Valve conquered PC gaming – what comes next?

https://archive.ph/dmHDP

Hopefully nothing is next for Valve except for continuing to improve what they already have. Valve is very rare in the corporate space; they never went public, and so are providing a good service to customs rather than squeezing every last dime out of customers on behalf of shareholders. The moment Gabe Newell is replaced, or Valve goes public there will be a massive problem with PC gaming.

The view exposed in the article is all wrong. It is MBA-analyst levels of wrong.

Valve didn't conquer anything. Valve defended PC gaming when everybody else including Microsoft, had abandoned it, and focused on consoles.

Windows XP had amazing gaming APIs, like DirectInput: still superior to XInput after all these years, because of more axis and better FFB support; and DirectSound3D, which enabled hardware accelerated 3D positional audio.

These APIs were declared obsolete by Microsoft, in favour of XBox-compatible inferior APIs, which were feature equivalent to the APIs in the inferior hardware of the first XBox console. Inferior not in absolute terms, but inferior to what a PC was capable of.

And that was just the beginning. Microsoft focused and pushed for their console, and most AAA game studios followed suit. Consoles have been incredibly profitable, so their gambit has paid off.

PC Gaming was for old nerds, old game mechanics like FPS (Counter Strike) and RTS (Starcraft) and indie gaming. Valve kept the dream alive. Valve kept open computing alive, in a sense, as consoles are closed computing, and in some cases you need expensive proprietary licenses just to produce a game for one of the consoles, like Nintendo.

So no, it was not that Valve released Steam in the right moment. Valve is a big reason PC gaming is alive and thriving. They believed in PC gaming when all the big companies went the console way.

Valve saved PC gaming.

Then Microsoft and the AAA game studios took notice and we have the XBox store on Windows, and many game launchers, but they are opportunistic companies, who would destroy PC gaming if they could, to get their console profits up.

Valve has a golden opportunity, with little downside, to go next level:

Extend SteamOS to seamlessly support other hardware beyond AMD (Nvidia, Intel), and, also offer a simple and clean Linux desktop environment on it.

No one wants to upgrade from Windows 10. A free, a fully-featured Linux OS SteamOS would put a Steam Store on every PC with relatively little effort and huge potential gains.

It really depends whether VALVe remains the Benevolent Dictatorship of GabeN or sells out, goes public or something.

In the latter case, what happens is the Extraction Vultures roll in, pitch some flashy slides about innovation and then progressively ruin PC gaming.

That can't be allowed to happen, so therefore, VALVe can't be allowed to monopolise this market.

From the article:

> it basically prints money.

Is "next" needed, then?

(the title is a hook - the article is overall a nice coverage of valve, worth a read)

I have heard from other internet comments (with no sources) that Gabe is planning on handing Valve off to his son when the time comes. Does anyone know if there is any truth to this?

Hopefully some strong regulation against unregulated gambling? As much good as Valve did they are also the source of some original sins, like the battlepass system and the whole skin gambling market. It's a total black market with shady companies all around the world leeching on the Steam API without any oversight from anyone.

> “Anybody who wants to put Valve out of business could do so, but nobody cares,” argues Michael Pachter, a gaming industry analyst at Wedbush Securities.

This is untrue; many tried. Almost every major publisher has its own launcher. The problem with them all is they absolutely suck. Even Epic Games Store, the biggest competitor with the most money poured into it, is ridiculously bad in almost every way. Aside from the lack of network effect, it just misses most of the QOL features, is slow, ugly, and very unpleasant to use. Almost universal agreement in the PC gaming community is that EGS is a bootloader for free games that it throws at the user. Every time I use EGS, I am constantly amazed by how bad it is, despite probably tens of millions of investments.

The second point that the article completely misinterprets is Microsoft's role. Microsoft (Xbox specifically) is hands down the closest company to beating Steam in its own game. PC game pass provides a constant stream of very good games available on day one for dirt cheap. The work that Microsoft is doing on optimizing Windows for games in general and for handheld consoles in particular is very promising (see Xbox Ally X). This is the threat that Valve faces. Not just a better store, but the absence of a store and "buying games" in general. For example, I intended to buy The Outer Worlds 2 on launch. Now that I know it will be available day one on Game Pass, there is almost zero chance that I will buy it on Steam or anywhere else.

Steam's anti-piracy measure is being better, convenient, adding massive value to gamers.

Pessimistic Me:

Nothing. They are too comfortable. They are stuck in rainy cloudy Bellevue Washington, in a skyscraper with limited space. Approx the same employee count as decades ago. Neither Epic's games store, EA's Origin, Microsoft's Games for Windows Live, nor Amazon's, was able to dethrone them. They tried to branch out into Movies and Music, they used to sell movies on there but removed the ability in 2019 because no one was using it. Looking back now, it even threw me off, but it's obvious now... People don't want to download movies, they want to stream them like YouTube videos. I'm sure people would want that with games too but that's difficult to do right now. Video games are an emotion, music and movies and books and comics are too. If I were them I'd try to expand Steam so it sells all types of media content. I think it's a mistake not to.

Optimistic Me:

I was worried about them about a decade ago because anytime you think you are "too big to fail" you set yourself up for long term failure and "getting comfortable" is usually what begin's a company's decline. But they've made some really good decisions to branch out. Like getting into hardware. They've got the Steam Link, Steam Machine, Steam Controller, their VR headset "the Index", and their handheld Steam Deck.

So I guess Valve's a hardware company too now.

I do have some concerns that other companies will manage to take legal actions that harm Valve's user experience without actually helping consumers.

They have a near-monopoly on PC gaming, which sounds bad at face value. But the only reason for that is that they've continually developed an excellent platform that helps connect people with games that they want to play, and then be able to play them. There are very few marketplaces that strike the right balance of presenting you with options you want, while not artificially getting in your way. (In other words, it's not very enshittified.)

There's nothing stopping someone from never buying another game on Steam, and moving to another marketplace on PC, unlike the store monopolies on consoles and mobile devices.