this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2024
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Lawsuit paperwork reveals Valve employs around 350 people – and less than 100 work for Steam. Most of Valve's payroll is still committed to game dev roles. (www.gamesindustry.biz)
submitted 4 months ago by nanoUFO@sh.itjust.works to c/games@sh.itjust.works
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[–] conciselyverbose@sh.itjust.works 3 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

It dominates the market without any effort whatsoever to force companies to distribute exclusively through them or otherwise weaken competition because it's far and away the best out there.

And EGS (and EA Play, and Ubisoft, and GOG, and...) show that just making a functional launcher is far from trivial.

[–] gila@lemm.ee -4 points 3 months ago (1 children)

A launcher is an unnecessary contrivance of anti consumerism (DRM). GOG Galaxy is entirely optional.

That and the other launchers are a product of Steam's dominance, not a cause of it.

Steam only historically dominated GOG, snowballing off the success of their first-party titles & providing a platform for DRM where GOG chose not to.

Valve has done a lot of great things, I'm not seeking to argue against that. To argue it hasn't become artificially bloated for purposes of maximising profit over the years seems silly, though.

[–] conciselyverbose@sh.itjust.works 3 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Steam doesn't require DRM.

The launcher is a massive value add, pretty much singlehandedly responsible for PC being a relevant gaming platform at all, and the features (that you can easily ignore) are also huge value adds to a significant number of people. There are no features that are "bloat". There are things I don't personally care about, but all of them are the single reason some measurable chunk of users prefers steam over anything else.

[–] gila@lemm.ee -1 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Steam/Steamworks is DRM. You can't purchase games on Steam and play them independently of Steam.

The overlay, the community pages, reviews, friends chat etc were all there circa 2010 and function identically to how they do today. Regional pricing was there too, today it's been reneged in many countries to protect against region-spoofing.

The primary group of people who prefer Steam only for Steam Workshop and/or Community Market are those who seek to extract profit from them. There were paid mods before Steam Workshop and it was fine. There were digital collectibles inside games before Steam Community Market and it was fine. There wasn't any skin gambling, though.

These systems are designed to provide functions which already existed, but with Valve taking a cut of the sales. That is a profit-adding for Valve, and literally value-reducing for consumers. They are popular because they are bundled with a popular pre-existing service, that's it.

[–] conciselyverbose@sh.itjust.works 3 points 3 months ago

There are plenty of games that are entirely DRM free and can be played straight from the EXE.

Steam Workshop is a massive value add. The premise that it's not is a joke. Not every game has a community that distributes mods that way, but it's by far the easiest way to add mods, and the people who value steam for Workshop absolutely have nothing at all to do with extracting profit.

[–] Pika@sh.itjust.works 1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

The game studios have an option when publishing the game through them to use their DRM, there are a ton of games that allow you to run it with steam off or even uninstalled from the PC, it's just a lot of games choose to include the steam drm on it (usually to allow for steam achievements as that is not possible without it to my knowledge), sadly steam does not provide a good way of identifying what games do this and what games don't. I believe you may be able to check this by checking the games executable in the install location to see if it uses the steam schema