Why are there no competitors to steam?

jsmoke

jsmoke

jsmoke

Soldato
Joined
17 Jun 2012
Posts
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I guess the answer is why would we need another, or, it would cost ridiculous amounts to run servers/bandwidth costs, however I would have though somebody would have tried it?
 
What do you mean by competitor to Steam? Steam is a digital platform for games, there are plenty of them around...
 
There are, but Steam is more popular because A) many games incorporate steamworks, B) steam keys are generally cheaper to find and C) most people have most of their games on Steam. I welcome competition, but EA and Ubisoft (and soon GOG) need to be aggressive in things like pricing to wrestle the market share away from steam.
 
100m+ & climbing rapidly user accounts no-one else can compete even though Steam is not universally loved due to the large cut they take from each sale. Its unbeatable. Sony/MS cannot compete only copy it after the event. PC is the master race 1 true gaming platform to rule them all ;)

If you want to sell a PC game in great quantity (except for Ubisoft who refuse to sell their newer games on Steam as Valve disagree about the £49.99 price point) Steam is the most viable place to sell the game.
 
Steam charges top whack for games, unless it has a sale.

You can buy games that will play on Steam far cheaper else where.
 
AWPC said:
If you want to sell a PC game in great quantity (except for Ubisoft who refuse to sell their newer games on Steam as Valve disagree about the £49.99 price point) Steam is the most viable place to sell the game.
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I agree with them - anyone who is happy to pay £50 for a PC game (unless it's a super-dooper extra special edition with some physical goodies), deserves to be ripped off IMO!
 
AWPC said:
If you want to sell a PC game in great quantity (except for Ubisoft who refuse to sell their newer games on Steam as Valve disagree about the £49.99 price point) Steam is the most viable place to sell the game.
Click to expand...

I seriously doubt Valve would ever attempt to argue/set the price of another publishers game.

I think there's a lot more to it than that. Ubisoft were probably trying to reduce their 30% fee to Valve.
 
steam started early seen the vision. cant knock them for that. others now follow but are late to the game.

there are many other platforms. Origin id say is next best.

never buy keys from steam just get from game key store online :p
 
Well I see that UBI pulled their games from steam, as far as I know steam generally charges 30% for games although that can vary, now believe this or not a high end return from retail sales is 2%.
 
Before Steam, 99% of PC games were on CDs. Getting updates/patches for the game was a nightmare because you had to use a variety of sites and there were incompatibility issues. Adding expansions to games was also often problematic - I have game version 1.3, expansion needs version 1.3b or it won't work etc. There were also issues with validating the CD key online and many other problems.

When Steam came out, Valve used it to simplify the patching/update process of their own games. Later on, they realised that there's nothing stopping them from applying the same rules for any game and that there was no real competitor on the market for such a platform. As time went by, Steam became less buggy, faster, more streamlined which attracted more customers and more developers/publishers. When they started doing holiday sales, Steam's popularity exploaded and it's been growing since.

Since then, there have been some competitors but even if they do everything right, they can never truly compete with Steam, there's only so much you can improve in an online gaming platform and people generally dislike change (something similar happened with Windows and Google).

Long story short, Steam became popular when it had no competition, it does its job decently so any improvements its competitors offer are too small to cause an influx of customers to their product.
 
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I think steam needs some competition. I'm not happy with their refund policy to be honest. I believe their cut of sales also forces publishers to price their games quite highly on the platform.
 
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