I see digital PS4 deals all the time on Kinja, who wouldn’t be putting them up if the price points weren’t lower than what’s otherwise available.
How about also because they got in first in 2004 and you had to install Steam in order to play Half Life 2. Once the Steam store got established with enough titles it was much more difficult for anyone else to displace them, even if they had a better product. Steam now has a near monopoly on PC game distribution. You want to have a successful indie game? You have to get on steam, you have zero chance of having a success if you don’t. Luckily they’re a privately held company and seem to genuinely care about gaming so its mostly a benign monopoly, but it still is one.
Who had a better client?
The steam client is nothing special. Its just a skinned web interface / download manager which triggers and auto runs installers and connects to an activation server. The reason steam got so dominant is not because they had a technically amazing product, but because in 2004 (which was very early in digital distribution) they had a huge installed user base, namely everyone that wanted to play Half Life 2.
That didn’t really answer the question of who was doing it better. Uplay and Origin lack a lot of Steam’s community features (plus Uplay has had cloud saving issues that thankfully never affected me and Origin is just flaky). Rockstar Social Club is garbage. Gamersgate, Amazon and Gamestop (back when it was Impulse) had downloaders but no real client. Capsule never went anywhere. Desura was bogged down in indie junk and GOG’s new client is feature-lacking and GOG’s business model doesn’t really compete with Steam’s market.
This isn’t even counting stuff like publishers who used to sell their stuff directly and were terrible at it (and usually contracted through shudder Digital River). Back when THQ still existed, I tried to buy a game or two direct through them and their download link was good once. Or you could pay a $2 “protection” fee for 90 days worth of downloading your game.
Sure, Steam had their foot in the door first. That only gives you a head start. If someone else comes along with a comparable product, just being first won’t save you (look at Netflix’s loss of studios and exclusives to other streaming services). But no one has had a product yet that you could actually compare to Steam and say “Yeah, these are pretty much the same thing”.
I second this. I’ve worked with UPlay, Steam, and Games for Windows Live, and I resented working with two of them. Steam was never a problem - the games are cheap, the interface is lightweight and very non-intrusive, and it offers a lot of options. By comparison, on uPlay, you have to be online, you *have *to download the updates to your offline-only single player game before you can play it, and the interface makes me want to cry. Oh, and then there’s the steam sales, a model that it seems very few digital distributors are actually willing to copy.
The closest thing to Steam’s model that people have are, as far as I can see, Humble Bundle and GoG, which are both kept from real mainstream competition by their goals - Humble Bundle sells games in extremely cheap sales and still uses Steam as a distribution platform, and GoG is all about, well, good old games.
Theres no denying that Valve did a lot of things right with Steam. But if they had done everything else the same, but they were just some company no one had ever heard of, they wouldn’t have become the dominant games market for PC. It was their fame from Half Life and putting Half Life 2 on steam that made them massive.
If steam hadn’t come to be dominant I think there would have been no one dominant system until Microsoft finally got their act together with a windows app store. Then it would have become the dominant player.
Given how hideously bad Games for Windows Live has been thank god that didn’t happen.
That was over a decade ago. There’s been larger game launches since then and more popular games. The market is much wider than it used to be. Yes, HL2 is part of Steam’s history, and am important part, but it’s not the reason why Steam is the dominant platform for digital sales today.
More to the point, you implied before that Steam was pushing out other, better clients by virtue of its size. I’m saying there hasn’t really been better clients. People say “Steam or get out” because Steam is objectively the most feature-rich and stable client currently available.
Steam is a great client and it would be impossible to argue otherwise, but it’s also a great client in a vacuum. There was an exciting couple of minutes where Stardock was promising to make its Impulse client an actual competitor, but then they sold out to GameStop instead.
GoG and Origin do not compete with Steam any more than Hulu and Amazon Prime are actually competing with Netflix. They offer a certain amount of overlapping content, but they’re not either/or propositions.
You have Origin for your EA games, you have GoG for your older stuff, you have Steam for everything else. You have Hulu for your TV shows, you have Amazon Prime because it ties in to a different service that you’re actually paying money for, and you have Netflix for everything else. Meanwhile, Battle.net and HBO Go have truly separate offerings that aren’t duplicated anywhere, because their content owners don’t give a crap about broad accessibility.
