Valve Conquered PC Gaming. What Comes Next? (ft.com) 47
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.
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we forget that didn't used to be a thing until Steam Sale days.
Err what? Gamestop, and companies selling physical media regularly had discounts and sales. Steam (the first online marketplace) happened to also be the first to introduce sales. It was literally a continuation of the normal.
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Buying a used physical media, which was variable and not nearly as common for PC titles was a whole different mindset than digital copies and sales.
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Tried to buy Civ 6 anthology during the current summer sales.
For some reason my card was blocked it seems (according to the support). They have no visibility when and why it happened. And that card has been used on occasion at steam (and epic / gog / various other online merchants) without issue.
And support can't do anything about it. Suggested I use another card / paypal, etc.
I refuse to change a perfectly working card for no reason. Especially since I use that card specifically for online stuff only, and
Privately held; indie devs (Score:3)
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
Games that get delisted after a couple years (Score:2)
if i really want a game i wait until the price seems reasonable and affordable even if that means waiting for years
Unless it's something like DuckTales Remastered that gets delisted from Steam after a couple years on the market. This particular game was an adaptation of a Disney product identity, and Capcom's license from Disney had expired.
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i wouldn't support an evil corporation like disney in any way, i never buy anything from unethical people
Re:Why does there have to be a next? (Score:4, Interesting)
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
Re:Why does there have to be a next? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Valve from what I can tell is firmly with Microsoft in the thought that "consoles", as these proprietary bits of hardware, are soon to be over. The console of the future is the Steam Deck which is just a generic PC underneath. SteamOS is the thing that gives it that console-like experience which is what the PC market lacks.
In a backhanded way this will probably end up as the biggest moment for Linux as a desktop in our time and I've always believed what desktop Linux was the right type of corporate overlo
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As far as I'm concerned, Linux need not expand anymore on the desktop. Let the 99% stay on Mac and Windows. Please. I'd hate to have to move to BSD just to avoid Linux becoming MS-lite.
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As a developer, they're contracting. Their passion for games is gone. They've been choked out by the success of their own storefront.
Yes, they've got Deadlock in perpetual alpha. It'll come out eventually. Competitors looking to steal its thunder (such as Overwatch 2's Stadium mode) are already on the move. By the time Deadlock finally launches, it may be an also-ran in an industry reshaped by its very existence.
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It's the FT. They're pressuring Valve to go public, so that their finance friends can suck it dry.
It's kinda hilarious to accuse Valve of stagnation just after they created a new gaming market with the Steam Deck.
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Valve should be developing games, but hey, at least they are putting their money to good use.
Epic puts it's money towards Unreal Engine. That's fine. But it's store rubbish. It's not the content, it's the CEF (that steam also uses) that some how requires 4x as much memory and CPU and is slow as molasses.
Steam's worst issues are issues it's had forever, cross-screen hiDPI is broken. I have to drag steam from my 4K 125dpi to 4K 150dpi screen back and forth to make the menus not appear as black. But it doesn't
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This is EXACTLY what came to my mind as I read the Title and Summary. WTF people? Are they mentally ill? Running a profitable business is NOT enough, you have to control the entire world to be considered successful. Fuck that noise. It is a death cult.
Why does anything have to come "Next"? (Score:4, 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.
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As an European: what is a craigslist and why would I need one? Seriously, nobody uses it around here.
What's next? (Score:5, Funny)
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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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Re:Remember: it's still DRM (Score:4, Interesting)
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 dev team.
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I love this way of putting it. "I subscribed to the dev team."
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This is why I no longer buy games at all. I've got a 40-year collection of stuff I can "play forever" so I don't need any of the new games with all their DRM crap.
Receipt bug in early Steam (Score:2)
I sorta think of it as the "always online" issue, which in the past I thought was absolutely unacceptable for a single player game, and now I mostly don't care because I'm always online anyways.
That created a problem for dial-up users and laptop users back in the day. That was solved in two ways. First, Valve fixed the bug in early Steam that was causing it to fail to store purchase receipts for offline mode. (Users at the time were experiencing this as a need to be online for switching to offline mode to work.) Second, the home Internet market as a whole phased out dial-up, and even in areas not served by fiber, cable, or DSL, dial-up users largely switched to satellite Internet.
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Technically, Steam mandates SOME kind of copy protection on all of their games, even if it's something as flimsy as Steamguard. You can't release a DRM-free title on Steam (that I'm aware of).
That being said, barebones Steamguard is a lot better than a full-blown implementation of Denuvo.
No, they do not mandate DRM (Score:2)
Proton for desktop apps (Score:5, Insightful)
Valve Index (Score:2)
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 !
Umm, Steam.. (Score:4, Informative)
is doing great for them. They should just keep that going and find innovations where they can. They need not personally make another game ever since they have their market place for more games then anyone will ever need in their life time.
I'm not seeing any problems here at all.
Origin is not dead (Score:2)
It was replaced by the EA app. Ubisoft Uplay is not dead either; it's now called Ubisoft Connect. Neither EA nor Ubisoft wants to give up on their apps because they would have to give Valve 30% give or take of their earnings, and no one wants that. Just my 2 cents.
Why do they care? (Score:2)
Valve is a private company, they can do whatever they want or feel like it's worth their time.