I mean, okay, but what other recourse does any actor have to challenge Valve’s monopoly? The big publishers do everything they can to drive traffic to their own stores, which sort of sucks for consumers because dear god do those services irritate me, but I’m mostly convinced that that’s more about risk mitigation (aka "what happens to our spreadsheets if Valve falls into the ocean tomorrow) and to a lesser extent brand positioning than about any serious attempt to decouple from Steam.
Valve has a dominant position today because they presented by far – by far! – the best value to both producers and consumers over years of steady operation. If and when they start up with bullshit anti-competitive measures to maintain that position not through the delivering of value but by artificial restrictions or abusive agreement terms, that’s one thing. If they maintain that position by continuing to provide the best value for everyone involved, good for them.
That all said, the natural barriers to entry in the PC game distro market are massive even without any anti-consumer or anti-competitive action on Valve’s part. Consumers like me don’t like choice; we want the storefront to be as thin a layer between us and the content we want as possible. We want all our content in one place. We want to not manage multiple clients. We want to not manage multiple payment vectors. We want to not give a shit about which storefront has the best exclusive pre-order bonuses (special bonus fuck-you to every single person involved in that particular sea of horseshit).
So what’s a competitor to do? Offer better service? You still lose. Offer better terms? You still lose. Offer better content?..well, there might be something there. But how to get better content? You can make it yourself, or you can buy it. Well, there ya go.
If you want to meet someone at recess I am sure we have a topic for that around here somewhere.
Google throwing its cash into the arena of yet more gaming exclusives is simply not ideal, and it doesn’t matter that Epic launched their cash at people with their t-shirt launcher first.
Honestly I’m not sure if 1 billion of investment is that much for what Google is promising with Stadia.
The custom gaming hardware they’re deploying to their datacenters cannot come cheap. Each server instance will be running on hardware which could easily cost Google over $1,000 with scale discounts even with a sweet deal with AMD. Server-class CPUs and high-end GPUs robust enough to run in a datacenter, and server class memory + SSDs which need to live far longer than ordinary consumer parts don’t come cheap.
At $1000/blade, if they deployed 250,000 across all of their datacenters put together, they’ve already spent a quarter billion dollars purely on parts.
Then there are the people costs (both engineers building the product + people working in the datacenters supporting the hardware), the costs to run the hardware (cooling/power) and deliver the content, the costs for the 3rd-party content and licensing, and then add in the new studio they’re building.
It would be very easy for Google to have already spent well over $1 billion on Stadia
I think we should all be frequently reminded that Google’s stance on change and dropping services is not at all consumer / customer friendly, but there is still room to like Google.
