One Platform to Rule Them All

[Shamus Young]

One Platform to Rule Them All

Shamus looks at the numbers behind the consoles. Why are next-gen exclusives so sparse? Will Steam Machines be the Next Big Thing, or will they be the next Ouya?

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[TiberiusEsuriens]

I would have loved nothing more than to see Origin, Gamers Gate, or GameStop (née Impulse) become large enough to act as a counterweight to this growing Steam hegemony.

In all seriousness, I don't really see origin or uPlay ever becoming a big player. They aren't completely terrible, but what is really hurting them is their forced publisher exclusivity. EA will never hit anything close to Steam numbers, simply because they don't have as many games on there - uPlay is the same. To attempt to trounce Steam, they would essentially have to remove everything that makes them unique (for better or worse). Origin is actually solid (unlike uPlay's overdone DRM) but suffers mainly due to generic negative EA stereotyping and hate.

The publishers could open their clients up to 3rd parties and the like, but they don't actually care. They aren't trying to steal Steam users, but just take back the cut of profit that they would have given to Valve on Steam. Right now it looks like the publishers simply view the Origin, uPlay, and Battle.net clients as a clean way to maintain and advertize to existing users, as well as further involve them in their own communities.

 

[Kenjitsuka]

" It's more resistant to piracy than any other platform"
Bwuh? The other way around, really. Because the others need actual hardware modifications, the ones from Steam simple software mods only...

 

[thiosk]

I always like shamus. Thanks brah.

I really like the customer experience I get with steam. Steam gets a lot of love for this positive experience. You get the occasional person who had a bad experience-- they love to jump in threads like this too, so I suspect you'll see them soon-- but in terms of being an unobtrusive and secure pipeline to video games steam is unmatched. I used to get all my news about niche titles and releases from a handful of small companies or from places like the escapist-- now, steam directly targets me and brings to my attention titles that I like. Games I'd never seen before, I've picked up from the front page, and devoted hundreds of hours to.

I'm lookin' at you, don't starve and project zomboid. You don't get that kind of stuff with Sony.

So no, I don't get GTAV, but I wouldn't play it anyway. As of now, if its not on steam, I'm not buying it; for convenience reasons as much as anything else.

I don't need a steam machine, because I homebrew my computers. However, I do look forward to a day where I don't need to put a windows OS on a gaming devoted machine. I am really really interested in that.

 

[Toadfish1]

How many Steam accounts consist of alts made for the purposes of farming tradable equipment in F2P games? Oh, you didn't consider that? Why am I not surprised?

 

[Rad Party God]

I wholeheartedly agree, but there's 1 single problem preventing the PC being as mainstream as a console.

Bad ports and the need to patch a game that doesn't work.

I made the mistake of buying the Legacy of Kan series on GOG, only to find out that the only way to play those games is on WinXP and having a dual/single core CPU (for us lazy people who can't be arsed to set CPU affinity). These games are the exception, rather than the rule, but they exist. Also the bad ports that they themselves frequently need patches made by the community (yes, I'm talking about you Dark Souls, and YOU TOO Deadly Premonition).

Again, these games are the exception rather than the rule, but in order to play these games, one needs to at least have a basic knowdelage about how to search for these patches and how to apply them, god forbids if they need you to tinker with the system registry.

So yeah, I'm all for the idea of the PC increasingly becoming a HUGE market, but it still can't be considered as mainstream as it's living room brethren.

 

[Vigormortis]

I made the mistake of buying the Legacy of Kan series on GOG, only to find out that the only way to play those games is on WinXP and having a dual/single core CPU (for us lazy people who can't be arsed to set CPU affinity). These games are the exception, rather than the rule, but they exist. Also the bad ports that they themselves frequently need patches made by the community (yes, I'm talking about you Dark Souls, and YOU TOO Deadly Premonition).

Again, these games are the exception rather than the rule, but in order to play these games, one needs to at least have a basic knowdelage about how to search for these patches and how to apply them, god forbids if they need you to tinker with the system registry.

