Steam gets almost all the PC games sales now..How do you feel about this ??

chaparral

chaparral

chaparral

Caporegime
Joined
27 Nov 2005
Posts
25,492
Location
Guernsey
About 8+ years ago the money from sales of PC games use to go to 1000's of different PC games retailers (shops).
But now with most PC game sales only being bought through steam all that money is mainly only going to a single company...

Do you feel this is really fair ??







(This question is nothing to do about the money that still goes to the game developers)
 
It might not be fair but they offer the best service, way above and beyond that of the competition, so it's not a surprise.

Of course, due to their popularity it now makes it a very difficult challenge for anyone to start claiming back some of the market. I know I don't buy from anyone else (bar gog.com) simply because I prefer having my library in one place. Microsoft could have done it a couple of years ago had they bothered to put any effort into GFWL, they were probably the only company that could have done it.
 
Funnily enough, plenty of people buy steam games outside of steam, on amazon, greenmangaming and so on. And from those sales, Valve does not get any money, despite providing bandwidth and all that. And yet it is brilliant for Valve, since they retain customers, and it is brilliant for those other shops too, since they sell "air", just a few numbers in a steam key.

And Valve being the most successful is completely logical, and IDEAL, outcome, because they are the best. And thankfully, on free markets the best ones are the most successful. And if they stop being the best, customers will start using someone else, even if slowly in the beginning.
 
Steam has thrived because physical retail stores ignored PC gaming and other companies were too slow to offer their own equivalent services. It's only really been the last couple of years that other websites have started being competitive with Steam.

It'd be interesting to find out how many physical PC games a retailer like, say, Amazon ships. I imagine it's a lot more than people think.
 
Steam is okay but often overpriced which when selling a digital download is a bit of a pee take.

Personally wouldn't pay over the odds just to have everything under one menu. One shortcut on your desktop would surely be just as convenient.
 
I don't like this, and never have. Steam has a monopoly on the PC retail market and this is good for nobody but Steam. Just check the prices of new releases on Steam - they are usually more expensive than traditional retailers despite nothing like the overheads. You can't blame them from a business perspective but it amazes me that consumers lap this up and even pipe up to defend Steam when people like the EU say 'Hang on a minute...'.

The digital distribution model was supposed to mean lower prices for all because of cutting out all of the supply chain costs. But it didn't result in this at all.

Now we have a situation where we pay more for our games than ever before* and technically, though the EULA isn't tested in law, we don't even 'own' them in the same way we did before. We essentially lease them from Steam. Who can bar access to our entire games library for a myriad of reasons including not agreeing to updated terms and conditions.

But all your games are 'in one place' I guess so thats fine.

* Except old stuff in 'Steam Sales'. Wow. For new releases, it's big money.

The only real benefit to me of Steam is not having to faff around finding patches. But then all that really is, is a fix for a problem that shouldn't have occured anyway - the 'ship it broken, let the customer test it and fix it through patch' thing. Great.
 
Last edited:
stuartw_b said:
Personally wouldn't pay over the odds just to have everything under one menu. One shortcut on your desktop would surely be just as convenient.
Click to expand...
I keep all my 350+ steam games installed

That would be a lot of shortcuts on my desktop ....;)
 
Last edited:
I buy more games from GreenManGaming, Simplygames and Amazon US than I do Steam these days. Steam for me and I suppose others, is more a place to store all your games in one easy to access home.

Most internet game shops sell Steam serial keys for most games much cheaper than the platform itself, it's never been better for us :p
 
I agree with Fox, the Steam sales are great and all but their 'regular' and new release prices are generally very poor, they're no different to the RRP you'd see in physical stores.

When you've got places like GMG offering pre-orders like Tomb Raider for the same price as Steam but with £7 cashback or £10 store credit, it makes you realise how overpriced Steam often is.
 
[TW]Fox;23684854 said:
I don't like this, and never have. Steam has a monopoly on the PC retail market and this is good for nobody but Steam. Just check the prices of new releases on Steam - they are usually more expensive than traditional retailers despite nothing like the overheads. You can't blame them from a business perspective but it amazes me that consumers lap this up and even pipe up to defend Steam when people like the EU say 'Hang on a minute...'.
Click to expand...

Hasn't it been established in the past that Steam don't set the prices, the distributors do?

I can't speak for others but I've never bought a full priced (so called) triple A title from Steam. My maximum expenditure tends to be about €25 so 50% of the normal Steam new release price.
 
You guys are making it sound like steam is the only place where you can buy most of the games when there are so many other places to buy keys from.
 
Technically having shortcuts outside of Steam should be more convenient in the sense that you could just launch them without having to load Steam first (this would have course be in the hypothetical situation where you didn't need to use Steam DRM of course i.e. you could launch the game directly). In terms of a games launching 'portal', Steam is incredibly bloated (of course it does a lot more, but I'm purely responding the comment about having a lot of shortcuts).
 
Its a case of they are the most established. Much like wow when it comes to mmos. They also offer the best service, customer service, sales and dont constantly blame everything on piracy.
Even if ea had of pushed origin or ubisoft pushed uplay at the same time steam came around. Steam would still be top dog simply because ita better in every way.
 
Antar Bolaeisk said:
Hasn't it been established in the past that Steam don't set the prices, the distributors do?
Click to expand...

I'd be stunned if that's really the case, they're obviously going to have some influence because they're the retailer. If GMG, Gamefly etc are able to sell new releases fairly cheaply, there's no reason Steam can't.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom