Steam Should Be a Seperate Company?

simoniker writes "As part of a larger in-depth interview over at Gamasutra, 3D Realms' Scott Miller has called for Valve's Steam digital distribution service to spin off as a separate company, suggesting: 'I would rather there emerge a leader in the market that isn't associated with a game company.' He further adds: 'I'm not a big fan of using Steam, because I'm not a fan of a strong competitor of ours having access to our download stats and revenue totals. I'd rather keep that private. Not only that, but we're lining their pockets as well.'"

sepArate

[Anonymous Coward]

SepArate not sepErate, numbnuts!

Re:Seems like an exercise in stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

But control would be separate, so the spin off would do things in its own interest and not valves(else law suits would ensue).

Re:It could be better..

[PingSpike]

Is that really good for valve though?

Steam was a huge risk, and had a rocky start. Valve basically leveraged the power of its Half Life franchise to semi-force market adoption of steam. A lesser title just plain couldn't have accomplished that. Now that all the risk as paid off you've got other publishers, that didn't have to risk anything, crying that they aren't getting the benefits.

Valve is 3D Realms competitor...but that goes the other way too. They're Valve's competitor as well. Why *should* they turn over the keys to the castle they built? They might end up locking themselves out!

In the last few years the number of big publishers has dwindled and most publishers only want the 'safe' titles. There's lots of small shops that are chomping at the bit to get what steam is offering. It seems they're doing pretty well and have already started to amass a pretty solid selection of different titles from different smaller developers.

Regardless, I think the calls for a divestiture are pretty premature given how young Steam and even valve itself are.