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Comment by firecall | Hacker News Reader

The Steam brand and mindshare is second to none in my experience.

My tweener kids will preference Steam over all other platforms. They would rather buy/re-buy, or pay more for a game on Steam than use another game launcher.

Their are games that are free to play with Xbox game pass, but they would rather buy and play them under Steam.

They have negative views on Epic, Ubisoft and so on. Blizzard/Battle.net aren't even on their radar.

They are mostly indifferent to MS/Xbox Store.

With Steam, the brand respect they have is five-stars!

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> The Steam brand and mindshare is second to none in my experience.

They've certainly come a long way. I remember when they first tied the release of CounterStrike to installing Steam (CS 1.6, 2002), and that was not received well. Online auth was spotty. People were not happy about having this extra software hogging their memory.

But Valve steadily improved it, and made a worthwhile value proposition.

It's worth comparing to Microsoft's incredibly clumsy and ill-fated "Games For Windows Live". At a macro level, why couldn't they repeat Valve's success? I suppose it's a management problem.

Hah, I remember that! My friends and I stayed on CounterStrike 1.5 for a good while to avoid having to install steam.

Microsoft actively discourages its Xbox employees from talking to customers.

Valve actively encourages talking to customers and helping them out.

(I've worked in both places. It's night and day in that respect).

Just looked this up. Valve also seems one of the few privately owned companies, not publicly traded as a stock. Maybe there's a connection.

> At a macro level, why couldn't they repeat Valve's success?

Because they lack the simple business mantra. Everyone is trying to copy Valve's monetary success without considering the good will expense.

GoG garnered a lot of good will by being DRM-free, which accounts for its mediocre success. Epic? They introduced exclusives to PC and, let me tell you, that shit doesn't fly with the PC gamer culture - Epic is where people go for Fortnite and free games. Microsoft Store? No mods, no interest. Ubisoft? Great if you like Denuvo.

Microsoft Store and Gamepass support mods now. At least a year I think.

It’s well earned. Steam is BS-free relative to the others on your list. Steam could degrade significantly in quality and customer satisfaction and still handily beat that lot.

It has, and it still does.

It’s a browser wrapper around a visibly slow site, and it’s far, far better than anything else but I’d rather use my real browser for those parts every time.

compare steam to epic if you want a real browser wrapper experience.

Have you seen how slower is the new authenticator app?

I'm the same, as a 30-something. Steam is so much better and Gabe has fostered my undying loyalty. He'd have to shoot my dog to stop me using Steam.

Piling on. And if Gabe shot your dog I would also stop using Steam.

The only potential contender for me would be GOG but their Linux support discourages any steps towards it. Steam all the way for now!

I loved GoG idea, but their resistance to steam deck and linux just lost me.

I play everything on the Deck now, so they literally lost me as a customer.

Which makes me angry, because I find insane that my 1000 games Steam library is fully locked when i'm playing one game, but we are 4 now...

> Which makes me angry, because I find insane that my 1000 games Steam library is fully locked when i'm playing one game, but we are 4 now...

FWIW, many games can be launched directly without Steam. There's also [0] for the rest depending on how you view things you might as well pirate the games at that pint.

[0] https://gitlab.com/Mr_Goldberg/goldberg_emulator

I bought 1000 games, definitely don't feel guilty. I know of some workarounds, the problem is I have to teach them to a 4 years old now .

I'll check the emulator. Does it run on the deck? I do 90% of my gaming on the deck now.

Edit: oh it's for multiplayer, I don't need it. I play only single player games, exception maybe for monster hunter, if you consider that multiplayer.

The steam deck is a steam machine, supporting it means supporting their direct and much more successful competitor. I understand the feeling since I have also gog games and a deck, I also understand why they don't want to do it

Yes and no. They are not in the hardware business at all, and they are losing customers because of it. So by supporting LINUX, which has been asked for ages, they will have the side effect of supporting Steam Deck and regain some customers. I don't think it's black and white as it looks.

There is family library sharing: https://store.steampowered.com/sharing/

I already use family sharing. But family sharing "locks" the library of the person you are borrowing from. On top of that, if you happen to have two copies of the game (1 for me, 1 for wife), there will still be no option to choose which library to lock, ending up with potentially the library the child want to use, already locked.

I appreciate family sharing, but it has some limitations that aren't amazing.

GOG is just "you are playing that one game". Way easier.

It's not just kids though ... I have free games on Epic and I honestly can't be bothered playing them. I've caught myself almost re-buying them as well.

> With Steam, the brand respect they have is five-stars!

It's so funny how this works. I remember when Steam came out (I was in HS) and it was extremely controversial. Everyone, and I mean everyone, hated it. "I need to start ANOTHER application to run my game?" It was slow, clunky, buggy, and basically a piece of garbage. It also started the anti-consumer aggressive software DRM trend (you basically couldn't share games anymore). In other words, it was a huge gamble by Valve.

There's few people I'd tag as "visionaries" in the software realm, but Gabe Newell is one of them. No idea how (maybe it was just luck), but he literally saw 10-15 years into the future. Very few people are able to do that: off the top of my head, I can only think of Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs, and Elon Musk.

Steam was 100% visionary. After Steam I realised everything would go online - I kept telling my dad to stop buying DVDs because I told him it would all become online and discs would be pointless.

Turns out it was like 10 years too early. That just shows you how early Valve was.

Except I'm not sure you were right. There is no online video service analogous to Steam where you can buy movies and then watch them forever or even while offline. It's all just streaming with a catalogue of titles that can be removed at any time.

Yeah turns out even that didn’t happen. Actually piracy is the closest we can get to a universal service.

> There is no online video service analogous to Steam where you can buy movies and then watch them forever or even while offline.

You've been able to do this for at least a decade, it's called the iTunes Store. I believe Amazon Prime lets you download movies now too.

Even more so now it is not pointless to own some nice CDs or DVDs.. You do not need internet connection.. just put it in the player and go.. still way easier than any spotify integration in modern hifi equipment that I have seen.

You're right, fortunately for steam all the rest of the gaming world became worst than having steam. Now the choice isn't between renting a game with DRM and needing another application to work or owning your game that you could copy , give or lend but between the former and the same + worse shit added like needing a second software or having exclusive

Oh yeah, I was pissed at the time. I held off playing HL2 for years because of it. I think I remember reading about a Steam easter egg where it accepted your old Half-Life box set codes. I tried it, and was pleasantly surprised. I bought the Orange Box, and never looked back.

Even years later, they quietly added HL Alyx to my library. I’m 100% skeptical of platforms like Steam, but Steam & Valve have won my trust.

Their unflagging support for Linux is just another piece of why I won’t budge from their platform.

> Their are games that are free to play with Xbox game pass, but they would rather buy and play them under Steam.

Why though?

My friend on steam are far larger than Xbox and with mult screens you can multi task while gaming.

A couple more reasons:

- Steam supports Linux and even for games that don't, Steam lets you pretend they do by automatically launching them via Proton. Sure, you can run other game stores through Wine/Proton but Steam makes this so damned convenient.

- I (and I assume most people posting here) have enough disposable income that game prices are mostly irrelevant and especially for indies I don't mind throwing them some more cash.

- I simply don't want to juggle multiple proprietary launchers. If anyone wants to get me off of Steam, build and open gaming ecosystem instead of trying to grift of more of the same.

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