Game Stores View Valve's Steam as the Devil

[joshyboy82]

I didn't even know GS still had a PC section. I've been in there twice in the past month and it's not exactly a big store area.

 

[aznshinobi]

Steam is a great company, especially since when they make or cause problems they live up to making them up. Like that VAC ban on MW2 gamers, they gave them LFD2

 

[alidan]

i love steam in concept, but i HATE it in practice.
in concept it makes games cheaper and gives more money to publishers.

i go to a store, i get box art, i get a physical disc, instructions and anything else that comes with the game, for 40-60$ (cod is the only 60 pc game i can think of) but if i go to steam, im paying the same damn price as retail, when there is nothing making that price higher.

i NEVER buy a game on steam unless its on sale. if i really want it i will pirate it until i find it on sale, buy it than, and transfer my saves if possible. dont get me wrong im all for giveing the devs their fair share of what they make, but it seams like they took out all the crap that realy drove game prices up and got rid of it, only to charge the same damn price.

i get that part of that is to appease the walmarts of the world, but F them, seriously, never do things half way.

 

[Ragnar-Kon]

I'm the type of person who would rather have a physical copy of the game on a disk, but I moved to Steam way back in 2004 BECAUSE the local retailers stop selling PC games. In fact, the only halfway decent PC game that the retailers have carried in my town in the past 5 years is Starcraft 2 (and WoW + WoW expansions, if you consider that a decent game).

Stopped by last week and saw about 10 boxes filled with 350 copies of Black Ops for XBox and PS3, but was there a single copy for PC? No. I asked the employee where I could get the PC version, and he said download it from Steam, so I did.

Does Steam have a frighteningly tight grip on the PC game market? Not really. I would say iTunes' grip on the music market is more frightening than Steam's grip on the PC game market.

 

[drapple]

I have no interest in box art or disks. The sooner steam kills off all the stores the better. They price gouge like crazy in Australia and the distributors even force Steam to price gouge in Australia on some games.

 

[velosse]

bye bye retailers, Its only a matter of time before your obsolete; well to the pc world in the long run i guess

 

[jgv115]

I like steam because it's got the friends thingo and you can tell your whole friends list when you open Firefox.

 

[universalremonster]

I have Steam and love it. But I have to agree with Alidan as far as pricing on digital content. This goes for games and music. We are saving the developers the cost of manufacturing the disc and packaging, the cost of warehouse storage and distribution while we are making the sacrifice of not owning a physical copy. Then on top of that we are paying full retail so now not only are they making more money by selling a product with no manufacturing costs, but they are also taking the slice of pie that the retail stores would have made too. If we are already saving them the manufacturing and distribution costs, it seems they could at least throw us a bone and sell it digitally for the price a place like Best Buy can buy the physical copy for. They still would be making more money than what they do from a physical copy while giving a thank you to their customers that are actually doing them a big favor by buying digitally.

 

[dEAne]

No, one day they will be out of business.

 

[b@mb@m]

I really don't feel sorry for any so called game shops or retailers. Walmart now has 1 little section of PC games, BestBuy has 1 aisle, used to be 3 or 4, Gamestop has 1 rack, it's GAMESTOP for crying out loud. If you own a console you have it made as far as stores go. For us pc gamers we have no choice but to use steam, D2D, or EA Store. It is so funny how game publishers want to blame pirating for low sales and game retailers blame digital downloads. I have an idea, how about owning up to it being your own damn fault for a change.

 

[JOSHSKORN]

I'm probably not the first to say it BUT...

Stores should stop carrying PC games. At the same time, PC Game manufacturers should allow us to download games from sites LIKE Direct2Drive.com. THAT, and things like OnLive are where the competition should look to.

...And as for nextgen consoles, the same thing (all games downloaded or make use of cloud gaming). Have them come with something insane like at least 5TB hard drives. We're not that far away from those size drives in the PC market, anyway. There's already a 3 TB drive out.

Oh and really...I think it's a bit ridiculous that they haven't gotten a handle on the hacking situation, yet. Maybe cloud gaming is the answer but I don't know enough about it.

 

[kastraelie]

Pros:

1. Instant download at excellent speeds.
2. Can download over and over again to all your computers (and friends)
3. All your games in one place, and cant be lost or destroyed
4. Most steam games with DRM are non-invasive and non-hassel
5. Excellent community organization service and matchmaking
6. Unbelievable deals (I have 250+ games in my library and I have spent under $400) on them.)
5. NO STUPID CDs/DVDs TO FIND AND HAVE IN YOUR DRIVE

Cons:

No box.

 

[Khimera2000]

I Use to buy games in store lots, but i lost most of the boxes, and lost most of the CD, not to mention that all the CD keys I had to keep track of. Steam is just alot less of a pain.

Although i dont think that they have a strangle hold it is getting closer. As long as game stores keep on ignoreing PC gamers they will find that when they want to get back in the customers that they use to serve will not be there to support them. We are all tech heads and what they cant provide we will find through other means.

Of all the stores that i use to buy games from the only one i go back to now is Fry's they still have a massive selection at least.

