
So You Want to Compete with Steam - eugenekolo2
http://www.fortressofdoors.com/so-you-want-to-compete-with-steam/
======
krapp
Really, Steam seems to be the closest thing Windows has to an
application/package manager[0].

It's almost kind of a shame that it's more or less entirely for games and game
development software - something like it with sourceforge/github integration
or an API for general purpose Windows installers would be nice.

[0]notwithstanding whatever Windows 10 might have, because I still refuse to
touch that, but it's probably not as good as the Steam client.

~~~
mehrdadn
> Really, Steam seems to be the closest thing Windows has to an
> application/package manager

I don't understand this obsession with package managers. You guys really have
less trouble with package managers than Windows installers? It was literally
just 2-3 days ago I was trying to update Ubuntu and I couldn't, because of
some stupid error (I don't remember exactly) along the lines of "libgl1-mesa-
glx depends libglapi-mesa XX.YY but ZZ.WW is present" (again: I don't remember
the error exactly). And no matter which packages I tried to
upgrade/fix/uninstall/whatever or in what order I tried it, it wouldn't budge.
I guess the package dependency graph was somehow impossible to satisfy? I
assume because different packages required different versions of the same
package? This was not the first time I've ran into problems like this...
eventually I just wiped it and restored from a backup. (Which I had made from
moments earlier, because, well, did I mention this wasn't the first time this
has happened?) To say I don't see what all the fuss and obsession with package
managers is about is putting it very... mildly.

~~~
majewsky
> You guys really have less trouble with package managers than Windows
> installers?

Hell yeah. I remember when I had to set aside entire weekends to reinstall a
Windows machine. These days, when I need to reinstall one of my Linux boxes, I
just fire up the Arch installer, and instead of installing the "base" package
group as the manual instructs you, I install my configuration package for that
machine which pulls in all applications (from the kernel and coreutils all the
way up to Steam) and contains all configuration. When I recently reinstalled
my notebook to enable full-disk encryption, it took me around 30 minutes, of
which most time was spent downloading packages, and downloading /home from the
backup storage. Net working time was maybe 5 minutes. I actually watched a
movie while doing it.

The issues that you're seeing are because the particular package manager you
encountered is shit. (Or rather, because Debian's/Ubuntu's byzantine packaging
processes create a ton of pathological cases.) I've never had such problems on
Arch. (Except for those cases about once a year when they restructure
something and the package manager is confused, in which case you go to
archlinux.org and the most recent news item contains the magic shell
incantation that immediately resolves the issue.)

~~~
AnIdiotOnTheNet
One wonders why you have to rebuild your "better than reinstalling Windows all
the time" system so often as to have invested the time creating a metapackage
of your configuration.

~~~
majewsky
1\. Because the package acts as a backup, and the commit history explains why
I set up stuff the way I did.

2\. Because it's really convenient to just link people to its Github repo when
they ask questions like "how do you configure MPD to use PulseAudio?".

~~~
AnIdiotOnTheNet
Wow but that sounds like a problem created solely for the sake of the
solution.

------
c3534l
The convenience of having your game licenses all in one place over the long
term is too great. The only way you could shut down Steam at this point is
create an open industry standard that would allow a license to play a game to
transfer seamlessly across platforms. No one wants to buy a game from a
website that isn't going to exist in a year and will take your game with you.
And no one wants to have 10 different platforms on their computer. And
certainly no one wants to have different platforms offer different games that
can only be accessed from that platform. But of course the gaming industry has
an entire business model built on exactly that: console gaming. It's kind of a
miracle that Steam even exists and people are going to be very resistant to
replacing it with a completely fractured system of owning PC games.

~~~
cptskippy
GOG links to your Steam Account and will add games to your library that exist
in your Steam Library. It only does this for participating publishers but it's
still an effective way to copy your library.

~~~
c3534l
Well, I guess that explains why people like GOG and hate Origin.

