Jumbled Thoughts: Proprietary Software and "X thing has this, why not others?" with Steam · 10:39pm Feb 29th, 2020
So, something I hear a lot when people talk about different digital store fronts is that they're confused why they don't all have everything that Steam does. Shouldn't we all have learned lessons from Steam? Well... this is where it being Proprietary software comes into play.
Proprietary software is software that you have to abide by certain rules in order to use. Whether this be buying the license, agreeing to a EULA, etc. doesn't matter. A big part of the agreements attached to this is usually in protecting using its code, and one of the easiest ways is to either make it impossible to get at the code underneath it, or make it so that if someone published the underlying code, they'd be sued into oblivion. All of this is to make sure no one can recreate what you have done and so make the same or competing product.
And if you share none of this, no one learns from it. I know this will sound extreme, but it's essentially how nuclear secrets are treated. If someone knows how to make a nuclear bomb, and I think even nuclear energy (I can't promise that one), you are brought into the group of people who need to promise to keep that secret to yourself. If you don't have the secret, NO ONE IS ALLOWED TO TELL YOU. Why? Well, if even the smallest detail, like how to make the right version of plutonium or the distribution system, you have just pushed forward their ability to make a nuke by years, if not a decade, and they'll be able to have that same weapon much sooner than they otherwise would.
So how does this relate to Steam? Easy. People like to rail against any other digital marketplace, whether it be GoG, consoles, or Epic, for not having features that are popular on Steam. Don't have a good search engine, don't have modding, don't have wishlisting, doesn't have Cloud Saves. These are great features, no doubt.
But each of them take time to create. Each one has to be figured out and implemented after X company has figured out how to in fact do it. And that's the thing. If it was as easy as saying "Hey, Steam, you have wishlists. Mind giving us the code and notes you have on all of that? That'd be greeeeat." then people would be correct. Steam has it, why don't you? But Steam is proprietary. Steam doesn't let those secrets out. They have no reason to either because competitors would be able to sell just as good a product much faster than them. And Steam doesn't even always have a lot of this stuff right, and they've been around SEVENTEEN YEARS. GoG has been going for twelve now. That's a LOT of time.
Time that, for people who just started making their marketplace, others haven't had. If it were easy, more people would do it. After all, you wouldn't have to go through Steam than like Humble does. They've decided that, instead of going through their own client and trying to get a larger cut of the profit for their games, to give Steam Keys, which means Steam is making some sort of profit off of Humble's own store. And Humble gives to charity. And partnered creators! That's a lot of ways to split revenue!
But it hasn't been worth it. Just like no one has decided it'd be worth it to fight Mac or Windows because of how time and resource intensive it is to make an operating system. The fact that no one else has Steam's features is out of Steam's need to stay ahead of their competitors, driving them to find other ways to fight them, or simply bowing their head and taking a smaller slice of the pie, or even paying Steam still.
And this isn't just something for Digital Marketplaces or Operating Systems. This applies to almost every piece of software in the world. So next time you ask "Why doesn't X have this? This other thing has it." try to keep this in mind.
Your third paragraph is an example of it applying to hardware as well. It's just, y'know, in most cases hardware is significantly easier to steal and disassemble.
5212064 This. This is super true. Back when i had a Mac and the power cords would break, I would try a MUCH cheaper third party option. They would break in like a month because it just wasn't made right.
That still perplexed me, particularly with regards to the Epic Store. “It doesn’t have this list of features that Steam has!”
Good. Those features are stupid and nobody likes them. Why does Steam have trading cards? If I wanted to manage trading cards, I’d watch baseball or play Magic or something. I play video game’s because I haven’t got the time or the patience to deal with organizing a card collection, and at least with physical cards, I can sell them for physical money.
Achievements are a joke.
Chat would be useful if Discord didn’t exist.
Friend management is actually pretty useful and that’s why it’s part of the software already.
People react on the idea that something with fewer features is intrinsically less good than something with more features, but if those features suck?
5212215 Agreed! The main one I often think about is wishlisting when people talk about this, because it is genuinely a big deal to help with watching for deals, and then the shopping cart. Both of these, and I know I'd get a lot of flack for talking about this, feel... predatory. I know that Amazon and what not has these sorts of things, but Amazon has a varied catalogue of items so when you buy fifteen things, they may all go into immediate use.
You simply can't do that with video games. If you're buying so many games that your credit card company assumes you must be a fraud, you have bought TOO MANY GAMES. At least at once. That's how you end up with these Steam libraries everyone talks about where you've played maybe 10% of them. But, because Steam has it, wishlisting will have to be a thing on Epic, because people won't leave it be.
5212228
A shopping cart exists mainly as a convenience and a money-saver than anything else. Sometimes, you want to buy more than one thing, and a cart makes that easier for you. Additionally, credit card processors charge their processing fee to merchants per transaction, and a cart allows multiple products to be bundled into a single transaction (the fee is very small and might seem trivial to us, but we aren’t processing thousands of transactions a day).
Largely the same with wishlisting, and I guess that makes giftgiving easier too.
The point is that, again, neither of these are essential features; just nice ones. (Although I guess there’s an argument to be made that the PlayStation Store is a trash fire, and it has a shopping cart)
5212288 MMMMMMHM. People hate the Nintendo online store, but they shrug it off because of the games you can find there, because the product matters more than the features, though I would debate that distribution of wealth matters too. That's why I'm trying really hard to only buy from Humble and Epic because both of them have creators I want to support and I can do that by buying from those two. Steam doesn't have that, which boggles my mind.
5212291
Steam only gets the love it does because it's been the only vendor like it, really, for years, and people are generally resistant to change. When EA Origin came around, no one liked it. Still no one likes it, and even if it was actually any good, still no one would like it because it it's Steam.
Folks without an irrational attachment to Steam, however, don't care and just use whichever store front gives them the best deal.
5212361 100%. That entrechment also feels like it applies to old game studios too and their old works, like Bethesda. I just... I cannot believe people are okay with just shrugging their shoulders and saying "Well, need to wait until mods fix this shit."
5212468
After the apocalypse that was Fallout ‘76, Bethesda is finished.
5212715 I don't believe it. It will take the next 'real' game of theirs to break them since most people just consider 76 to be a poorly thought out cash grab, which is actually somewhat accurate from what I've heard. Even then, only as a developer, much like what will happen if Valve fucks up Alex. Bethesda is also now a wildly successful publisher, even if they're also running some of their IPs into the ground. Oh, Wolfenstein, I didn't see you there.
5212722
I think the main problem is that Todd Howard has broken free from his restraining bolts and no one’s been able to staple new ones into him.
Now, he just promises whatever he thinks sounds cool with no regard to whether it’s actually feasible or not.
5212728 I mean, that's what a lot of companies do, especially if they can't keep putting products out. I don't have much to add though, so have a song I started listening to right when I saw you had responded.
5212732
Yeah, but the problem with Howard is that he thinks of things right before he steps out in stage, so the first time we hear about something is the first time the rest of Bethesda is hearing about it too, and now they have to make it happen.
Naturally, I can’t prove that this is true, but all the evidence I have strongly suggests it is.