I would love to see a client spring up to compete with Steam, but it’s not realistically going to happen anytime soon. I also don’t understand the reluctance to admit that part of Steam’s continued success comes from its ironclad grip on the market. That doesn’t devalue the quality of its service - Steam’s doing a great job of that on its own through Greenlight and early access.
You left off Blizzard’s client, which is flaky, unreliable, and annoying even when it’s working right. Like, every time there’s a new update to the client, you have to change all your shortcut icons for it.
EDIT:
Actually, come to think of it, what really makes Steam unique is that they don’t just distribute their own games; they distribute for anyone who wants to distribute with them. So far as I know, no other game client has even attempted that. You can’t complain about a monopoly in a market where nobody’s even trying to compete.
That’s silly - one of the characteristics of a monopoly is that it discourages competition from even beginning.
Anyway, I did mention Battle.net in my post - they’re not even really part of the discussion since they only offer, what, six games? A few more if you count really old stuff. I personally have no problems with their client aside from the annoyance of having to use a standalone client for the two Blizzard games I currently play.
Hulu and Amazon Prime absolutely compete with Netflix. People only have so many dollars to spend on streaming content providers and all three try to convince customers that they offer the best value for that dollar.
GOG* competes with Steam but in a niche market. Origin wanted to compete with Steam but they never really got off the ground as such and mainly exists now because of disagreements between Valve and EA on who gets to make what distribution decisions**. Ubisoft Store directly competes with Steam in that basically anything in it is also on Steam but Ubi shows no interest in trying to make their store competitive and it seems to exist as an afterthought.
Origin distributes non-EA games. Most notably Ubisoft games are available through Origin (apparently Ubisoft will distribute through practically anyone). But Origin has always been terrible about competing on price so no one actually uses Origin except for the EA-exclusives.
*GOG rebranded from “Good Old Games” to just GOG a couple years back so it’s just GOG now.
** The root of which was Valve’s insistence that any games distributed through Steam also have all available DLC distributed through Steam which went against EA’s “Bioware points” thing. Thus older EA games are on Steam but titles from the last five years or so no longer get distributed there.
Half of all Amazon Prime users also have Netflix.
This article suggests that Hulu and Netflix also have a lot of user overlap, though I couldn’t find any specific numbers on that count. Still, these services are generally viewed as complementary among users who do not have cable.
Ok, so? You think Netflix wouldn’t want the other half as well? Even if it came at the expense of the Prime side?
I think a better argument is that most people don’t buy Prime for the streaming content but rather for the Amazon shipping. Hulu and Netflix would be a better comparison since both offer the same basic product (streaming video). Your second article is all about how Hulu is working to actively threaten Netflix’s customer share.
Yep, and I said that already.
It about how Hulu would love to threaten Netflix, but doesn’t. From the article:
Bolding mine.
Not to mention when they shut the WON servers down and everyone who played Counter-Strike and other HL1 multiplayer games had to move to Steam.
Almost as though… they’re competitors? 
That said, this is a bit of a hijack off of what was already a hijack (but at least a forum appropriate hijack about games).
My point is that at the end of the day, Hulu is more of a competitor to Netflix than anything is to Steam, and even Hulu isn’t really competing. They’ve found a few niches that Netflix isn’t interested in filling and they’re doing a great job at existing in those places, but they aren’t trying to actually edge out Netflix on their own turf. And even that’s a healthier market than what currently exists for digital game distribution.
If the Hypothetical Fairy came to my house and told me I could only keep one, of course I’d keep Netflix. I think most everyone else would say the same.
I don’t think the digital distribution market is that bad off. There’s a difference between the Steam store and the Steamworks distribution platform. As previously noted, publishers are free to sell their (Steam) games via third party sites and the best price for a game on Steam often isn’t via Steam’s store. So there is legitimate competition for Steam’s pricing.
Now, if the concern is having all of your eggs in one basket from a “What if the world ends and Valve turns off all their server?” standpoint then there’s something to be said. Although, as far as baskets go, I’d rather have my eggs in Steam’s versus smaller services that are floundering/failed such as Desura or on GetGamesGo’s servers.