My grocery shopping is largely driven by third-party exclusives. Something like 95% of this country’s grocery retail is concentrated between the top two chains. And it’s very common for specific brands to be only sold in one of the stores. So if I want Pepsi, I need to shop at one chain. If I want some Pringles, I need to shop at the other one.
It’s never been quite clear to me who/what is driving those exclusives, but it sure is a pain. Cui fucking bono?
Where you live Pepsi and Pringles are exclusives? Those are top name brands. People might buy a lot of store brands but the reason they choose that store isn’t always because of the store brands. They might say buy at Fred Meyer because they don’t like to shop at Wal-Mart and while they’re at Fred Meyer they buy Kroger brands… but does that mean they actually chose Fred Meyer because they want Kroger, not exactly. They actually chose Fred Meyer because they didn’t like Wal-mart not because they’re in love with the Kroger brand although they might like it… too.
Yeah it’s very rare to have any exclusives in any other industry, at least in the US. One funny exception is mattress stores in the US, which pretend to have exclusive inventory. Turns out its custom made for them ie. the manufacturers literally take the same mattresses and give them different names so it seems like different stores have unique products.
Another factor is that not only are you being sold exclusives, but your source for that exclusive forever more is that particular digital store. You have to keep ‘coming back’ to that store to get the exclusive item, and if that store should fail, your purchase is gone. In this sense, buying digital media is a much longer term commitment than say, buying a board game, where the purchase takes place once and you never need to deal with the store again.
I believe that this is the source of psychological attachment to Steam. People who have already spread their purchases around and particularly ones who have gone through console generations are used to these purchases being essentially one-time deals where the product is essentially lost, whereas people who game on PC, or who mentally connect gaming on Steam to collecting physical games before the digital era, form a stronger mental connection.
This is so wrong. You and Nesrie are really out of touch with the real world. All you have to do is walk into any Wal-Mart, then across the street to the Target and down the block to the Kohl’s and over the hill to Macy’s and you’ll find out they all sell totally different brands, styles within the same brands, and completely different products from one another. They may all be “pants” but the pants they sell are not the same. Some of them are, sure, but not all of them. Not even close.
You are acting like fools. And I guess I’m the fool for replying…
Screw you Dave. That’s freaking clothes and it’s a completely different market than Games. We’re talking about groceries and games. An apple is an apple. And if you think the people who shop at Macy’s would just shop at Wal-Mart if they carried the exact same thing, you’re nuts. Not all the clients overlap like that. You get your panties all in a bunch and then say shit like that. What’s your problem?
Yeah that industry does that by design. They purposefully sell separate model numbers so you can’t really price match although you can bargain every time. Electronics kind of do that too although a 55 inch TV is still a 55 inch TV. Samsung, Sony, Vizio, you find those at almost any store that sells TV. They’re not going exclusive as a brand even if the model numbers might be.
I wonder why Steam doesn’t apply a little bit of curation. Filtering the rubbish out*** would require little effort. A single Valve employee could easily make fair and unhurried evaluations for 500 games per year, without breaking a sweat. So 20 people more could make hell of a difference, and the money needed is peanuts. Even cleaning the current shop would be an option.
*** I’m only talking about closing the door for derivative work, cash-grabs and sub-standard titles. I don’t see filtering those out as problematic for Valve’s general strategy of letting everybody in.
They don’t believe they should make those decisions, what developers can create and sell or what customers can buy which of course turned out not to be true because they did just that recently.
I’m actually in full support of curation as long as there are alternative marketplaces available without curation for those games that don’t pass.
But oooh… errr. I think that’s opening a massive can of worms.
What is the criteria for curation?
Is there an appeals process?
What about re-submissions?
How many new games are submitted to Steam daily? - I expect it’s a lot.
As a father with a Paw Patrol obsessed 5 year old, I assure you that exclusives are a thing. Particularly in the toy space.
It is not uncommon (read: for tie in properties almost SOP) for different variants to be sold at different stores.
Hell, even board games. There are special store exclusive versions of things like Captain Sonar or Codenames that are Target exclusives.
