this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2024
0 points (NaN% liked)
Steam
10215 readers
2 users here now
Steam is a video game digital distribution service by Valve.
Steam News | Steam Beta Client news
Useful tools:
SteamDB
SteamCharts
Issue tracker for Linux version of Steam
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Valve is a whole company of people like Gaben.
Realistically, it's only a matter of time until Steam becomes as enshittificated as any other services. There is profit to be made from Steam selling advertising space and customer data. They can either choose to capitalize on the profits that are in front of them, or allow another company to and take that capital from them. For a business it's not a matter of what's right and wrong anymore but consume or be consumed. If Steam isn't willing to do that someone else will be willing to play the long game and do it. Then it'll be only a matter of time until Steam gets acquired by another company and then it's game over.
Speaking in inevitability isn’t very realistic regardless of the outcome as inevitably the solar system will collapse and steam will surely be out of business then, right?
What we do know is that steam is exceptionally profitable, at least according to their own internal metrics, at nearly 800k per employee. So they have no need to pump more, except “because more” but all we can do is consider that they haven’t yet and hope it continues.
I personally think Steam’s timeline to replacement is 100% based on how long they can maintain a positive relationship with their audience. I don’t disagree that a replacement will come, but we have seen other publishers spin up stores and largely fail because of shitty patterns so for now we are back to the “wait and see”. Their replacement will be the result of their own failures to meet and maintain a very vocal customer base