This is a fair point. One I've parroted in other discussions. And yes, these can be viewed as a pretty substantial downsides to PC gaming.

However, a few things to consider:
Buying and playing older titles like the ones you've mentioned is virtually unfeasible; if impossible; on consoles. Short of, of course, buying a copy of the requisite older console or hoping the maker of the console has included some amalgam of backwards compatibility.

So while there may be compatibility issues with older PC titles on newer operating systems, it is a least still possible to play almost any older game on a newer PC.

Something that can't really be said of most consoles.

As bad ports, let's be honest. We'll probably never be rid of them. They're very likely to remain an issue for the foreseeable future.

But then, if developers started targeting the PC as the primary platform, bad ports wouldn't really be an issue as they wouldn't be ports.

And while it is fairly annoying to occasionally have to rely on community-made patches to get things working, at least PCs have, and can foster, such communities.

So yeah, I'm all for the idea of the PC increasingly becoming a HUGE market, but it still can't be considered as mainstream as it's living room brethren.

As it stands, no. It can't. I agree.

However, the movement to bring the PC gaming experience to the living room and else where has gained quite a bit of momentum in recent years. There's been quite a lot of scheming and planning going on behind closed doors. We're only now starting to see the end results of those efforts in the form of things like nVidia's Shield, Valve's SteamMachines, and in some ways AMD's Mantle.

Time will tell if it at all pays off on the consumer end. But, if nothing else, at least someone is trying.

The one thing this industry desperately needs is some innovation. A "shake up" to break it out of the stagnant state it's currently stuck in.

 

[Octorok]

How many Steam accounts consist of alts made for the purposes of farming tradable equipment in F2P games? Oh, you didn't consider that? Why am I not surprised?

From the article -

Keeping all this in mind, I ran into an interesting figure cited at the Steam Dev days, showing that there were 75 million active Steam users as of the end of 2013. That number includes everyone who has bought at least one game and is currently active in the community. (So abandoned accounts and accounts with no games don't count.)

Emphasis added. Now, I don't have a source for Valve's measurement of "active" accounts, but if Shamus were correct, it would exclude people with Steam accounts tied only to F2P games. It's quite possible that the total number of Steam accounts is significantly higher, but that Valve count them as "inactive". Without solid information beyond the 75 million number, we're just speculating at the *precise* number of accounts.

As has been mentioned, the point still stands, even assuming a massive scale of account farming.

 

[Rad Party God]

Snip.

Yeah, you're right, the Legacy of Kain series mostly suffer from skipping sound issues, wich are incredibly annoying, but at least the games are playable and if you truly want them to work as intended, you can always have a WinXP partition and problem solved, but my point still stands that it's too much hassle for people who doesn't know how to do it, or who doesn't want to do it.

Don't get me wrong, I want the PC to thrive as much as it's counterparts, but we still have a long way for that day to come.

 

[BrotherRool]

But those 75 million people don't end up becoming more sales. The console titles still sell consistently more than the PC versions. The PC market is huge and spread out and has a wide range of people valuing things differently. Those 75 million active users include the guy who bought Rome Total War in a humble bundle and plays that every month or so, but nothing else. It includes people who only play indies, who only play MOBAs, who only play RTS... the market is a lot more fractured than the console market.

Sure it's big enough that most people won't ignore it for the price of a cheap port. But I don't think it's going to be upsetting many people's equations at the moment, I bet CoD Ghosts sold more on the PS4 and Xbox One than it did on the PC already and those install bases are going to grow.


The Steam Console is almost not relevant in this discussion. Maybe if Valve started paying for Steam exclusive games, but I doubt that will happen. Otherwise this is exactly the same information we had before

 

[Vigormortis]

Yeah, you're right, the Legacy of Kain series mostly suffer from skipping sound issues, wich are incredibly annoying, but at least the games are playable and if you truly want them to work as intended, you can always have a WinXP partition and problem solved, but my point still stands that it's too much hassle for people who doesn't know how to do it, or who doesn't want to do it.