~~~
kuschku
GOG also has no DRM'd games, at all. It's truly amazing, and if possible, I
always buy from them.

~~~
kbart
Yes, GOG is the only place I buy games from. I don't want to have spyware
installed on my PC in a form of DRM or be able to play games only while
connected to Internet, so I don't use Steam at all.

~~~
kuschku
Agreed, some DRM solutions are so bad, they’re worse than simple spyware – for
example, Sony’s DRM Rootkit in the past.

~~~
kbart
DRM isn't even worst for me, I can always use a fresh virtual machine for a
game and wipe it out afterwards, but constant Internet connection requirement
totally kills it, as I don't have time for games often and these rare moments
I play something is usually on a laptop when I'm on vacation out of town with
no reliable Internet connection. GOG is great, I can buy, _own_ and play a
game whenever I want, wherever I want and expect it to be playable many years
in future, even when official servers are long dead.

~~~
kuschku
Yes! The most interesting part is that I bought the collectors edition of some
Ubisoft games back when they were released, the DRM servers were shut down,
and now they won’t work – but I bought them on GOG again, and the GOG version,
without DRM, works just fine.

------
phreack
There are plenty of businesses where you can just roll up, make a better yet
not more innovative version of the leading app, and just take all of the
customers.

Game distribution is NOT one of them, at all, by any stretch of the
imagination, at this point in time.

I've saved this article to share every time I hear that pitch.

~~~
mrhektor
Could you give us a few examples of such businesses? Do customers really
switch for marginal improvements?

~~~
pitaj
I can give a few more examples where marginal improvements are not enough,
which really boils down to "anything with network effects".

\- Messaging (WhatsApp, SMS)

\- Social Media (Facebook)

~~~
usrusr
Steam entrenchement goes so much deeper than "just" network effect: DRM (and
even DRM-less, to some extent, for convenience) requires trust and despite a
choppy start, Steam has definitely built a lot of trust. Maybe even earned
(debatable, but I tend to agree), but definitely built. Trust that they are
likely to still be around n years down the line, and trust that they don't
shove every imaginable profit maximization down their captive audience's
throat.

They have a headstart of more than a decade to any upstart and the growing of
trust cannot be artificially accelerated. On top of that there are financials.
Valve are not expected to disappear any time soon because of their huge
earnings. Again, impossible to replicate. And they are a private, mostly (or
exclusively?) founder-owned corporation, so there is at least a _possibility_
of making "good enough" money, which is important for the "not shoving
unwanted features down customers' throats" part. A VC funded startup, or
worse, a publicly traded company could never reach "good enough" profits. It's
the goose that lays golden eggs: a publicly traded company would inevitably
keep rising into overvaluation until it eventually reaches the point where the
only way to justify it is to cut up the goose in search of even higher
profitability.

------
methodover
Discord could do it. Discord SHOULD do it.

There needs to be a serious competitor to Steam, something with significant
enough market share that Steam gets scared. Steam could be so much better than
it is -- I'm not saying that it's a bad product, just that it could be better.

Discord seems perfectly positioned to take on Steam. They already have
incredible adoption in the gaming community. And they have quite a bit of
experience at this rate too. (Maybe I should go work for them and push this
line from within...)

~~~
jimminy
Twitch is trying to do it.

They turned the Curse application into a game/mod store that also integrated
custom servers that essentially mirrored Discord's application.

They also are using Twitch Prime and other service integrations to promote it.
And they are well backed, which isn't something that could be said about
Discord.

~~~
methodover
Twitch/Curse hasn't really taken off with the community as much as Discord
has. It's hard for me to pin down exactly what has put people off of it...

~~~
AlphaSite
I wasn't even aware it does VC/text chat. Discord puts it front and center and
does it extremely well.