 

[shadowryche]

Ten years ago there was more than a dozen places with in a 45 minute drive, I could buy a retail copy of most any game. Today the only place left for me is a Best Buy, and they want full retail for a game that has been out for ten years. Sorry, not paying $50 for Diablo II. Every so often I pick up a new release from Best Buy. But for the most part I buy direct download and save myself $10 - $20 in gas, lets not forget people wanting to eat or shop for other stuff while I'm in town. Most people I have known that owned retail establishments have noted that there isn't a lot of profit in software any how. Unless you have the sales and purchasing power of a big box store.

 

[el_bastardo74]

lamestop is the only game shop in my city and they cater to console trash. sad that hastings, best buy and even walmart have a more vast selection...bring on the steam, it's inevitable anyway

 

[sudeshc]

Kind of a problem indeed for retailer as they will loose there investments but as far as its good for us its good.

 

[powerjuice]

[citation][nom]universalremonster[/nom]If we are already saving them the manufacturing and distribution costs, it seems they could at least throw us a bone and sell it digitally for the price a place like Best Buy can buy the physical copy for. They still would be making more money than what they do from a physical copy while giving a thank you to their customers that are actually doing them a big favor by buying digitally.[/citation]

If publishers did that (offer downloadable games at a lower price than retail), they would alienate big-box stores even more. Not that I care for physical stores, though; they were turning their backs on PC gaming long before Steam gained traction.

 

[neiroatopelcc]

The steam concept works great, but you can never truely trust it. It's a very limiting system, not as much as battle.net but still very limiting.

 

[proxy711]

[citation][nom]neiroatopelcc[/nom]The steam concept works great, but you can never truely trust it. It's a very limiting system, not as much as battle.net but still very limiting.[/citation]
Please go ahead and list these so called limitations.

I use steam for 99% of my game purchases, really the only time i don't use it is when there's a better deal somewhere or there's a preorder bonus that isn't can cool or isn't there at all with the steam copy.

@ people that continue to spread false information about steam being unuseable if your internet or steam service is down. Please stop there's a offine mode that works just fine for almost every game. And really when has steam gone down for an extended period of time? I haven't EVER encountered a time when it was down, and I've been using steam for years and years.

 

[ScoobyJooby-Jew]

Steam prices are the same as in store prices to protect basically walmart target and bestbuy. Game retailers like EB and gamestop get that protection too. The don't sell pc games anymore because most games require a personal account, and tie that game to the account, so they can't get it back to resell as used.

 

[Guest]

More like those game store can't get hand in second hand game market. Steam integrated game usually can't be re-sell. Eb games pay customer 5 to 10 dollar store credit than re-sell those for 20 dollar or so.

 

[Kryan]

in tommorrow's news: restaurants think MacDonalds is the devil....

sigh

 

[matt87_50]

lol, like the oil and coal companies being scared of renewable energy...

now, I admit the Digital distro world is a bit anti competitive, but get with the times bricks and mortar stores... set up your own Digital distro solutions...

 

[ScoobyJooby-Jew]

[citation][nom]matt87_50[/nom]lol, like the oil and coal companies being scared of renewable energy... now, I admit the Digital distro world is a bit anti competitive, but get with the times bricks and mortar stores... set up your own Digital distro solutions...[/citation]
Yeah if walmart can sell phones and minutes, they could do digital distribution.

 

[neiroatopelcc]

[citation][nom]Proxy711[/nom]Please go ahead and list these so called limitations.[/citation]

There are many that I'm sure I've forgotten right now but,
a - all appdata is stored in the same place, complicating matters for people with plenty of small harddrives or low disk space
b - the system by default downloads data at random, causing lag in games when people aren't aware that it suddenly decides to update team fortress or something
c - it seems impossible, at least to me, to delete a title from the library list once it has been installed - even if it was just a demo of a game or something
d - You can't pick which update version of a game you feel like playing. You can just pick to never update, or to have the newest version. Sometimes a new version of a game makes it unplayable or ruins a savegame or whatever.
e - steam decides if you're allowed to cheat in a game, even in singleplayer. Consequences for cheating online aren't as unreasonable as with battle.net, but still it shouldn't meddle with what people can do in games they've bought.
f - the ui is very limiting. Searches are poorly designed, and title information is in many cases insufficient. For instance, when you're buying an older game it might come wrapped in a dosbox enviroment, though an opengl wrapper would've been available instead, deducing from the value of the game. This they ought to inform the user of really.
g - then there are numerous bugs that limit the user. Like the steam client update system frequently hanging and leaving the user with the 'update 0%' window until such time the task is terminated.
h - steam games sometimes still come with extra protection enabled, meaning you can end up having to sign in to both steam and games for windows or a similar system.
i - The gifting feature doesn't let users know they received a gift when they log on steam. So they can go ahead and buy the game even though their mailbox has a steam voucher for them (even when using 'send directly thru steam' when gifting. This is getting even worse when the steam client sometimes wrongly claim that a user already owns a given game, and you'd have to resend the title to a mail address instead of thru steam directly, requiring you to know the mail address of whomever you wish to gift a game.
j - finally there are all the neusances like the advertisement window that pops up on load, which I can't seem to find a switch to disable, or the fact that you can't have serveral store windows open at once although it's based on a firefox browser with tabbed browsing support. Also that some titles don't show up on the searches, while you can still click your way there using links is annoying.

Overall I'm still fairly content with the steam service, having just under 50 paid titles in my library. But it's not a great system, it's merely better than the competition. And frankly that sais a lot more about the competition than about steam.

Edit: spelling fixes