The rent seeking on platforms like Steam, the Apple App Store, and Google Play is absolutely gross considering how little value they actually provide. I’ll be very glad to see them forced to reduce it to somewhere similar to a card transaction fee.
I am one to always call out rent seeking where I see it… But I don’t really see how Steam fits in there. Some of us are old enough to remember when HL2 came out, and things began transitioning from physical media to Steam. No dev was forced to do anything, and for years most people still bought physical games for everything other than Valve games.
The reason other devs started switching over, and it became dominant, is because it’s just a damn good service (and also because broadband just started getting more affordable).
We can always go back to the old ways of having a download from the company website and downloading directly from them. What? Nobody wants to pay for bandwidth? Nobody wants to have to pay for secure management of credentials and billing? :O
Those days didn’t even exist (or if they did, they were very short). I feel like Steam came out just before the broadband boom (when they released HL2, it was still on five CDs). And by the time other devs started switching, most of them just went to Steam.
However, re: the broadband thing, they could distribute with bittorrent, kind of like how linux distros do it.
Uh, all games had patches and mappacks downloaded directly from the game’s distributor. It was extremely slow, hence the invention of CDNs like filehippo, hwfiles, 2cows etc and some gaming companies (at the time you could rent your own server and host the games. Incredible, huh? You could also have LAN parties and play with your clan against other clans all using LAN, no internet required) were also doing mirroring of those files (in Italy it was gamearena and ngi, for example). Steam wasn’t even a thing.
Lol patches… Unless you were having LAN parties, or attempting to play a game of AOE2 over dialup (hoping your mom doesn’t try to use the phone), you just ran whatever version of the game came on the disc. By “you”, I guess I meant me.
For bandwidth, it’d absolutely make sense if a game that’s 10GiB+ because uncompressed audio and pre-rendered cutscenes (and likely huge day-1 updates) had to pay more of a cut to its platform than a 200MiB (or less) game. Particularly if the smaller game doesn’t even have multi-player.
Nobody wants to pay for bandwidth? Nobody wants to have to pay for secure management of credentials and billing? :O
They absolutely would if it didn’t mean getting deprioritized on Steam. Those things aren’t that difficult or expensive these days. I could have secure management of credentials and billing up in a weekend if I needed it (correctly), and I’m a single developer.
Steam is better than Microsoft, Apple, Google and Tencent. Using monopoly power to maintain the 30% standard is still a problem.
The rent seeking on platforms like Steam, the Apple App Store, and Google Play is absolutely gross considering how little value they actually provide. I’ll be very glad to see them forced to reduce it to somewhere similar to a card transaction fee.
I am one to always call out rent seeking where I see it… But I don’t really see how Steam fits in there. Some of us are old enough to remember when HL2 came out, and things began transitioning from physical media to Steam. No dev was forced to do anything, and for years most people still bought physical games for everything other than Valve games.
The reason other devs started switching over, and it became dominant, is because it’s just a damn good service (and also because broadband just started getting more affordable).
We can always go back to the old ways of having a download from the company website and downloading directly from them. What? Nobody wants to pay for bandwidth? Nobody wants to have to pay for secure management of credentials and billing? :O
Those days didn’t even exist (or if they did, they were very short). I feel like Steam came out just before the broadband boom (when they released HL2, it was still on five CDs). And by the time other devs started switching, most of them just went to Steam.
However, re: the broadband thing, they could distribute with bittorrent, kind of like how linux distros do it.
Uh, all games had patches and mappacks downloaded directly from the game’s distributor. It was extremely slow, hence the invention of CDNs like filehippo, hwfiles, 2cows etc and some gaming companies (at the time you could rent your own server and host the games. Incredible, huh? You could also have LAN parties and play with your clan against other clans all using LAN, no internet required) were also doing mirroring of those files (in Italy it was gamearena and ngi, for example). Steam wasn’t even a thing.
Lol patches… Unless you were having LAN parties, or attempting to play a game of AOE2 over dialup (hoping your mom doesn’t try to use the phone), you just ran whatever version of the game came on the disc. By “you”, I guess I meant me.
For bandwidth, it’d absolutely make sense if a game that’s 10GiB+ because uncompressed audio and pre-rendered cutscenes (and likely huge day-1 updates) had to pay more of a cut to its platform than a 200MiB (or less) game. Particularly if the smaller game doesn’t even have multi-player.
They absolutely would if it didn’t mean getting deprioritized on Steam. Those things aren’t that difficult or expensive these days. I could have secure management of credentials and billing up in a weekend if I needed it (correctly), and I’m a single developer.
Steam is better than Microsoft, Apple, Google and Tencent. Using monopoly power to maintain the 30% standard is still a problem.
Do you wish to collect games on dvd again?