This is me spinning off from the DRM thread because I didn’t want to derail it. I hear people talk about Steam as a “service” (rather than as a “store”) a lot, and talk about the value it adds to games.
I must be missing it. It’s got a clunky chat client, indifferent friends functionality, and some ridiculous trading card nonsense. What’s the added value that makes this a ‘service’?
The good: It’s a service because it autoupdates and makes modding easy with the workshop. It makes multiplayer easier. In most cases, it takes away the desire of publishers to use DRM of their own so instead of having to deal with tens of different DRM mechanisms, you only have to deal with one (again, usually). It also provides a hub for long tail games.
The bad: It’s a service because when it wraps up, there’s no guarantee you’ll still have your games.
Everything MEM said, but simpler: a store sells you something and never factors into the purchase or product again. A service might sell you things, but the primary purpose is to provide a complete support mechanism for the purchases.
The Steam friends list and multiplayer-matchup capabilities may seem limited, until you compare them with what games have without Steam. A very few games have such features that actually work properly. But if you get the game through Steam, you know they will, because the Valve programmers will fix it and integrate it with Steam’s system.
Yes, Steamworks is about a million or so times better than Gamespy matchmaking… or GFWL.
Just because you don’t like something doesn’t make it any less of a service.
Besides the things MichaelEmouse mentioned, it also makes installing and uninstalling games really easy, allows you to sort your game collection, shows you how long you have played certain games and when you bought them (and how much you paid for them), collects user-written reviews and news of the games, makes gifting games easy, shows what your friends are playing, allows you to manage a wishlist for both yourself and your friends (so they can give you games you’d actually play) … and probably half a dozen other things I forget and a bunch of things I don’t actually use.
When you have a lot of games, having one service where you can access most of them in one place is very convenient. For my non-Steam games I have to go hunting for CD-keys or actual physical discs, my Steam games install with one button press.
Integrated matchmaking, modding tools, a friends list, an overlay that works even with non-Steam games, a central hub for purchased games, collectables (whether or not you give a crap, they’re there), community forums, digital gifting, etc etc.
Whether or not you (or I, or anyone) personally considers all this to be “added value” doesn’t really change whether or not Steam is a service. It absolutely is. They provide an enormous superstructure framework around the basic idea of delivering games through a digital medium.
Yes, I’ve replaced about four systems used for Steam gaming, and other the unavoidable download time, it is a gift from the gamegods to be able to just install the Steam client and reload the games as you want to play them, pretty much intact from where you left them on the last system. Even the three or four games I had to find discs and keys for, sometimes get keys re-validated for, install, update, etc., so forth were a huge PITA, much less the 20-25 I have with Steam.
I don’t use any of the multiplayer, community, or modding stuff and I still consider Steam a quantum leap forward for gaming.
It’s only real value to me (as a service) is that it keeps a library of my games for me to download at will. But that’s a pretty significant service in of itself even if I don’t use the chat client, care about achievements, etc.
I stayed away from Steam for a long time because of this fear, but Valve is far beyond the point where this is a legit concern. Steam (or some iteration of it) is going to be around for a long, long time.
The more legit concern, in my mind, is that they end up going all Facebook on their users and reducing the quality of their service because they know they have that “critical user mass” that makes it very difficult for people to move away from them.
See, this, and all of the stuff Arrogance listed is the kind of thing I expect in a STORE.
A store should keep track of your inventory. It should track reviews. It should allow redownloads. Etc. Etc. These are “store” features. I mean, FFS, DriveThruRPG has all these features and it’s far from even being what I consider an especially full featured store.
Steam has matchmaking? I’ve never seen it used. Yes, it does offer a multplayer ‘framework’ but again, it feels to me much like the same junk offered by most games, it’s just the latest iteration of this…not especially functional functionality.
Much as people tend to malign it, I really felt that Xbox Live offered something of value. Integrated voice chat. The ability to say “Oh hey, look, one of my friends is playing a game in a joinable state. I push a button and join his game.”
So I guess Steam is a service, just not an especially good one. It’s a mighty fine store though. 
At this point a game not being on Steam is basically a deal breaker.
I don’t feel like you made this thread in good faith.
Yeah, but that’s because you have no use for that aspect of the service which Steam is providing. It doesn’t invalidate the existence of the service itself.
Steam also has the ability to see a friend in a joinable game and pop right into their session.
It also has its own voice chat, but hardly anybody uses any game’s integrated voice chat these days. Everyone uses their own program of choice (Axon, Skype, Teamspeak, whatever).
“Why is it that A?”
“Because reasons 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9.”
“Lol y tho?”
You’re right that Steam is likely to go rotten far before it goes away. The current managers and shareholders won’t be there infinitely. I guess by the time Steam turns bad, the multiplayer games will have been supplanted by better ones and single player games will be easy to torrent with their most popular mods. Hopefully.
So, because I view most of the “services” provided as “store features” it means I made this thread in bad faith?
Because I’m comparing it to what I consider to be the gold standard of “services a service should provide” and find it not very compelling it means I made this thread in bad faith?
Because I don’t view achievements, trading cards, and a bad chat client to be enough to qualify something as a “service” I made this thread in bad faith?
Because one of the view games I play that uses Steam for multiplayer got worse after it switched from GWFL to Steamworks…
Nevermind. I guess. Apparently “it allows games to use it for multiplayer instead of having to write their own” is service enough. Though I guess it is PROVIDING a service by dissuading publishers from using some other DRM. That’s kindof the opposite of “being” a service, but I’ll take it.
A lot of people feel this way and it is ironic because I remember all the end of the world talk when Steam was first announced.
For me being able to play a game without having to fish out a CD make sit worthwhile.
When I want to game with my buddy in Colorado, neither of us needs to type in the other’s IP address (which we might even need to use a separate tool to learn), neither of us needs to set our computer as a server which our ISPs won’t allow through their firewalls, and we don’t need to just click “join game” at the same time and hope that the built-in matchmaking will choose to put us together. It’s just open up friends list, invite to game. And when we move on to a new game, which happens a couple times a year, we don’t even need to go friend-listing each other: We just use the same friends list we always have.
I do that all the time on Steam.
Valve is a privately held company (LLC).
There are no shareholders and unless the founders decide to sell, retire, or just plain die they will be running things for the foreseeable future.