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Comment by dangero | Hacker News Reader

It’s funny because some places actually go the other way —- they start off only selling their own stuff and then they invite others into the marketplace. This is one way to overcome the marketplace chicken egg problem of having both buyers and sellers. This would stifle that.

Valve launched Steam originally only with its own games then invited others to join. Now it’s a completely open marketplace.

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I mean, Valve's games (as few and far between they are these days) did and still do get preferential treatment. It just so happens that because Valve doesn't really make games anymore, Steam works out being mostly fair. But if Valve went and released HL3 tomorrow, you can bet it'll be at the top of the store for half the year.

Would it? Alyx didn't really overstate its presence earlier this year either.

Alyx is also a VR game. Bit more niche.

Steam has a very powerful recommendation engine, and knowledge about the hardware of its users. I would be surprised if they weren't able to focus their marketing to VR owners if they wanted.

In the past year, I've used my steam account for VR games 50% of the time roughly and they still didn't really push Alyx all that much.

That said given I mostly only do short game sessions , maybe they figured that I wouldn't be that interested in it?

How short? The chapters in Alyx average a bit over an hour each but nothing stops you from only doing half a chapter.

oh I didn't know that, I somehow thought the chapters would be much longer.

I've mostly played VR games in 30 minutes sessions about. I get dizzy beyond that and it's the time I've got available anyhow :)

I'm not sure the comparison is apt. There is a lot less competition in the space that Steam occupies. If I buy Half Life, I'm more likely to buy another similar FPS, not less likely.

Artifact is a Valve game [1], and on it's release it was advertised no more then any other game in the strategy category. It has a banner at the top for a new release as they do for any other game. And that was about it.

[1] - https://store.steampowered.com/app/583950/Artifact/

Not to say HL3 wouldn't get more attention, I don't believe Valve treats their marketplace similar to Amazon.

To be fair, Artifact's announcement even before it ever got to Steam was met with a literal chorus of "BOO"s [1]. It wouldn't be [2] the best measure to prove Valve wouldn't favor its own game.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0qZTS38cjw [2]: 6.4k likes vs 81k dislikes at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DA5mY8XqrHU

I think the dislikes came after the initial launch. I remember everyone being super hyped about Artifact, but then the game came out, and they didn't really like it. (I also bought it, played a few games, bought a few decks, and decided Hearthstone was better.)

The game lost all of its players (something like 30 active daily users at one point), and Valve said they were rewriting it. They called it "the long haul", and that is where most of the dislikes came from. People paid for the game, paid for cards, and then were told they couldn't play anymore. The community was furious.

Sometime recently they did release a beta of the new version. I have a beta key but wasn't all that interested in trying it. I imagine most people feel the same way.

Honestly, I think the game was so bad that pushing it on everyone on Steam wouldn't have improved their numbers. It came at a very bad time -- card games were on the way out, auto battlers were on the way in. They gave up on Artifact and focused on Dota Underlords, and probably made the right decision. (I have not followed the auto battlers at all, so I don't know if people like Underlords or not. Maybe it's another Artifact, I'm not the right person to ask.)

The tricky thing is that it would probably be at the top of the store even if Valve didn’t put it there; a lot of gamers would be thrilled to see HL3 released. Teasing out the difference between fair and unfair market behavior here is non-trivial.

It would stifle the specific marketplaces where, when they "open up" to third parties, wish to retain arbitrary special privileges for first party offerings.

There's a reasonableness metric there that needs to be evaluated. Nothing is simple. If you're giving in-house apps special privileges because you've implemented some core functionality using mostly generic APIs and just a few special hooks.. that's one thing.

If you're giving in-house apps special access to random "nice to have" things, or participation in various contexts (e.g. sales, promotions, etc.).. in order to boost your stuff against others, that's another thing.

The details matter.

Amazon was pretty similar. Selling other people’s stuff makes financial sense because you don’t carry inventory. It makes an accounting cost center a profit center.

They should spin off at that point. The original inventors can holds stock and earn return, but the platform would have to operate at arm's length from the original product.

But the same is true for amazon.

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