sschaem wrote:Steam is holding the gaming industry back, its time for it to be replaced by an open standard not under a single person grasp.
I agree it
might be now, but for a long time they defiantly had it right and gamers were singing their praises. Steam really pushed ahead with getting gamers onto a unified platform. Social interaction was really bad in games before Steam - Remember how you needed an account per game, or had to match make via forums and TeamSpeak? All separate services that had no correlation with each other. Then it gained support for their store, social features (and some games) cross-platform on OSX, Linux, iOS and Android alongside Windows. It looked promising.
Then large game studios start getting irritated by loosing up to 30% per-sale on anything that passes through Steam (and being forced to place/sell all content via Steamworks), and go their own way. So now we have Origin, uPlay, BattleNet and Microsoft's "thing" for Windows these days among several others. As a result, I feel we're going full circle again, with further market fragmentation of the gaming community and several social platforms once again requiring the user to have an account for each one - with no correlation between them.
Forum/Site based matchmaking clans and TeamSpeak are now more popular than ever with the gaming community after a period where many started to disappear because Steam offered everything in one place.
Valve was (once) a great game developer. Now, it's nothing more than a retail company with some major glaring omissions from their catalogue because some major players in the games industry won't do business with them anymore (Anything from EA, some Ubi games and Minecraft to name a few). They also insist on pushing ahead with Seam Box, and whichever way you cut it - I can see that just having FAIL written all over it on launch day. They are going head-on into the Xbox / PlayStation market, with an incomplete OS and very little in the way of AAA games that will run on the SteamOS version to attract anyone deeply rooted into either of the market leaders eco systems this late into the game.
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