The meme of “Valve maintains dominance by doing nothing but waits for competition to trip over itself” is funny but they do put part of the billions they make towards beneficial products for their customers.
Remote Play (stream your own game from another PC)
Remote Play Together (can stream a game to friends without a copy of the game and play together)
Linux, Proton
Well designed hardware innovations
Not out of the goodness of their heart but to drive sales and foster a customer base willing to return.
GOG and itch do try in their own way so I have bought from them, IMO they are the only competitors making serious efforts to build a mutually benefical gaming ecosystem.
Epic, Microsoft, Ubisoft, EA and the rest are like a trapdoor with a wooden board over it. Tim Sweeney is standing there hoping you won’t think he’s trying to find the right time to swipe the board away and get you to fall in.
Valve reinvests and does more work then basically every other major studio. It’s just a lot of back end stuff they don’t market.
Since valve doesn’t care about selling anything. Their service sells it self so they don’t need to shove it in your face.
They are a hardware and software RnD company more then a game studio too. Which is just boring to most gamers till there is a finished product or someone points out that x y or z was because of a decade of effort by valve in the back ground.
Not out of the goodness of their heart but to drive sales and foster a customer base willing to return.
I think this is partially true, but also I legit think Gabe Newell is ideologically a market anarchist that legitimately loves video games as a medium. He probably could have (more safely) made even more money doing something else considering his early Microsoft connections and ability but he didn’t.
Unfortunately as a result, the moment hes dead Valve might be in trouble long term. Depends on who takes over afterward and how they want to direct Valve. Pierre-Loup Griffais or Lawrence Yang seem possible given how successful Steam Deck has been. Its hard to get a read on them. They seem smart and well meaning though.
Based on what I’ve heard of the internal structure of Valve, there’s a good chance he’s helped foster enough an environment of “doing what you love” that it’d survive him retiring/dying. Maybe not forever, but at least for a long while after he’s gone.
Honestly, remote play together has probably sold me more games than all of the summer/winter sales combined. I don’t play multiplayer games much, so I don’t really invest in them. If my friends are enjoying one we will remote play it together and I can make a decision to purchase after that. Otherwise, I would just never purchase them. Because of that, I’m also now incentivized to purchase any remote play together games that come across my feed and I think would be even a little fun so that I can return the favor. If they enjoy it then I will often just buy them a copy and they will get to share the experience with their go-to multiplayer friends who also go on to purchase the game. That may not be everyone’s experience with remote play together, and it’s possible that they are missing out on more sales than they are generating, but I doubt it from my personal experience.
Being the go to gaming platform really just means you’re a money printer at a certain point. I have quite an extensive friends list on Steam, often adding people from conventions on steam and nowhere else. I have never once met somebody at a con and exchanged epic information with them. But because of my extensive friends list I’m introduced to a bunch of games that I would never have heard of or seen otherwise. It’s basically free advertising for all of those titles. I might not personally be interested in any of those games, but if I notice I have friends with a similar gaming history, I will look into whatever other titles they are playing as possible gifts for topics to bring up next time we’re chatting about games.
It works great for me on wifie 6e, I did have issues using remote play from my PC to my deck until I disabled AX for the 2.4/5ghz networks on my router tho
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The meme of “Valve maintains dominance by doing nothing but waits for competition to trip over itself” is funny but they do put part of the billions they make towards beneficial products for their customers.
Not out of the goodness of their heart but to drive sales and foster a customer base willing to return.
GOG and itch do try in their own way so I have bought from them, IMO they are the only competitors making serious efforts to build a mutually benefical gaming ecosystem.
Epic, Microsoft, Ubisoft, EA and the rest are like a trapdoor with a wooden board over it. Tim Sweeney is standing there hoping you won’t think he’s trying to find the right time to swipe the board away and get you to fall in.
Valve reinvests and does more work then basically every other major studio. It’s just a lot of back end stuff they don’t market.
Since valve doesn’t care about selling anything. Their service sells it self so they don’t need to shove it in your face.
They are a hardware and software RnD company more then a game studio too. Which is just boring to most gamers till there is a finished product or someone points out that x y or z was because of a decade of effort by valve in the back ground.
Family sharing got a huge upgrade recently too where now only the game you’re actually playing is locked instead of your whole library.
It’s a sidegrade. The ability to share with overseas family was nixed, which sucks for immigrants
I think this is partially true, but also I legit think Gabe Newell is ideologically a market anarchist that legitimately loves video games as a medium. He probably could have (more safely) made even more money doing something else considering his early Microsoft connections and ability but he didn’t.
Unfortunately as a result, the moment hes dead Valve might be in trouble long term. Depends on who takes over afterward and how they want to direct Valve. Pierre-Loup Griffais or Lawrence Yang seem possible given how successful Steam Deck has been. Its hard to get a read on them. They seem smart and well meaning though.
Based on what I’ve heard of the internal structure of Valve, there’s a good chance he’s helped foster enough an environment of “doing what you love” that it’d survive him retiring/dying. Maybe not forever, but at least for a long while after he’s gone.
And hopefully by that time they’ve built up the open source community enough that even if Valve turned bad they wouldn’t be able to do much damage
Also all the consumer friendly shop page stuff like labeling anti features
Honestly, remote play together has probably sold me more games than all of the summer/winter sales combined. I don’t play multiplayer games much, so I don’t really invest in them. If my friends are enjoying one we will remote play it together and I can make a decision to purchase after that. Otherwise, I would just never purchase them. Because of that, I’m also now incentivized to purchase any remote play together games that come across my feed and I think would be even a little fun so that I can return the favor. If they enjoy it then I will often just buy them a copy and they will get to share the experience with their go-to multiplayer friends who also go on to purchase the game. That may not be everyone’s experience with remote play together, and it’s possible that they are missing out on more sales than they are generating, but I doubt it from my personal experience.
Being the go to gaming platform really just means you’re a money printer at a certain point. I have quite an extensive friends list on Steam, often adding people from conventions on steam and nowhere else. I have never once met somebody at a con and exchanged epic information with them. But because of my extensive friends list I’m introduced to a bunch of games that I would never have heard of or seen otherwise. It’s basically free advertising for all of those titles. I might not personally be interested in any of those games, but if I notice I have friends with a similar gaming history, I will look into whatever other titles they are playing as possible gifts for topics to bring up next time we’re chatting about games.
I have never had remote play together work smoothly enough to actually play. Even when on the same network the input lag is problematic.
It works great for me on wifie 6e, I did have issues using remote play from my PC to my deck until I disabled AX for the 2.4/5ghz networks on my router tho