According to an unnamed rival, Steam is killing the market.

[VoltySquirrel]

http://kotaku.com/5687187/valve-is-killing-the-pc-market-apparently
Yeah, I both understand and don't understand. If brick and mortar stores aren't going to carry the PC game I want just because it requires Steam activation, isn't that going to encourage me to buy it on Steam in the first place? I mean yeah, monopolies suck (look at Gamestop for Christ's sake) but this isn't a monopoly in my mind. Steam has 6 main competitors in the PC digital market. There's Direct2Drive, GamersGate, Impulse, OnLive, GOG, and Game For Windows Live. That's alot of competition. But the reason Steam is above them all is because of how they treat their customers. Yes, losing connection to Steam suck, but a variety of robust community features, consistently awesome and cheap sales on all games, support for Indie games, and a great Mac selection makes up for it. What do you guys think?

[Maringue]

Gamestop can eat my cock. Here is my scenario that has played out the few times I went there: I'm out doing something, see a Gamestop and think, "Hey, I've been wanting game X, let's see if they have it." Enter Gamestop. While they have no new copies of the game, they have 40 used copies. Do they let you check to see if the manual and everything is in there? No.

Granted this is for console games. Does Gamestop even sell PC or Mac games? Their section for that is usually in the back room like a porno section and has about 6 games, all of which suck balls. If I want a PC title, I generally go to Best Buy or buy it online.

What killed the PC gaming market was the designers of the games. For a while, PC was king of all the cool games. They kept making more advanced games that needed the new, top of the line hardware which entailed getting a new $2k PC about every two years if you wanted to keep up. Then the DVD consoles like Playstation came out. Here was a system you could buy and play the next new games for several years, basically until the PS2 came out, and it was a lot cheaper than a new computer. What did game designers do? Kept making games that needed the next set of maxed out hardware to run smoothly every 6 months. BAM, they fucking loose.

What made their losses worse was that it was a lot harder to copy a game on a console, and it's gotten progressively harder. PC games had to wade through a bunch of DRM bullshit that everyone hated to try to protect their games. In comes Steam. They take games that are only played online (original TF, CS, then CSS) and put them on Steam so you had to be logged in to play. No big deal, you had to be online to play anyway. Once internet became standard with cable, Producers started seeing that they could put their single player games on Steam and not get ripped off by hackers. Sure you needed an internet connection to play your single player game, but everyone has one of those anyway. Then more game developers come to Steam with their games because of the price. Since Steam doesn't have to pay the ungodly upcharge that Gamestop requires, the price went down and more units got sold. Remember when the average PC game used to be 60-70 bucks? Now Steam games top out at 40-50, but a whole lot of them are 15-30 bucks.

Hey Gamestop, ask Blockbuster Video how your business model is going to work out for you in 5 years. Steam gave publishers an avenue to protect their intellectual property that wasn't a massive pain in the ass for the customer, therefor they win.

And I love that Brick and Mortar stores are threatening to stop selling games that require a Steam validation. Oh NOOOOOOO! So instead of having to drive to the mall, deal with traffic and finding a parking space and finally deal with the dipshit who tells you the game is probably not in stock, I can sit at my computer and buy it online? Wait, I can start the download, go sit on my couch smoking pot and when I remember that I bought the game, 45 minutes ago, its ready to play? Yeah, this is a HUGE problem for me.

[dieinafire]

Would be nice if the gaming community/developers/companies could come up with a standardized API so anyone can start a gaming community that hooks into your games. This way I can stop using this worthless piece of shit and use one that is actually useful.