------
FussyZeus
Mind you the USERS don't even want a lot of Steam's competition. The GOG
downloader is...okay? Origin is almost universally hated and every time one of
these big companies announces $NewNotSteam the collective community rolls
their eyes and groans, dreading the new application that has to be installed,
and kept running so it can update, to accomplish the exact same thing that
Steam, GOG, Origin, and uPlay _already_ accomplish because $NewNotSteam's
parent company has an executive somewhere that is tired of giving Valve money
and had sufficient pull to change it.

~~~
wernercd
Really though... other than perhaps Blizzard... is there any secondary store
worth looking into?

Outside of Windows/Android/iStore... There's nothing worth switching.

I've passed up on purchasing games (IE: Mass Effect 3) because it's tied to a
shitty NotSteam...

~~~
ndh2
Same here, I won't buy Titanfall as long as it requires Origin.

~~~
FussyZeus
Don't wanna be that guy, but you really should. It's quite awesome and you
don't need to deal with Origin hardly at all, just let it run in the
background and it's 99% fine.

------
hellbanner
We sell our game on itch [http://QuantumPilot.me](http://QuantumPilot.me)
Developer chooses what cut to pay to itch, which is nice. DRM free, easy to
setup -- 5 minutes compare to 5 hours with Steam.

Itch supports indie game dev by letting community manage "Game Jams":
[http://itch.io/jams](http://itch.io/jams)

Their site + client is open source:
[https://github.com/itchio](https://github.com/itchio)

~~~
kasbah
The client seems to be open source but their site doesn't.
[https://github.com/itchio/itch.io](https://github.com/itchio/itch.io) is just
an issue tracker.

~~~
hellbanner
My mistake, thank you

------
sergiotapia
Steam has lost that "discovery" aspect to it. It's now mainly weaboo garbage,
early access and PUBG clogging up the trending and leaderboards.

I feel like I can no longer discover cool titles or great things people are
buying on the site.

~~~
dageshi
Yes, an entire industry of youtubers volunteered to take care of discovery and
curation for games, valve saw that and decided to "just" be the video game
version of Amazon and take care of sales and distribution.

~~~
cyborgx7
Which is a decision I agree with. I feel like the ones who sell the products
and the ones who recommend the good products shouldn't be the same people.

------
muzani
Also a huge point to consider is that games also have to be as cheap as Steam.
I used to buy pirated DVDs once upon a time because the real thing would cost
about a month salary. Now Steam games in third world countries are so cheap I
just buy a bunch I don't intend to play.

Even the discount sites and Humble Bundle aren't able to match up against
Steam in third world countries.

~~~
andybak
[https://isthereanydeal.com/](https://isthereanydeal.com/) regularly shows me
titles on my wishlist that are cheaper on somewhere other than on Steam.

~~~
muzani
Steam sells up to 4 times cheaper to people who live in certain poorer
regions, and this also gets the usual discount. So some old game sold for $10,
might get a 75% winter sales discount, plus a further 75% off in poor
countries, down to about 60 cents.

It's clever because it takes purchasing power into account. So a game that's
about 1 hour salary in the US would cost about 1 hour on a Indonesian salary
as well.

This is going to be really hard for many competitors to match.

------
discoursism
This article is full of good observations. A shorter way to say it is that the
distance between Steam and "perfect" is not very large, and there isn't enough
margin to be had to justify the cost of building something to close that gap.
And that's assuming you can identify the features that would bring you to
perfect from where Steam is.

I cannot even imagine a game distribution product that would get me to switch
from Steam, unless there were Very Important games on it I couldn't get on
Steam, or unless the prices were at least 10-15% lower.

~~~
larsiusprime
> unless the prices were at least 10-15% lower.

Article's author here :) You couldn't even do this, because every distributor
I've ever heard of reserves the right to match your full retail price. So you
can't even cut your margins in a bid to pass on the savings to the consumer.

So yeah, it's tough out there.

------
AlexDanger
I wonder if CD Projekt heard the same arguments when they started GOG?
Certainly they leveraged The Witcher and anger around DRM to gain traction.
But they've found a sustainable niche that does not depend on going head to
head with Steam's colossal network effect.