Oh, I didn't disagree. I've made the same point. It's an opinion I share with you.

I was just saying that things like community-made patches are just the tip[footnote]An unfortunate tip, to be fair.[/footnote] of the iceberg of the shared communal experience that is PC gaming.

An experience you rarely, if ever, see in console gaming.

Don't get me wrong, I want the PC to thrive as much as it's counterparts, but we still have a long way for that day to come.

Yes. Yes we do. But only in terms of "mainstream, central-gaming-box" experiences.[footnote]In other ventures and avenues, console gaming has a hell of a lot of catching up to do.[/footnote]

It's like I'd said before:
At least there's a growing movement within the industry itself; by a number of very influential key players; to make it a reality, instead of just some misty-eyed dream of the PC gaming community.

 

[The Lunatic]

" It's more resistant to piracy than any other platform"
Bwuh? The other way around, really. Because the others need actual hardware modifications, the ones from Steam simple software mods only...

Well.


Technically.

All games on the consoles have been pirated.

Diablo 3, still not cracked for pirates to play.

So, 100% of console games have been cracked for pirates.

Only 99.999% of PC games have been cracked!


(Yes, I know, I'm being sarcastic.)

 

[Raziel]

There are several issues I have with this.

I don't know where you are getting your numbers but there is a difference between active accounts and number of consoles sold. Many, perhaps even most consoles have multiple accounts on them. And considering that their are almost as many ps3 consoles, by your numbers, than there are steam accounts I'm betting there are way more ps3 accounts than their are steam accounts. Maybe multiple times as many. I'm betting sony alone has more users than steam, perhaps microsoft and nintendo also each individually may have as many or more users. Declaring steam the winner in this race is laughable.

And calling the hardware better than the 360 is misleading. A dedicated console will perform better than a generic computer of the same specs. My $350 laptop has specs far better than the 360, but it won't play most any pc version of console games.

The main thing channeling steams popularity is the game prices. And thats built on the back of the consoles. Older games being ported there for a tiny sums. ANd current games sold their because sony and M$ don't care about the pc market. If the steambox starts to eat the console market you will find the price of those game going up to match the consoles. They have to make their money back.

On top of that they are making such a mess of the steambox, variations going from hundreds to thousands of dollars its going to fracture their user base a lot. And I expect it to lead to lots of user backlash. part of the console popularity is that you don't have a huge mess of can my box play this game. A ps4 plays all ps4 games. A $500 steambox won't play all the games on steam.

Additionally steam's service is becoming worse not better. There store is on the way to being a total mire filled clones and broken games. And its just getting worse all the time with their early access garbage. That doesn't fly with mainstream users.

I spend hundreds maybe even more than a thousand dollars a year on gaming. I have an active steam account I guess, I do sometimes get sucked into humble bundles. But the pc is the 2nd to last option for me to game, even worse than vita, the only thing I hate more is the phone. Once I found out the steambox is just another program loaded on any old pc I lost all interest. Until they make an actual console where crap just works without me searching out patches I'm not going to spend any time on it.

The issue with steam is the same issue with iphones. Crow all you want about more people using them, them having tons more games. Neither makes the revenue to found AAA game development.

 

[Toadfish1]

How many Steam accounts consist of alts made for the purposes of farming tradable equipment in F2P games? Oh, you didn't consider that? Why am I not surprised?

From the article -

Keeping all this in mind, I ran into an interesting figure cited at the Steam Dev days, showing that there were 75 million active Steam users as of the end of 2013. That number includes everyone who has bought at least one game and is currently active in the community. (So abandoned accounts and accounts with no games don't count.)

Emphasis added. Now, I don't have a source for Valve's measurement of "active" accounts, but if Shamus were correct, it would exclude people with Steam accounts tied only to F2P games. It's quite possible that the total number of Steam accounts is significantly higher, but that Valve count them as "inactive". Without solid information beyond the 75 million number, we're just speculating at the *precise* number of accounts.

