this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2024
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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.
This doesn't make any sense. The reason Valve hasn't been acquired is because it's privately owned and not up for sale, not because it doesn't have "enough profit". In fact it's extremely profitable, for all we know.
Sure, another company could come along and build a competitor. It's happened already multiple times, and Steam is doing just fine despite some major titles these days being exclusive to other platforms. Unless Steam drops the ball on something big time, it's unlikely that people will move to another platform en masse, especially one that is less focussed on consumer interests. No-one can just come in and "take capital away" from Steam, whatever that means, by building a competitor that sells advertising space and "monetizes user data" — they need users first.
... And then there's the fact that Steam is already "selling advertiser space" today. Games don't just get featured on their storefront because Gabe likes them. They make deals with publishers for this.
The idea is less that someone makes a competitor and then they actually compete. The idea is that a competitor service is able to lock away one or several big titles, like, say, overwatch, league, fortnite, or whatever else, behind exterior launchers that are maybe more free to do data harvesting. Then, that competitor theoretically eats away more and more of the largest market share, and tries to drive those users from just using their platform for a single game, to maybe using multiple games, maybe with something like a games pass or with free weekend deals or whatever. Once they have that market share, they can give developers better margins, since they'll be selling customer data at a profit and steam won't be, maybe with some sort of exclusivity contract baked in, purposely undercutting steam. Then, steam's been put on the back foot, and the rest is just kind of what has happened to streaming services.
It's a market, markets trend towards short term gains strategies over long term gains strategies because having faster short term gains means you can more easily crush your competition. It's like age of empires 2, the first couple minutes of the game is the part that matters the most. That being said, steam has been around for quite some time, and has a good amount of brand loyalty and goodwill built up, and that doesn't seem to be slowing down anytime soon as they keep one-upping their competition with actual improvements to their platform, like family sharing, screencasting, big picture mode, increased controller support and reassigning, and a full standalone version of linux, that basically all their competitors seem incapable of. So maybe steam has enough of a headstart that, even with a long term gains strategy, even with a, basically, non-evil mentality, they can stay afloat. Who can say.
You're of course right with the exclusivity argument — that's a very real possibility, and yet Microsoft has tried it with Call of Duty, one of the most popular franchises ever, and saw very little success with it, resulting in them putting it back on Steam years later. If I were to guess why attempts like this have failed in the past, I would say that Steam is so dominant over the PC gaming market today that not even large franchises going exclusive attract enough of a user base to offset the loss of customers that aren't buying games only because they're not on Steam. Add to this the additional overhead of developing and maintaining a competing store front, and the cost-benefit analysis leans clearly towards just being on Steam and accepting their cut of sales. The exclusivity tactic clearly failed even for big titles like CoD, so it definitely won't work for smaller ones. And we're not even talking about cutting into the indie game market, which would require making very attractive exclusivity offers to many smaller studios, all for acquiring exclusivity on titles in the hope that they'll be the next big hit — a very high risk strategy that likely results in a lot of sunken cost short-term.
When we talk about "selling customer data", I think we need to look in more detail into what this would actually mean in practice. It's very unlikely that any online storefront could legally literally "sell your personal data" like address etc. that you would enter presumably as part of the payment process to third parties. That's just illegal almost everywhere in the world, and certainly in the largest PC gaming markets. It wouldn't lead to significant revenue either, because raw data like that just isn't very valuable. Instead, I suppose what people mean when they say this (in the context of companies like Google or Facebook) is just the practice of selling advertising services that use the data they have on people to advertisers, who can then target their ads at highly specific segments, improving their return on ad spend. The actual private data though stays with the entity that collected it — because it's what actually gives them the edge on the market; it allows them to offer better ad targeting than competitors.
How would this apply to Steam or a potential competing storefront? Barely. I assume no-one is arguing that a steam competitor could launch a generic advertising network that could stand against Google or Facebook, so we're probably talking about advertising within the storefront itself. Steam today already collects information on your interests and customizes the store based on that, plus presumably your location, age group etc. — so they're pretty much already using your "personal information" to the extent possible in this context. How else could a competitor realistically monetize personal information?
I wouldn't say that this is the case when we're talking about trying to eat into the market share of a dominant entity like Steam. Sure, potential competitors can make short-term plays that cut away some market share, but such strategies are expensive, risky, and alone likely don't lead towards a significantly improved position long-term (exhibit A, again: COD being exclusive to Battle.net).
For better or worse (usually worse), toppling a near-monopoly like Steam is extremely hard for players with big cash, and practically impossible for independent competitors. This is especially true for products that are inherently sticky, like Steam, where people have curated large libraries over decades. The only reason Steam's dominant position is not hurting the consumer is because their product works well and is in many ways very pro-consumer.
I don't have the article on hand, but there is a publication from a steam store employee explaining exactly how to get your game onto the front page. The gist of it is that you don't have to pay Valve. It's about community engagement (your publisher, I guess).
I've read that, IIRC. It was about getting featured organically though. Steam runs promotions for certain game series or even publisher catalogues frequently, with large custom graphics and usually a sale. Obviously I have no way to know for sure, but I can't imagine that Valve doesn't get itself paid for those.
I'd drop Steam if that happened. There are other ways to get games and managers like Lutris make organizing them easy. I'm sure Valve knows this and with how long they've been successful, fucking with gamers would not make sense. Look how it's working or for some of the bigger gaming companies recently.