Scott Miller: Steam should not be a part of valve

[zaphod]

http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_i ... tory=11895

"I’d love to see Steam spin off as their own company. That would be a smart move. That removes the conflict of interest issue and it would give Steam focus as a separate company. Since they’re buried in Valve, if Valve doesn’t do well for a game or two, Steam will get cut before their internal game development. They have to consider Steam secondary. I don’t know why they hang on to Steam as an internal thing. They’d probably rule the game industry if they did. A truly independent company is going to come along, and I know of a couple of start-ups. I think one of these companies will emerge as the product leader and they should be able to take Steam’s spot."

Guy's got a point, how independent is Valve being when episode two comes out, and everything gets pushed off the front page. I could see this becoming a much larger issue as steam picks up steam (lol) I was actually pretty surprised when they put SiN episodes up there.

[JeanPaul]

Valve is Steam.

[FMPONE]

The point about failure of a Valve game just isn't really even possible at this point I don't think, what with Steam's audience so huge and receptive and the otherwise huge costs of marketing the game being non-existant. "Conflict of interest"? Hardly. This is first and foremost Valve's content delivery service.

To be quite honest, Steam is seemingly a resounding success, this seems like someone not in on the deal asking Valve to give up their hard won prize.

But I could just be paranoid

[zaphod]

but the fact still remains that Valve is a competitor, and if push ever comes to shove is valve going to use steam as whats best for valve, or whats best for online distribution and the welfare of all the companies relying on steam? When a Valve game gets twice the marketing on steam than your game no matter how much you are willing to pay or whatnot, that tends to be a big what-if for business people.

[FMPONE]

but the fact still remains that Valve is a competitor, and if push ever comes to shove is valve going to use steam as whats best for valve, or whats best for online distribution and the welfare of all the companies relying on steam? When a Valve game gets twice the marketing on steam than your game no matter how much you are willing to pay or whatnot, that tends to be a big what-if for business people.

I do agree, but I think the one thing that people like this guy underestimate when they discuss truly independant content delivery services is that Steam's audience (completely thanks to the foresight of Valve) is freaking huge and as long as Valve keeps making Steam-reliant, brilliant games then it will stick around. People, apparently, seem willing to bite the (for now) uneven advertising bullet for not having to worry about publisher overhead. Plus this guys also discusses how their content delivery service failed for Prey. Steam's several year headstart is already showing its worth, I don't think Valve has completely neglected this angle where they haven't ignored much in the past.

[Erratic]

What's funny about this is Prey is available through Steam as of tomorrow.

[Skjalg]

Valve has spent tons of time and money on making an online distribution system for their games. It became a huge success.

If other companies dont like it, they can spend their time and money on their own distribution tool.

Bottom line, he's a whiner

[Section_Ei8ht]

EA tried it. They failed miserably.

[Polaris]

Thing is though, part of the allure of distrbuting through Steam are the associated names of Valve, Half-Life and Counter-Strike wich by themselves attract a huge audience.

What's funny about this is Prey is available through Steam as of tomorrow.

lol

edit: btw does anyone know if I can register my old retail copy of Call of Duty with Steam?

Guy's got a point, how independent is Valve being when episode two comes out, and everything gets pushed off the front page.

The games on the front page are randomized. Sure when Episode 2 comes out it will get a spot in that large news thing, but then so does every other game released on Steam.

[Fletch]

What's funny about this is Prey is available through Steam as of tomorrow.

This is why irony is the best form of comedy.

[skdr]

edit: btw does anyone know if I can register my old retail copy of Call of Duty with Steam?

Nope.

[Zacker]

There is indeed an issue with Steam and Valve being so closely tied together. This is just a result of that Valve are the ones who have been most succesful with their digital distribution tool.

Regarding other games getting pushed off the frontpage, then I am pretty sure that games get exposure on Steam based on how much they pay and what deal they got.

Steam is a Valve product and they are free to do with it what they want. If they prefer to keep it internally, then that is cool with me. Other firms are free to not choose Steam.

[FrieChamp]

Scott M. actually said pretty much the same thing a couple of weeks ago in one of the next-gen.biz podcasts:

http://podcast.next-gen.biz/

He also mentions Steam's outrageous fees to distribute your game on the platform beside the "conflict of interest" issues (full acess to revenue accounts, sales figures etc. which he wouldn't want to expose to Valve). Sounds reasonable that you don't want to feed a competitor's wallet, but Gabe Newell's take (the podcast after Scott's) was interesting too:

3D Realms licenses competitor's engines like many other studios do or work together with Nintendo and Sony for their consoles although these companies develop their 1st party titles as well.

I can see Steam spinning off from Valve in the future though, I just had a look at their website after a while again and although the amount of games being distributed by Steam today is quite remarkable, it can quickly be overtaken by an independent, neutral digital distribution start up.

[Defrag]

I'm still waiting to see the savings that were meant to be passed down to the consumer. Right now I'd say it isn't happening for a few reasons, namely the fact that most games on steam also have publishing deals with traditional publishers. I'm guessing that the existing deals guarantee the publisher x% of the sales revenue regardless of the distribution method, so after valve takes its cut, the consumer is still paying as much, if not more, compared to buying a boxed copy. I had a quick look through the steam games list and googled/froogled some prices and found pretty much all of the games like CoD2 & Civ were found cheaper on web sites that offer boxed copies. It was the same deal when HL2 was released, you could buy the bronze version in the shops for less than the bronze download package. Until I actually save some money via downloading, I'm not going to use Steam regularly. Right now my solitary steam purchase was HL2 silver which worked out to be £37. Not bad, but not great.

The great thing about steam is the indie and/or small developer stuff. Innovative & fun games like the ship probably would never have been released, or if they were, a lot more of the money would end up in the hands of the publisher.

The bad thing about steam is simply that it is becoming saturated (I used to leave my news updates on so I could see information about valve updates, but now I'm spammed with 29764 messages about some columns clone that costs £4.34... I don't care) and, as others have pointed out, it is not independent of Valve. I'm not sure what people are getting at when they say that Steam should be an independent company -- it'd just be like having Rupert Murdoch owning Myspace and Sky News. The two companies aren't under the same banner, but they have a common interest. If people mean that they would like to see a new and independent company taking steam's position as the market leader in digital distribution, I'd agree that'd be kinda good, but then again, who's to say that we won't end up with another publisher situation? Valve has a ridiculously sharp business operation (considering how urm.. naive a lot of games companies are -- it's still a very young industry) and it's fair to say they're doing the best for themselves, though others are benefiting. It's giving people options they didn't have before, but yes, it could be better. I'd be cautious about wishing it were replaced by a company unconnected with developing games, though.

Right now I bet the majority of the larger games companies (particularly EA ) are kicking themselves and saying "why didn't we think of that first?"

From what I've read, the people who get the best deal out of Steam = Valve & small developers without existing publishing deals who would have trouble releasing their game or would barely receive much revenue from the sales. For the rest, I think they're probably just jumping aboard because there's nothing better out there and, if they don't punt it via steam, they won't make any more money once the game falls down the retail charts.

[R_Yell]

That would be a smart move. That removes the conflict of interest issue and it would give Steam focus as a separate company.

I can't see where the problem is, at least looking from the surface. There aren't many independent neutral distributors, at least not the big ones. EA or Ubi as an example, they got internal studios, they also work with independent game studios. So there is a conflict of interest inside those traditional distributors? Is the Valve bussiness model so different from those companies?