As has been mentioned, the point still stands, even assuming a massive scale of account farming.

Buying a free game is still counted as buying a game via the metrics given from Valve (they consider people who have Tf2 to "own" the game). So the point still stands.

 

[gorfias]

Eh, they get me every which way anyhow. I love PC gaming, my Wii U gets another type play if I'm in the mood, My PS3 or PS4 or Vita another.

Some times I go outside and move. Some times under protest.

 

[Phrozenflame500]

I don't know where you are getting your numbers but there is a difference between active accounts and number of consoles sold. Many, perhaps even most consoles have multiple accounts on them. And considering that their are almost as many ps3 consoles, by your numbers, than there are steam accounts I'm betting there are way more ps3 accounts than their are steam accounts.

Here's some actual stats on this. Valve has 75 million active accounts, while xBox Live has 48 million (counting both free and gold) and PSN wins at a whopping 120 million likely due to their mobile platforms. However, it's not specified whether XBL or PSN counts non-active users so the comparison might even be more favourable to Steam. Either way, having more than XBL makes it a serious competitor anyways.

And calling the hardware better than the 360 is misleading. A dedicated console will perform better than a generic computer of the same specs. My $350 laptop has specs far better than the 360, but it won't play most any pc version of console games.

The <a href=http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey>vast minority of Steam users use Intel integrated graphics, and while for some reason the most recent Steam hardware survey doesn't let you browse the specific GPUs (last month's did, not sure what happened) any dedicated GPU made in the past couple of years can easily out-power the 360 even with any benefits optimization would bring (not to mention the concept of console optimization has become less and less relevant over the years).[/quote]

The main thing channeling steams popularity is the game prices. And thats built on the back of the consoles. Older games being ported there for a tiny sums. ANd current games sold their because sony and M$ don't care about the pc market. If the steambox starts to eat the console market you will find the price of those game going up to match the consoles. They have to make their money back.

I don't understand this at all. Steam does sales because they money not because they're trying to attract people to their store although that is a happy side-effect. Unless you're arguing that Steam's pricing will force Sony and M$ to start pricing their games as competitively, in which case that's a good thing for everyone.

On top of that they are making such a mess of the steambox, variations going from hundreds to thousands of dollars its going to fracture their user base a lot. And I expect it to lead to lots of user backlash. part of the console popularity is that you don't have a huge mess of can my box play this game. A ps4 plays all ps4 games. A $500 steambox won't play all the games on steam.

From what I understand the $500 Steambox is intended to be a "baseline" for minimum specs at a decent frame-rate while higher priced boxes are their if you wish to run the games at higher settings. Although admittedly Valve hasn't done a great job managing the Steambox so far so things may be completely different.

Additionally steam's service is becoming worse not better. There store is on the way to being a total mire filled clones and broken games. And its just getting worse all the time with their early access garbage. That doesn't fly with mainstream users.

This is a completely valid complaint and I don't really disagree.

The issue with steam is the same issue with iphones. Crow all you want about more people using them, them having tons more games. Neither makes the revenue to found AAA game development.

You do realize most AAA-games in the past year have been ported to Steam or Origin? The only one that hasn't off the top of my head is GTA 5. This analogy makes no sense.

Not to mention, in defense of iPhones, the reason AAA games don't work there is more because the purchasing demographic is mostly casual gamers not willing to invest that much time into a game and less because they don't make enough revenue.

 

[camazotz]

So Shamus's point is "devs, sell on PC too if you like more money." I don't see how anyone can argue with that (except Sony and MS).

 

[Kirill Steshin]

Yeah, great promo. Seriously, people!
Valve isn't even giving any effort to market Steam Boxes - like Ouya or WiiU. So why every "sophisticated gamers" - including author of this hype-article - pulling from nothing an absurd ideas of "It could be done - Valve will succeed", when, reality is different.
Stop believing the hype - Steam Boxes are worthless and too overpriced. More that this - venders have multiple version - which will confuse mass. consumer base.
So, this article is so facepalm.