I can’t seem to find that one comment explaining the issue with them…
But for the sake of promoting conversation on Lemmy, what’s the issue with Epic, and why should I go for Steam or GoG?
Note: Piracy is not an answer. I understand why, and do agree to a certain extent… But sometimes, the happiness gained by playing something from a legitimate source is far greater 🥹… coming from someone who could never ever afford to purchase games, nor could my parents… Hence I’ve always played bootleg, or pirated games.
Real answer is branding. Steam has cultivated an absolutely stellar image of being the “good guys” of gaming, and it’s super hard to counter that. Epic came on the back of publisher-specific launchers getting a bad reputation for both legitimate and illegitimate reasons, so you end up with a weird, paradoxical defense of Steam’s quasi-monopoly.
I guess tehcnically GOG is exempt, in that they also have a good reputation and they’re objectively more radically pro-consumer than Valve by a huge margin, so the lines get blurred there.
How are they cultivating this exactly? I mean other than just doing consumer-friendly moves like free updates, supporting open source, etc. This makes it seem like Valve is out there pushing out pro-Steam propaganda or something, but does Valve even market Steam at all? They don’t do interviews or put out commercials or buy billboards. They put up a few silly YouTube videos to advertise a sale or new product and then it’s radio silence for the rest of the year.
Well, that’s cultivating an image.
I have this conversation weirdly often around here. Steam launched under a TON of pushback. They effectively did what people criticise Epic for doing and locked down Half-Life 2 under Steam, and in turn under always-online DRM. People were very angry, nobody wanted that crap and it was pretty controversial. As I recall, Valve didn’t react much. They just kept going, adding more first and third party content until they were the de facto storefront. They targeted their publishing and purchasing strategies to keep content first and consistently avoided controversy via the silent treatment, outside of having Gabe talk in public here and there and keeping his persona out there, along with a couple of select employees, although once they phased out game development for pure publishing even that went away.
They are very careful to not demistify themselves and to keep that semi-accidental conflation of being the de facto monopoly with being pro-consumer. It’s kind of insane how resilient to speaking publicly or being perceived as speaking publicly they are, especially with how much they had to let go of that in regards to the scandals related to CS gambling grey markets, game greenlighting processes and a few other key snafus. But it works. The brand is sticky and they know if they don’t say anything the community will do the job for them, so they just… shut up, avoid constructed corpo PR when they can and favor having their content makers handle communication whenever they can, including product launches.
By the numbers Valve is a fairly standard tech upstart: comes from Microsoft vets, uses traditional disruption tactics, throws everything against the wall to see what sticks, fixes broken things later. Their branding is up there with Coca-Cola, though. Hell, Disney wishes they looked as squeaky clean as the “we had kids gambling on gun skins” guys. It’s kinda nuts.
I mean, good for them. I don’t know why they aren’t more of a mainstay in PR and marketing degrees. It’s kind of amazing.
As someone who bought Half Life 2 when it was released …
I only remember people being excited about Steam, Web stores weren’t a thing back then and they were the future! (It was the following years of audio and ebook stores locking stuff down and evapourating that taught us to hate it).
Game/Audio CD DRM hacking the kernel and breaking/massively slowing down your PC was pretty common back then and Steam’ s DRM didn’t do that.
The HL2 disc installer didn’t require you to install Steam, once installed it asked you to setup Steam and there was a sticker under the DVD with the Steam code for you to enter.
You were then rewarded with a copy of HL2 Deathmatch and Counterstrike Source.
Steam wasn’t always on DRM, back then ADSL/DSL was relatively new and alot of people were still stuck on Dial Up modems.
Steam let you sign in and authorize your games for 30 days at which point you would need to log into Steam again. This was incredibly helpful feature for young me.
I was there, I was an adult. I was mad and I was online enough to know I was not alone. In fairness, some of the being mad part was from people being locked out by login and server issues, which is a slightly different kind of mad.
But I personally did not play HL2 for a while because I was boycotting Steam. I remember so distinctly holding the box in my hand and going “hell no” at seeing the “Steam mandatory” sticker on it and putting it back.
You’re technically right that I wasn’t always online, though. It required you to go online to authorize it, as you say, but that was more than enough. I already had a standing veto on anybody attempting it.
I pirated HL2 when it came out entirely in protest of Steam. I don’t know how long it took me to relent, because I don’t have my Steam account on hand at the moment, but I think it was a couple of years at least. Honestly, to this day I still default to GOG, so I’m still a bit testy about it.
This image you are painting of Valve is just… funny to me. Anybody who plays Valve games could tell just how oblivious they are to PR or marketing. This is a company composed almost entirely of engineers that basically only communicates in patch notes. If they are trying to cultivate an image, they are doing a hilariously bad job at it.
That’s a hilarious thought. Valve is primarily an online storefront company that runs organized sales events multiple times a year. Their marketing arm is ruthlessly efficient. They invented maybe half of the GaaS strategies in the books and are arguably still one of the best at deploying them.
And they do have at lest one more vector of PR. Normally you’d think third party relations is a different category, because it’s a business-to-business thing, but when you get as big as Steam and have effectively removed or crowdsourced all greenlinghting and discovery you’re in a different space. Like Unity, Valve has a small ninja army of dev relations guys they send around the world to events and gatherings to deliver the good word of our lord Valve and ensure that indie devs know what they’re supposed to be doing to fit within their strategy. I assure you you haven’t heard more refined PR-speak in your life.