Steam is generally pretty great. But off the top of my head I can think of two
areas where Steam arent delivering;

\- Greenlight. Good idea, didnt work as planned. Room in the market for some
kind of Greenlight/Kickstarter hybrid?

\- Gaming for kids and educational software. A Kahn Academy approach but with
games instead of lessons.

~~~
larsiusprime
Article's author here.

GOG.com got started in _2008_ , which was critical to their success. Steam had
much lower market share back then. If GOG started today I would give them
much, much, lower odds of succeeding.

And consider also that Desura, Direct2Drive, Impulse, etc, which also were
around in that rough time period, are all dead and gone.

~~~
Chathamization
GOG only started selling newer games in 2012, and even then it started only
selling a few. Before that, it was a place to buy old games (hence the
original name, Good Old Games). I think GOG's success was because for its
first few years, it was selling games that simply weren't available on Steam
or anywhere else at the time. When it did finally go up against Steam, it
already had a decently large customer base, and was able to set itself up well
a a DRM-free Steam alternative.

~~~
masklinn
Indeed. First they got a market which was unserved (old games), then they got
the CD Project Red games (Witcher series), then they branched into third-party
games.

------
PostOnce
What if Steam had to, by law, share your game library with other services?

i.e., just like you can take your phone number to any other phone company, or
how banks in europe have to share info, you were able to take your game
library with you to any other game distribution service?

Perhaps the same could be done for iOS/Android portability

~~~
grahamburger
I've often wished that this would happen for movies / music. When I buy a
streaming movie on Amazon I'd like to be able to transfer it to Google Play or
vice versa.

~~~
tambienben
You wouldn't transfer a car to Google Play, would you?

~~~
grahamburger
I'm not sure what that means. Every way that I can think of to compare movie
ownership and car ownership suggests that I should be able to transfer a movie
from one service to another.

~~~
craftyguy
[http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/piracy-it-s-a-
crime](http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/piracy-it-s-a-crime)

------
kuon
Amos has been doing some insanely great work with the itch.io app and butler.

If you are interested in how it works, I highly encourage you to read his blog
[1].

[1]: [https://amos.me/blog/2017/efficient-game-
updates/](https://amos.me/blog/2017/efficient-game-updates/)

------
coldacid
As someone who does video games in his spare time, this was a very enjoyable
read.

------
jlebrech
At some point itch was one of the 99%.

Maybe taking on newgrounds or miniclip with a wasm based gaming platform is
the niche?

~~~
lmm
> At some point itch was one of the 99%.

It sounds like itch is more of a lifestyle business than something trying to
compete with Steam. And maybe they got started with indies back when that was
more of a "blue ocean" (Steam used to be quite anti-indie in the early days).

> Maybe taking on newgrounds or miniclip with a wasm based gaming platform is
> the niche?

Now _that_ is a good idea.

~~~
larsiusprime
Newgrounds is run at a loss, for the record.

------
nkkollaw
I wish Steam supported hidpi.

It's kind of ridiculous they don't.

------
madisfun
The day you try to contact Steam support, you'll know how to compete with
Steam.

~~~
AnIdiotOnTheNet
Their support is pretty bad from what I hear, but then again, so is
Microsoft's. Bad support doesn't seem to be the kind of thing anyone is making
decisions based on, no matter how much people like to bitch about it.

------
parski
Excellent write-up.

------
grawprog
As specific as this is to steam competitors this seems like good advice for
trying to get into any crowded niche market. A friend of mine lately found the
random hobby of promoting dog toys and such through instagram. He started with
pretty much nothing but pictures of his dog and over a few months has begun
working with different manufacturers and distributors to make and sell custom
products and to distribute existing products and I've watched him do almost
everything described in this article to succeed.

He's spent his own time and money to help big name companies get more
customers, helped smaller companies expand their business without much
incentive to himself at first other than a mention here or there or some free
products, in turn he used those products to gain more business for those
companies and eventually became well known enough to start getting small
amounts of cash and more expensive products. Eventually these companies
trusted him enough to make some of his custom designed things and get
commission on their sales.

