Of late, Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford has seemingly made it his goal in life to criticize Valve and its Steam service, saying that it is exploitation and a conflict of interest. While the Steam service may be many things to many different people, a document by Stardock CEO Brad Wardell [thanks Gamasutra] says that Steam is also the digital download market leader.
"Our estimation is that Steam - as the current market leader - enjoys approximately 70 percent of the overall digital distribution market with Impulse at 10 percent and all others combined at 20 percent in terms of actual dollars generated per month," wrote Wardell, noting, “Steam and Impulse both have the advantage of exclusive content (Left 4 Dead, Half-Life, Sins of a Solar Empire, Demigod, etc.).”
Impulse was formally launched in 2008, a full five years after Steam, though Stardock had digital distribution services prior to that. The company also noted that it has had to deal with the challenge of pricing internationally, "Thus far, our competitors have a significant head-start in this area," added Wardell, who continued, "Another trend we have seen in the past year has been Valve’s successful work with getting Steamworks licensed as a DRM solution by major publishers. Once a game requires Steamworks, it is effectively cut off from us, which limits our content. Examples of this include THQ’s Dawn of War II, Sega’s Empire: Total War, and more recently Activision’s Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare 2. The problem is that it is not practical for us to install a game that in turn requires the installation of a competitor’s store and platform in order to play it.”
Depending on whom you ask, these practices by Valve would probably be viewed as either keen business practices or monopolization.
2 Comments
November 22, 2009
As a consumer I find Pitchford's comments to be ridiculous, and Wardell's to be whiny. I have used a number of on-line venues to purchase game content--Steam, GOG, D2D. Steam is hands-down the most effective in stability, support, ease of purchase, ergonomics, content patches, everything.
It's too bad that other studios have to go through a competitor's platform to sell games, though one could wonder why they didn't think of it themselves five years ago and do it first. Valve came up with a good idea and has been constantly improving the implementation. Frankly, as someone who buys games, I think that's great.
In fact, the basis of the complaints seems to be purely financial. There has never been a breath of scandal that Valve plays favorites, delays or slows competitor's offerings, dishes out unequal access, or commits any other form of unethical practice. In fact, it's worth noting that every single comment that came out as a response to Pitchford's original diatribe has stated that Valve could, but doesn't. After all, just because Valve also comes from Seattle doesn't mean that they use Microsoft's business practices.
Why does Steam have a 70% market share? Why are so many of us happy using it? Maybe it's because it works.
November 24, 2009
Most consumers feel that Steam is a great service, and most developers are obviously on board with it too. However, the potential conflict of interest is very real, and it’s enhanced by the Steamworks DRM tie into Steam. With the importance of digital download increasing every year, it’s something to be mindful of.