From the perspective of allowing more and more games to exist and do well on the market Valve is doing amazing. This talk goes over some of it https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1025672/2014-vs-2018-The-Shape but essentially there are 1000+ games right now on Steam with over 100 concurrent users. One of my games got about 80 concurrent users at its peak and it made a small but fair amount of money (especially for someone's first game), so it's easy to see how 1000+ games with that many players means a lot of financial success to a lot of people, way more than ever happened before for game developers.
One of the things that amazes me about Valve and the way they run Steam is that I released my game, had thousands of people buy it, pushed updates, communicated with users, got paid, and I had to speak with 0 human beings at Valve. It all just happened in a very predictable, clear and highly automated way. This lack of friction is absolutely amazing for developers, especially people like me who live in a third world country and would otherwise have more difficulty going through these processes for any number of reasons. So IMO they're doing something extremely valuable which is properly acting as a platform so that other game developers can succeed and make more and better games for everyone.
The PC game revival probably would have taken much longer without Steam. The things that Steam does seamlessly like installing required frameworks, a regular update delivery system, cloud saves, and a cloud-based library with a low price is really easy to take for granted now that it's everywhere. Before Steam, it was a chore to play a game on PCs.
Also being able to stream a PC game to any device is really cool.
> Before Steam, it was a chore to play a game on PCs.
I disagree. It was somewhat more elaborate but the experience (having an actual physical copy, a manual/books, sometimes nice installer screen) made it feel more special. Nowadays most games feel the same, you just hit a button on Steam, it downloads itself and then you play. But it's mundane; the charm got lost along the way.
It was indeed a chore. Your local shop might not have the game - it might not have been released in your country. Media could be damaged. DRM that wouldn't work on your system. You buy that huge box and all it has is a leaftlet and a CD in a paper sleeve. The game might not actually run, depending on a patch that you had to huntdown in some slow FTP server somewhere.
I do not miss manual patching one bit. If you were lucky the publisher hosted the patches themselves. If not you're downloading them from some potentially sketcky third party site. And then you often had to apply the patches sequentially instead of just applying the latest.
It was definitely a tedious process, made all the more frustrating when all you wanted to do was play. But damn if your post didn't just make me smile from a wave of nostalgia.
One thing that I kind of miss from "physical" game was the leaflet/manual. Some of them were truly awesome. For example, the original boxes for guild wars had those huge manual with concept art, lore, and explanation about the whole game. It gave you something to do while downloading all the updates on a 256k connection ;) . When you buy games on GoG, they sometimes give you access to the old manual in PDF, but most game don't really have any anymore or it is really just a barebone manual on how to install and play the game.
That drastically increases the cost of the game though along with the physical copy itself. One of the major benefits of a cloud gaming platform is that games become cheap. If you really like that type of swag though it's still available via crowdfunding
I wouldn't be GOG surprised if it was GOG that stole Valve's market share in Europe because no one buys physical copies of PC games anymore, especially when most of them are just boxes with just the Steam code.
There is GOG for that. No one is buying physical media, that's so '90s. The only exception are probably collector editions, which people buy for fun. But surely no one does it for convenience, because it can't compete with convenience of digital DRM-free stores.
Not optical disks, which are commonly used for selling such stuff. If you preserve your archives using them, you are in for a nasty surprise. And who sells games on hard drives? So the way it works - you buy digitally, and do a proper back up of your copy using whatever good storage you want. Not optical disks though.
> allowing more and more games to exist and do well on the market Valve is doing amazing
Not to mention their efforts with Linux gaming. Proton [1] is amazing: in under a year a lot of AAA games just work with it. Something you couldn't even imagine happening for the next 10 years.
It's something that has stalled me out a bunch of times, trying to find the 'correct' way to implement things, rather than just charging through and trying to see if my ideas even have merit to stick around long enough to desreve improvement. It has obvious links to the famous saying about Premature Optimization too.
The bit about globals and team vs solo matched my experience too (especially the part about how much you can fit in your head at once).
The part about it being ok to break rules more freely as a solo dev because it’s all in your head also resonated with me as something I think about but stray from due to needless guilt
The usual counter-point is that even when you're solo you're not - it's you writing the code today, against you reading the code in 6 months or more and not remembering anything. I think that's often overblown in importance though.
One of the things that amazes me about Valve and the way they run Steam is that I released my game, had thousands of people buy it, pushed updates, communicated with users, got paid, and I had to speak with 0 human beings at Valve. It all just happened in a very predictable, clear and highly automated way. This lack of friction is absolutely amazing for developers, especially people like me who live in a third world country and would otherwise have more difficulty going through these processes for any number of reasons. So IMO they're doing something extremely valuable which is properly acting as a platform so that other game developers can succeed and make more and better games for everyone.