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Is Steam too big to fail?

Westwood

Westwood

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Usually everything has an end, but do you think that Steam has become too big to fail at this point? What I mean is that it's constantly only generating money for Valve, and while one could argue that Greenlight has overall only had a negative impact on the platform, it still doesn't look like Steam would be losing users anytime soon.

What do you think?
 
I thought there be a day that Nintendo would never struggle but look at them now. So yes, one day Steam will struggle and fall.
 
As I see it, Steam has a very stable and profitable platform. It could lose it's luster if a better service comes along and attracts a lot of Steam users, and if it stops offering anything "new." As long as no one competes with Steam, Steam will remain the strongest digital distribution platform. It's not surprising to see Steam offer mostly Valve-made games either, since the entire site was developed by Valve itself, and for as long as people patronize Valve games, people will have to use Steam.
 
I don't think anything is "Too big to fail". It just needs the right type of competition. Right now, the problem is that steam doesn't really have any good competition. People have tried, but they've failed. Steam has had some mishaps in the past, if they poorly manage their community aspect they'll fail. I think there's a possibility that Steam never fails though. Right now, it's currently the largest gaming platform available on PC. As in, it's where everyone goes to buy their games, and Valve makes a lot of successful games of their own. (Dota, CS, TF2, Half-Life, Portal) As long as Steam doesn't majorly screw up soon, I think they still have a long life ahead of them.
 
Curation and Discovery could become a problem for Indies and smaller devs. It is about like the Apple Store. There is just too much selection that it is hard to be found no matter how good your ratings or reviews. Steam worked for awhile, but now we are just back where we started from where you have to spend a ton of money on marketing to get noticed.

I do not think Steam is going to collapse, but I think it is going to lose indies and hopefully an alternative arrives. Itch.io is awesome, but again there is no staff curation, which means there are like 20,000 games already listed on a platform that is only a couple years old. Again, it is impossible to get noticed.
 
Of course it could, everything has a chance of failing if they do not continue to innovate and listen to customers. All it takes is another game service to start offering better deals, better service and performance and the users will switch over without a second thought.
 
Demon_Skeith said:
I thought there be a day that Nintendo would never struggle but look at them now. So yes, one day Steam will struggle and fall.
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While I see what you mean and completely agree with you, the problem with Nintendo has really been sticking to archaic mediums and not having any real third-party support. Also the underpowered hardware hasn't exactly helped them.

Now I love Nintendo as much as the next guy my age, but these are really apples and oranges here, and the way I see it is that Valve is actually ready to adapt, and as such doesn't seem like they'd be losing their footing in the future.
 
There is no such thing as something that is too big to fail. We may think of Apple as this colossus nowadays but Steve Jobs, in his first stint as CEO of Apple, failed and had to be bailed out by Bill Gates and Microsoft (Gates didn't do this out of the kindness of his heart but to ensure that Microsoft had a competitor to point to in their monopoly trial in the mid/late 90s). General Motors was a colossus in the 1950s and went bankrupt 50 years later and had to be taken over by the government. Until our government becomes too abusive and overbearing (and it is evolving that way), there will always be the capacity for "creative destruction". Steam may be a colossus in its method of letting user search and download a huge library of games, but virtual reality and the movement away from the PC and even the tablet platforms will allow a new competitor to arise. The only question is .. when?
 
Some conditions should be met before ever glimpse a possibility of a prospective failure for Steam Platform. First, that all the most popular third parties move to another platform and do not support Steam any longer, Second, that not even First party games bring enough newer users to Steam every year whilst the competition is thriving with a steady growth of user base, and finally third but far less probable, is that PC and phone Videogame Industry experience a similar crysis like the 80s thus there is not porfitable market anymore.

Needless to say those scenarios right now are as probable as expecting the earth being struck by a gamma ray burst within the next few hours
 
Westwood said:
While I see what you mean and completely agree with you, the problem with Nintendo has really been sticking to archaic mediums and not having any real third-party support. Also the underpowered hardware hasn't exactly helped them.

Now I love Nintendo as much as the next guy my age, but these are really apples and oranges here, and the way I see it is that Valve is actually ready to adapt, and as such doesn't seem like they'd be losing their footing in the future.
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If I remember right Valve adapted some polices which brought on a huge negative wave of unhappy people. If they don't keep things good for people, they will vanish.
 
Valve is making a ton of money nowadays, just by being a platform. They haven't come up with any new games since DotA 2 6 years ago, and why should they? They can just sit pretty taking a cut from the sales of third parties (game developers, cosmetic item designers, modders etc.) HL3 could have the possibility of flopping, and would require heavy investment and development.

Many gamers have also invested too much into their Steam accounts to switch to other platforms. IMO as long as PC gaming remains popular (which I don't forsee declining for a long while) the platform won't fail.
 
Squigly said:
Valve is making a ton of money nowadays, just by being a platform. They haven't come up with any new games since DotA 2 6 years ago, and why should they? They can just sit pretty taking a cut from the sales of third parties (game developers, cosmetic item designers, modders etc.) HL3 could have the possibility of flopping, and would require heavy investment and development.

Many gamers have also invested too much into their Steam accounts to switch to other platforms. IMO as long as PC gaming remains popular (which I don't forsee declining for a long while) the platform won't fail.
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pretty sure the same was said with youtube and yet some gamers are going to twitch. Any service can go under, specially if Valve was to be sold.
 
Too early for something like this to happen, I'd say. The platform is too large and most users have invested so much into it by buying games. These games aren't DRM-Free either, so they need steam to run them in the first place. It is possible for it to 'slowly' die if a stronger alternative comes along. If, for instance, GOG were to expand their collection to include a lot of current big steam games, I reckon most people including myself would move to that when buying their new games instead of investing more into steam, especially since they offer all of their games DRM-free, which is something every single PC gamer would like to get rid of.
 
I think that eventually all good things come to an end, so eventually it will fail I think. Who'd have thought that Sega and Nintendo would ever struggle back in the day when they dominated the gaming market for example?

Time and technology moves on, and so while steam is ruling the roost now, and probably will for a good few years to come, there will be a time when something new takes over I would have imagined, as that's what's happened in the past in gaming.
 
It has a small chance to fail but I don't see it in the near future.It is the biggest company in the business and there is not much competition.Origin is still a long way.Pretty much any pc gamer knows about steam or uses it.So I doubt it will happen soon,if at all
 
Demon_Skeith said:
pretty sure the same was said with youtube and yet some gamers are going to twitch. Any service can go under, specially if Valve was to be sold.
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I'd argue that Twitch is a different product from Youtube though. Twitch caters exclusively to gamers, with live chat and livestreams, while Youtube is more of uploading videos for a general audience. Let's Play videos on Youtube are still drawing high numbers of viewers.

With regards to Steam it's been pretty dominant, with other game distribution platforms such as Desura failing to take up market share. Origin might be a bit of a threat thanks to Microsoft's aggressive marketing though.
 
Another part of it is how much you think Indie games will influence the future. I am not going to overstate this as a huge issue, but getting your game on multiple platforms is not trivial, you have to put some effort into it, and almost everyone starts with Steam because it has the biggest reach. I am not sure of exact numbers, but the numbers of games that are on other platforms but are not on Steam is probably pretty small.
 
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