But again, they’re amazing at being quiet and keeping up that image of “just a buncha engineer underdogs in a room fixing the games industry, ya know?” I don’t hate them, or even dislike them. I don’t hate any game publisher. Games are games, it’s an entertainment industry, it doesn’t warrant love or hate of companies or corporations, beyond the larger questions of how copyright and IP work in an online world. But this idea that Valve is a magic wonderland with no agency on how their image is handled or moneymaking strategy or community management is… a lot.
“Their marketing arm?” So… Kaci? The person they hired about a couple years ago to film silly minute-long YouTube videos about 5 times a year? Yeah she’s really ruthless…
Just look at the guys they send out to do Steam Deck interviews and tell me Valve has PR people working for them full-time. No offense to Pierre-Loup Griffais but there’s a reason companies hire good-looking celebrities to push their products.
jfc lmao does this “ninja army” sneak some shurikens pass the TSA so they can take out employees of rival PC gaming stores!? This doesn’t even sound remotely nefarious, just sounds like Valve sends out some guys to consult companies on how best to use their products and do a little salesmanship and networking. The horror.
So give me some proof of Valve’s “ruthless” marketing arm then? So far most you can say regarding Valve’s “image handling” is that Valve sends some devs out to talk up Steam to developers. Meanwhile, most companies spend BILLIONS UPON BILLIONS on marketing and PR. Can you not see the insane difference between these?
We already know a little how Valve works (here’s an old employee manual). Note the line “There are not different sets of rules or criteria for engineers, artists, animators, and accountants.” So yes, even Valve’s marketing team (which so far as we know consists of one person) has a flat structure. So it’s a little hard to see without any sort of management apparatus how “Valve” (as a whole) makes any concerted efforts towards these things.
Hey! Somebody brought up the “leaked” employee manual, I think I have bingo now.
The guys they have doing dev relations aren’t talking development, they’re talking business.
And just so I’m clear on how you think this works. You believe that Valve sets up what? Five sales a year? Plus the International. Plus coordinating and financing the CS Majors. Plus actually negotiating all the distribution deals for store placement with third parties. Plus shipping multiple hardware and software products, including setting up preview events and sending out review samples. Plus all the press relations for both games and press queries…
…with zero sales/PR/community management staff.
Am I getting that wrong?
Man, messed up as it is to refuse to put proper credits in games, you certainly see how that feeds into their, again, very carefully curated public image.
EDIT: To be clear, it’s hard to know what anybody does at Valve if you don’t work at Valve, or at least routinely with Valve. I’m not gonna stand here and say that all of the guys working on that don’t also… I don’t know go build 3D models or code store features when they’re not doing that. But they absolutely do that. And they absolutely have a PR strategy, which is mostly “shut the hell up, keep the black box a black box”. Again, so much to learn from them about how to handle PR, especially in tech and gaming.
I’m making a best effort guess based on the evidence to understand how the company works but yes, you can’t prove one way or another. All I can really say is
So I’m just putting 2 and 2 together here. If Valve actually has a community relations team, please God let me work there because that must be the easiest job on Earth.
I think you’re misunderstanding what sorts of roles a brand, sales, PR and community management teams actually have, beyond… I’m guessing you’re thinking traditional advertising stuff. But also what sort of role they would have under Valve’s extremely opaque strategy.
At the absolute least Valve has a ton of third party relations to handle, which I know for a fact they do because I’ve physically seen the people doing it. So there’s that.
They also run one of the biggest esports organizations in the business, or at least they manage it, which is effectively its own standalone thing on the side. They fully run The International, as far as I can tell, and they at the very least fund and organize the CS majors circuit.
They run one of the world’s biggest digital service platforms, with an absolutely insane amount of third parties involved worldwide. They have comarketing deals all over the place. Every time you see a game show up on a Steam banner somebody had to have a conversation about that, sign deals, source art, get it cleared… it’s a whole mess.
They run everry bit of branding, marketing and community management on Steam. Every sale, every ad, every bit of written copy you see on Steam that is not uploaded directly by a game maker? Somebody made those.
They ship and sell games and hardware. All those Steam Deck OLED reviews and previews you saw? Somebody went and set those up, signed NDAs and embargos, shipped test units, provided review guides, handled questions from the press, got the right info to the right places.
Every campaign, loot box, piece of cosmetics, seasonal event in CS2 or DOTA 2 or any other Valve game? Somebody put those together. Not just the content, the in-store materials, copy, go-to-market plan, the whole deal.
Valve are intentionally obtuse about what they do. They don’t put roles next to names on credits. They don’t put in credits at all, sometimes. They don’t advertise job positions or share what the jobs actually are. They don’t easily provide points of contact or names or have roles or tell anybody what they do or how, with very few exceptions. Because it helps their image. It helps sell that one of the biggest online marketplaces in the world (we’re talking Netflix big. Amazon big) is somehow an upstart of engineers coming up with ideas on the spot. And that is what we call “a carefully cultivated image”.
I absolutely believe that they run lean and flexible. I have no question. But I’d be less suprised to find out that Valve has no cleaning staff than to find they have nobody working on brand, comms or event organization.
Exactly. Steam didn’t invest in marketing nonsense and gimmicks to get people on their platform. For consumers it is simply the superior product, DRM not withstanding.
They got their issues, no doubt. But I have never seen a quasi monopoly be more consumer oriented than steam.