Which is a far better comparison to video games than the detergent. You may not shop at one store over another for those reasons, but it happens.
Also movies and video games have a long history of retailer differentiation. Some movies had different special features for certain retailers, maybe a short video only available at one. I remember when Guild Wars first launched, Fry’s Best Buy, Walmart, etc. all had an exclusive in game item. Part of my calculus when buying was which item you wanted. This is obviously a different scale than a game not being available in other stores, but it’s one of degrees, not kind.
I agree that opening the Steam store was a good thing. I still remember how hard - or rather how nearly impossible - it was for Indies like Jeff Vogel or even for reasonably sized foreign publishers to get their product on Steam. Even a publisher like Koch Media / Deep Silver had trouble getting product listed until they hit the jackpot with Dead Island.
I believe though that there can be a middle ground. At least get rid of all the asset swap crap.
a) Really? The budget needed for full curation is peanuts. Valve needs 100 people instead of 20 for this? Fine, then do it. Just raise the fee a little bit.
b) This is open for discussion. If Valve’s strategy is to generally let all games through, the hurdle in this context would have to be low. Stop all asset swap games. Find a couple of other criteria to prevent shady publishers from exploiting the system.
I guess this would cut the amount of new games in half. My goal here is to get the junk and the shady products out. Every honest effort by an Indie developer or a known publisher should still go through, no matter how mediocre it may be.
c) Sure. It costs you the equivalent of 2 man days, up front. ;) Or just send the standard “more luck next time” mail.
d) What’s a re-submission, compared to an appeal?
Well I believe I mentioned Toys R Us days ago. They went the exclusive route, heavily. It’s not that exclusives don’t matter, it’s that they’re often not enough alone. So if you have the good service, acceptable prices, a pleasant experience then sure… exclusives can help but by itself, like come to my crappy store with my bad everything else and hope that works. Gamestop also likes exclusives. I am not sure getting a special pin or virtual item though is enough to keep them afloat. They had some issues awhile back.
If they want to be another Origin and another Uplay that people use for exclusives… and nothing else, then sure. I got the impression they want to be more. than that.
This is difficult, and isn’t as simple as it seems. Right now, with their automatic curation (or non-curation really) they aren’t at fault for the knock offs, cash grabs etc. They leave it to the consumer (not great) to make their own informed decisions about their purchases, and have a pretty robust refunds system.
If they were to take on curation, they could cut out a lot of the garbage for sure, but for every 10 garbage asset-flip games they remove from the store, 1 makes it through. And that is the one that youtubers, critics, and other scream about Valve letting some piece of trash on their store.
They become liable for every game on the store if they curate. Right now, they use automated systems of ratings/rankings/recommendations/sales to ensure those bad games basically never pop up in people’s store pages.
Right now, they bypass any arguments over the specific bad games on the service, people can just (somewhat rightly) complain about them not doing curation, and letting garbage games on their service.
I don’t know if I agree with how they run their store, but I can see their logic behind the decision making behind their system.
It is odd to make this comparison, but it is basically how buying stuff offline works. When you get a broken or bad item at Target, you don’t blame the store. You can use the store for a return and get your money back, but you blame the brand or company that made the item. When I bought a Yeti mic from Best Buy, I didn’t get mad at best buy for selling me a mic that broke right away, I got mad at Blue, the company, and went to Best Buy for a return.
Not saying that it works exactly this way, but Steam is saying, let’s do it like that. Blame the game maker for a bad game, we will refund you. If a game gets negative enough press or breaks some rules, they can pull it.
I think, in the real world, this doesn’t really work. People do blame Steam for selling that game, as I blame Best Buy for selling me a broken mic. It isn’t logical for me to blame best buy for Blue selling me a broken mic, but I still feel a bit that way. Though Best Buy’s return policy was good enough that I was happy with my interaction.
Maybe this is something Steam needs to work on, instead of curating. If it were possible for users to flag games as copyright infringing or asset flippy trash, they could have a better review system to get the bad stuff removed retroactively. Not perfect, but something, and it would be user-directed curation.