I'm kind of getting sick of hearing about instagram but it's been cool
watching him grow this weird little business he's been doing.

------
dvt
I'm actually pretty cynical when it comes to this kind of thing (for example,
I don't think anyone can really compete with Google Search anymore), but I
need to disagree with this article. It fundamentally misunderstands a few
crucial elements of how game publishing (and consumption) works. Keep in mind
that I am a long-time user of Steam (my account is 14 years old, having signed
up literally the day it came out).

1\. The gamers

Gamers are by definition quasi-technical and, by their very nature, will be
welcome to (at least) trying out a new client or platform. I, and most of my
friends, and probably most of Twitch, have not only Steam, but also GOG, and
also the God-awful Origin, and Epic's launcher, etc. So installing a new
client so I could play some games I like is _really not_ that big of a deal.
Steams social aspects were always secondary to its game delivery platform --
besides, most people use Discord to keep in touch, no one really takes Steam's
"social network" seriously. I think that's a non-issue.

2\. The developers

If you're an indie dev that's toiled for the past 3 years on a small game that
you hope will make it big, you will _release it on every platform_ \-- let me
say that again: you'll release on Steam, on Itch, etc. On every. Single.
Platform. If you (really) want to sell AAA games, you can just be a run-of-
the-mill distributor at first, and just sell keys. Worrying about developer
friction I think is fundamentally misguided.

3\. How to win

Imo, winning would look something like this: scout indie developers building
the next big thing (they'll be a lot of false positives, so a lot of $$$ helps
here). Make them sign contracts to _only_ distribute through your platform. Do
this for like 10 or 20 games, even if the contracts suck for you (hell, I'd
give them > 100% revenue share). Now you're funneling people through your
platform to play the newest "Cuphead" or "Super Meatboy" or "Dark Souls" \--
obviously this isn't easy, but I do think you could hypothetically compete.and
slow.

~~~
wick_works
2\. Speaking as somebody who's had to make builds for pc/mac/linux and bundle
them up into each special back-end for each store and then test each one for
_every single patch_ , multiplying the process by adding more platforms is a
hard sell. Why bother with Desura or whatever when 95% of your sales are gonna
come through Steam?

Especially for the model of early access & building community gradually
instead of risking it all on a big release --- since you're sometimes putting
out new builds weekly the update pipeline becomes a real time factor.

3\. If it was a numerically advantageous proposition to scout & invest in
indies, we'd see more people doing that. Try for a month going through new
releases on Steam and predicting which ones are gonna be successes. It's a
near-impossible game, much less if each bet cost you tens of thousands of
dollars.

Plus, if somebody offered me such a contract, I'd be deeply skeptical that
100% of their revenue share (plus a straight-up cash bonus even) would beat
out what I could get by going with established avenues --- _especially_ if I
had something I had good reason to believe was the next Cuphead.

~~~
dvt
> If it was a numerically advantageous proposition to scout & invest in
> indies, we'd see more people doing that. Try for a month going through new
> releases on Steam and predicting which ones are gonna be successes. It's a
> near-impossible game, much less if each bet cost you tens of thousands of
> dollars.

I think you forget you're posting on YC's forum. YC _literally_ does this
(with much higher stakes, by the way). Obviously, the great majority of YC
companies don't end up being unicorns, but every now and then you get a
Dropbox.

And to address your first point, Steam's SDK (for anyone that's worked with
it) obviously sucks. But Valve can afford to release a crappy SDK because
they're the big player and they don't care. Obviously, if I made a game
distribution platform, the back-end would be minimal and packaging would be
programmatic. E.g.: upload your binary, we'll package it and deploy. You don't
_need_ half the crap Valve peddles anyway (Steam overlay, chat, etc.)

~~~
larsiusprime
Over 100 new games are released on Steam _every week_. I hardly think YC
invests in that many companies.

