Comment by ethbr1
2 days ago
The entire point of this thread is that there are many things that Valve could do to increase its profits over the short, intermediate, and long terms... that it doesn't (presumably because that's not the kind of company it wants to be).
As the simplest example, they could have stamped HL3 on a third party game and made several millions of dollars with only a minor hit to their brand (in 5 years, "that bad HL").
In more realistic terms, they could have built proprietary, closed source emulation packages (they are funding a lot of development, apparently) to give themselves a unique advantage.
If they were a publicly traded company, they probably would be doing all these things.
I don't see a problem with the first, if they want to outsource HL3 go ahead. Consumers can decide if they want to buy it when it releases, that's just normal economics.
As for the 2nd, that's sort of what Epic does, yet Valve's store revenue is 10x Epic. So if enacting these anti-consumer practices were actually more profitable, why is Epic doing so shit? Not even in terms of absolute numbers but in terms of growth, Epic store isn't growing at all. Epic can't hit even a fraction of Steam's numbers despite giving away hundreds of games.
Developing open source emulation is essential to their success - no developer would build and verify for Steam OS and Proton if it were closed source and only available on a single device (lol). Steam being very pro-consumer is what makes them successful.
> So if enacting these anti-consumer practices were actually more profitable, why is Epic doing so shit?
Because it is "common wisdom" even if the wisdom is short sighted and doesn't always amount to increased profits.
See Netflix removing the ability to cast, because fuck you. How much of the current growth is borne out of that crackdown on people using all their profiles they pay for?
There currently isn't a "good guy" so they can keep turning those screws and force some extra growth. Being anti-consumer would be beneficial for Valve because they are currently the only good guys.
> So if enacting these anti-consumer practices were actually more profitable, why is Epic doing so shit?
Because there's a huge network effect in play here and Valve was first in the market.
That doesnt explain their surge in growth only in recent years, its not like gaming is new. No, its all the new features they are offering and goodwill they have engendered.
1 reply →