the main page.

One I like: 'Weird games for your pleasure' http://store.steampowered.com/curator/7099409-Weird-Games-fo...

AnIdiotOnTheNet7• 9 years ago

I really don't feel like there is a better way to handle it than the curators system. I mean, look at Youtube and Amazon recommendations, they're awful.

kuon• 9 years ago

Amos has been doing some insanely great work with the itch.io app and butler.

If you are interested in how it works, I highly encourage you to read his blog [1].

[1] https://amos.me/blog/2017/efficient-game-updates/

madisfun• 9 years ago

The day you try to contact Steam support, you'll know how to compete with Steam.

animal531• 9 years ago

Their support is truly worthless.

I bought an add-on to a game, it downloaded to 99% and refused to finish. I mailed support, perhaps 2 weeks later I received a generic did you try to reboot your PC response. So I listed the 10 different (including and up to complicated) things I had tried up to then and mailed back.

Another 2 weeks later I get another response along the lines of whether I've tried restarting my Steam client.

After a 3rd round I just gave up. In the end it was a network issue on their side that auto-magically resolved itself (after 1.x months)

AnIdiotOnTheNet7• 9 years ago

Their support is pretty bad from what I hear, but then again, so is Microsoft's. Bad support doesn't seem to be the kind of thing anyone is making decisions based on, no matter how much people like to bitch about it.

nkkollaw• 9 years ago

I wish Steam supported hidpi.

It's kind of ridiculous they don't.

jlebrech• 9 years ago

At some point itch was one of the 99%.

Maybe taking on newgrounds or miniclip with a wasm based gaming platform is the niche?

lmm5• 9 years ago

At some point itch was one of the 99%.

It sounds like itch is more of a lifestyle business than something trying to compete with Steam. And maybe they got started with indies back when that was more of a "blue ocean" (Steam used to be quite anti-indie in the early days).

Maybe taking on newgrounds or miniclip with a wasm based gaming platform is the niche?

Now that is a good idea.

larsiusprime7• 9 years ago

Newgrounds is run at a loss, for the record.

parski• 9 years ago

Excellent write-up.

So You Want to Compete with Steam

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