Simple, private ownership structure stemming from bootstrapping. Any presence of external equity or (worse) publicly traded shares would make it impossible to ever consider the money printing machine that the steam store is "good enough" for now and focus on long term strategy instead. Perhaps even allowing certain forms of "benevolence". Companies with private, noninstitutional owners can be infinitely greedy as well, but they don't have to be. Contrast this with publicly traded: there, if there is any reason to believe that more could be earned, someone ruthless/optimistic enough to believe this will bid more for ownership than those who don't and eventually the company is forced to go the ruthless path due to it's ownership structure.
If there were shares traded of a goose that lays golden eggs, the shares would inevitably end up being owned by those who believe that cutting it open yields more than waiting for the next egg. Apparently Newell isn't prone to cutting up the goose.
There are plenty of public companies, such as intel and google, that manage to pursue a long term strategy, to commodotize their complement: https://www.gwern.net/Complement
Hire open source consulting companies like Collabora, Igalia, Bootlin etc to work on Linux/graphics stuff. IIRC Valve is doing this work via Collabora. I note that both Igalia and Bootlin have done crowdfunding campaigns to support their Linux, graphics and web work:
As an industry: Follow their lead and be prepared to pay for the software you rely on - there are some really clever people out there, for a company like valve this is pocket change but someone still needs to have the balls to do it.
I'm thankfully for the native games from Valve on Linux. And also for improving gaming on Linux in general. Steam? Steam itself is not necessary and is just another system to lure users and developers into a Vendor Lock-In. Everything useful it provides should be part of libraries. In a better world - we would use a package manager or Flatpak to install games.
I'm sick of the software industry, every big company tries to lock you in. Microsoft (historically with contracts, incompatiblity and UWP and now Cloud), Apple (AppStore and of course incompatibility), Google (Cloud and PlayStore...and making everything else then Google Services a pain) and EPIC (Games Store).
No other industry has managed to be so awful than software industry. You can drive another brand of car than anybody else in your town and be fine with it, as long you get support (spare parts). But software? Hell no! Your choice is either pain through being in a minority or pain through living without control upon your your software, unsteadiness, insecurity, high costs...
> Steam itself is not necessary and is just another system to lure users and developers into a Vendor Lock-In
This ignores the history of how Steam came about in the first place. The PC gaming industry was basically dying because physical distribution was expensive, which made the games expensive too, so a lot of users just pirated games (by downloading them from the internet) because it was easier. Valve recognized that piracy was a symptom of a service problem and set out to create the convenient service experience of piracy in legitimate form. It was actually widely hated at first because people assumed malevolence, but over time Valve has proved their good intentions with the platform. They helped kick off the indy explosion with the Potato Sack, they allow developers to sell Steam keys on other stores without giving Valve a cut, they never ask for exclusivity, and despite what many internet whiners complain about they actually try pretty hard to have worthwhile recommendation and review systems.
> Everything useful it provides should be part of libraries. In a better world - we would use a package manager or Flatpak to install games.
This is basically already the case. Steam is the manager, and it also provides the libraries for its functionality (DRM, workshop, achievements, etc) that are entirely optional. There are games on Steam that don't use any of that and you can copy them to a system without Steam and they run fine (BallisticNG was like this last I checked). Hell, as EA and Ubisoft proved you can even install and run your own alternative client as part of your game you sell on Steam (though thankfully the store now warns users about this behavior).
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make here. Of course you can play games without Steam. But I think it is disingenuous to characterize Steam as "just another system to lure users and developers into a Vendor Lock-In" when Valve has seemingly not put any effort whatsoever into locking in anyone despite their unquestioned market dominance.
They recently stopped developers promoting on steam, sale of their game on other platforms. Makes a lot of sense and if the battle with epic games gets worse we might see lock in..
Fortnite changed steam's dominance. Epic games is buying out a lot of games to offer on their store and they have the cash to burn on it. Who knows where all the fortnite fans will be in 5yrs, epic or steam.
> They recently stopped developers promoting on steam, sale of their game on other platforms.
Hard to blame them for a stance of "you can't use our storefront to advertise other storefronts" though.
Epic is doing the things it is doing precisely because Steam is so ludicrously dominant. I'd argue that they haven't been successful at usurping that dominance yet. They are still very much playing catch-up.
I honestly don't think they are aiming to take over Steam. There's a lot of features they could implement with their cash that would match Steam's store.
They prefer their churn and burn, buying out games and giving them for reduced prices. It makes little sense unless it is seen as a very long term play.
The above article estimates the PC gaming industry sold around 32.3 billion in 2017, although from [0]:
> If you throw out revenue for packaged retail titles and browser games, that leaves the dedicated digital PC game business with a total value of $23.9 billion – and that number includes DLC, which the Steam estimate does not.
> If the numbers are right, that means Valve own at least 18% of their specific market
This is by no means exact, but 18% for PC gaming is huge and, given that these are global numbers, probably doesn't account for the PC games market in China.
I think that that software industry philosophy now applies to many other things. I guess because most things now run software, from cars to farmers milk tanks. But it's probably not the only reason.
I agree with you on everything except for Steam. It is the only launcher / store I have installed because it legitimately adds value to the games I play. Specifically Big Picture and In Home Streaming let me play my games on any other device I want, and that's done a lot of mileage for me in playing games like Final Fantasy XIV on the Nintendo Switch, or even on my old laptop sitting in bed.
Okay: Any possibility to support their open source work? (except of using steam)