Valve Conquered PC Gaming. What Comes Next? (ft.com) 24
Valve has achieved near-total dominance of PC gaming distribution through Steam, but the victory appears to have left the company adrift, Financial Times argues. The platform controls an estimated 70% of PC game sales while generating billions in revenue, yet Valve releases major new games at what observers call a "glacial pace."
Founder Gabe Newell has largely retreated from the company's operations, reportedly living at sea on one of his five ships and pursuing side projects like brain-computer interface startup Starfish Neuroscience. The much-anticipated third Half-Life game became "the video game equivalent of Samuel Beckett's Godot" before being quietly cancelled.
Attempts to challenge Steam have failed repeatedly. Epic Games Store, powered by Fortnite's success, "has failed to really impact Steam in any meaningful way," according to industry analysts. Microsoft runs what analysts describe as a "somewhat unambitious store," while EA shut down its Origin launcher earlier this year. Gaming analyst Michael Pachter notes that major tech companies could displace Valve "but nobody cares" enough to mount a serious challenge.
Court documents suggest Steam's revenues will exceed $10 billion next year, leaving Valve with unprecedented profits but unclear direction for a company that appears to have run out of worlds to conquer.
Founder Gabe Newell has largely retreated from the company's operations, reportedly living at sea on one of his five ships and pursuing side projects like brain-computer interface startup Starfish Neuroscience. The much-anticipated third Half-Life game became "the video game equivalent of Samuel Beckett's Godot" before being quietly cancelled.
Attempts to challenge Steam have failed repeatedly. Epic Games Store, powered by Fortnite's success, "has failed to really impact Steam in any meaningful way," according to industry analysts. Microsoft runs what analysts describe as a "somewhat unambitious store," while EA shut down its Origin launcher earlier this year. Gaming analyst Michael Pachter notes that major tech companies could displace Valve "but nobody cares" enough to mount a serious challenge.
Court documents suggest Steam's revenues will exceed $10 billion next year, leaving Valve with unprecedented profits but unclear direction for a company that appears to have run out of worlds to conquer.
Why does there have to be a next? (Score:5, Insightful)
I mean the answers are already known, Valve already said they are expanding Proton and SteamOS but really this is MBA style brain rot that says you can't just be a company that provides a service and provide that service well and at a reasonable profit. There must be more, you will grow forever.
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nah, this will soon come crashing down as the enshitification of commercial games continues. I already won't buy games as most aren't worth the price and there's free alternatives like Fortnite. if i really want a game i wait until the price seems reasonable and affordable even if that means waiting for years, the side benefits are there's more content, most of the bugs are squashed and the drama is history, it seems unethical to support classist corporations in any fashion especially financially in my view
Re:Why does there have to be a next? (Score:5, Interesting)
Steam is reason PC gaming has the "wait until the price seems reasonable", we forget that didn't used to be a thing until Steam Sale days.
Privately held; indie devs (Score:2)
nah, this will soon come crashing down as the enshitification of commercial games continues.
Valve itself is NOT publicly traded. There are no shareholders to whom the value needs to be shifted.
This explains (in parts) why Valve has been a little bit less shitty than most other companies.
It also means Valve's own product (Steam, SteamDeck, upcoming Deckard, etc.) are slightly less likely to be enshitified
(e.g.: whereas most corporations try to shove AI in any of their product, the only news you'll see regarding Vavle and AI is Valve making it mandatory to label games that uses AI-generated assets)
if i really want a game i wait until the price seems reasonable and affordable even if that means waiting for years, the side benefits are there's more content, most of the bugs are squashed and the drama is history, it seems unethical to support classist corporations in any fashion especially financially in my view
A
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this is only true about public companies or at least companies with a board breathing down their neck and making them hit profit targets.
Valve doesn't have to, it's basically a Gabe's hobby project at this stage. the fine FT folks don't understand businesses-turned-hobby-projects, they only understand making more money from money. funny innit
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Something with: any one who believes in infinite growth in a finite world is a madman
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I think SteamOS is the big "what comes next". They dominate PC gaming, but they're locked out of consoles. They're trying to turn consoles into open devices where people can run the Steam client and buy games from them.
Why does anything have to come "Next"? (Score:5, Informative)
Craigslist has operated for many years doing the same thing, without changing a thing. Challengers have come and gone, and yet here it sits. Since there's no objective definition on "Maximize profits", it can literally just keep doing what it is doing, responding to or positioning itself to deal with challenges, but why do anything else? It's a good service.
What's next? (Score:3)
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I think that's what they are complaining about in TFS, but is that actually a goal here? Game development is nothing more than a side hustle. All of valve including the team that does lawyering, support, HR, manages game licenses, advertising, and develops Steam, to say nothing of the VR APIs is an order of magnitude smaller than Bethesda, who are themselves an order of magnitude smaller than other AAA studios.
Half-Life doesn't have a development team behind it, just a dude who is bored with his other work.
AI and robotics (Score:2)
And biotech. We have a lot to advance in biotech, we can't cure cancer or dementia. Curing dementia should be a priority given how many old politicians we have.
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If you study any field enough to know who the right people are, then you can invest in it. For example Elon Musk hired people like Tom Mueller --an experienced propulsion engineer, to build the first rocket engine for SpaceX. OpenAI was started by people without much AI experience but hired people like Ilya Sutskever who had worked on projects like AlexNet. Elon Musk started Neuralink without any training on brain-computer-interface by consulting/hiring people from Krishna Shenoy's lab.
Sometimes it's a matt
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The screams of (Score:5, Insightful)
Remember: it's still DRM (Score:2)
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Moving to digital made games feel less like things and more like experiences; I buy them so that I can play them and after that I don't need them.
This is actually a much bigger shift in game design than DRM. Many profitable games today make their profit by continuously providing some service, whether it's new content, game play modes, matchmaking, hosting or in some cases, completion of promised features and bug fixes.
I no longer buy games the way I bought a chess set - buy once, play forever. Now I'm expecting games to continually improve, with more content and features coming out every few weeks or months. I didn't buy Genshin, I subscribed to the
Proton for desktop apps (Score:3, Insightful)
Valve Index (Score:1)
Money lovers crying!! (Score:2)
So a financial journal is crying because there is a huge company, making tons of money and not caring about being even bigger!! and worse, they refuse to go public and share those profits with the poor and sad greedy "investors"!!
Don't worry, Valve is good, games are release when ready, steamdeck, linux, proton are the current battle (and winning) and people that work there are happy. Valve owners are also happy and don't care about other people crying for a share of their business, they have enough money a
How about releasing SteamOS 3 to the public ? (Score:2)
Start going after the desktop market , or at least some of it, with Steam OS 3 public release?
What's next ? Dumping all the profits on AI (Score:1)
Someone is mad they are not pursuing current investment trends. It's some cash that won't go into their pockets.
Instead they are spending it on Linux ecosystem and niche hardware. That's madness !