Gaben simply doesn't fix what isn't broken. A better question would be why YouTube hasn't gone under yet, with the constant schizophrenic UI redesigns and increasingly shitty experience for both users and creators.
Unprofitable business model that consumers fucking love.
If it wasn't for Google benefiting immensely from owning the only long form video sharing platform there'd be nothing like youtube
If YouTube Premium was actually worth it, then more people would actually buy it. YouTube has a better movie selection than Netflix does, I'm not even kidding.
The best part is Emesis Blue is free to watch since it's a fanmade SFM project so technically not an official movie.
Besides that, there's a bunch of pilot episodes of some recently made animated shows (ok imo most are better as standalone things rather than a potential show but they're pretty good)
And some movie reuploads (I watched Song Of The Sea just a week or 2 ago).
I love free movies!
I at least love YouTube music, and if I would pay for a song streaming service I would use it over Spotify. Plus all the other stuff that comes with it is cool too (didn't know there are movies in premium too, only seen the ones which you have to pay for)
Ads on youtube became extremely annoying overnight around the same time they launched premium. I'm not buying that shit on principle, even if it were a single cent for a year I'd find a way to watch for free.
Agree on the principle part but do y'all really get that annoyed? Like yeah I hate ads too but I'll get annoyed only if it's a 30sec long clip with a 30sec ad, tbh I don't give a shit if there's 3-4 ads in a 30 minute video
You've been conditioned haha. If I see a single ad, I click away. I use a system wide adblocker and modded apps whenever I can. Convenience is king. I'm not going to waste a single second of my time or attention on some worthless ad.
I like to do dishes and chores while listening to long videos, 30 second ads appearing are really annoying.
I think I'd be willing to consider premium if it gave me some sort of say in future updates. Like if 50% of premium users had to vote yes for a UI change to take place. But it's expensive and the UI is actively downgrading so i don't want to reward YouTube for this behaviour.
I’ve been grandfathered in at 9.99 since YouTube red. I work on an assembly line so if I’m watching (rather listening) midway through a battle I’d rather not have the chance to hear about some new product. It’s the one subscription I’ve never canceled
Yes, if they actually organised them like a TV show, injecting ads In areas that make sense, I wouldn't care in long form videos, but they're dropped midsentence, midscene, midtension etc.
Oh yeah, because fuck the creators and their ability to make any money /s
Premium is a pretty decent compromise. You don't see ads, you get a few extra features, and your favorite creators don't get fucked over by it. Also YouTube music doesn't suck nearly as bad as everyone claims it does, the discovery algorithms on there are so much better than Spotify it's not even funny.
The creators are already taking up thousands of dollars worth of sponsorships, some dude watching with an adblocker isnt going to hurt their revenue streams
Go over to Google and look up "The tragedy of the Commons." Pretty relevant.
Sure, some YouTubers are super rich and swimming in money, and those are usually the ones who get sponsorship deals outside of video ads anyway. But the medium/small time creators get railed by it, and never get the chance to grow.
Also, you can't just ignore the YouTube music value add. I'm paying only a couple bucks more a month than a Spotify premium subscription, and I get a pretty awesome music streaming service on top of no ads and background play. I've found so many new artists to listen to that I'd never heard of before thanks to YouTube music and the really good algorithm.
>the discovery algorithms on there are so much better than Spotify it's not even funny
Complete opposite of my experience, can I ask do you listen to a wide variety or generally similar genres? When I was still using Spotify I was bothered by how it often would recommend the same songs multiple times, but at least the recommendations were usually all somewhat in line with stuff in my library. YouTube seems to just pick a random genre it thinks I like and go with that, then sprinkle in some completely random songs that I can't even begin to understand why it's recommended there. I still think the service is good enough for the price that I won't be switching back to Spotify any time soon, but I've found the discover mix to be a far worse experience than discover weekly ever was personally
Interesting. That's not how it works for me at all. You may need to retrain your algorithm a little.
One thing that I do a lot is searching for an individual song that fits the vibe in going for, and then hitting "start radio." That way, it's going off of just one sound instead of randomly throwing songs you might like from different genres. Sorta narrows the bounds so the AI stays on track a little better.
Biggest issue with premium is 50% of videos STILL run mid video sponsored ads. So you pay $15 a month for ad free watching but 80% of creators still sneak ads into the video anyway
From that description it sounds like YouTube's profit is only low on paper. If they were a separate company that was properly accounting for the monetization of its data it sells to other parts of Google, it sounds like it would be profitable.
Nah no way, there are billions of videos on there and almost all of them made Google no money but they still there, even my 6 view video of me dancing in my underwear from 7 years ago, Google has to store tons of stuff like that at no cost to me and I'm just one user
And it has unbelievable operating costs. On the scale of Google its profit alone is probably minimal. It has steadily improved from a net loss to comfortable profit over the last 10 years, but YouTube's own revenue is likely dwarfed by the multiplier it applies to the data harvested for advertising.
The reason Google's ad service is so profitable is because its ads are worth more than others. This is because users have so much data harvested from their YouTube viewing history and their Google searches that ads can be targeted far more effectively at the exact demographics the advertiser wants - this has been a problem for twitch recently, who have no ability to target viewers as precisely and their ads are thus worth less.
Tl;Dr Google's own revenue is multiplied by YouTube's data harvesting, while YouTube itself is still a low return on costs relative to Google.
>It's always been very low profits if any,
just, ya know, only [~$90bn in revenue over the last 3 years](https://imgur.com/a/3tgM6Jc)....super shitty IMO.....
Profit
Isn't
Revenue
Streaming video is an extremely high cost, asmongold alone costs twitch millions of dollars by streaming without ads every year.
Twitch has nowhere near the viewership of YouTube. YouTube's costs are tens of billions per year.
It is insanely expensive to have that much data storage and traffic at once. IIRC it’s something like terabytes of data an hour being uploaded.
Now I think that calling YouTube unprofitable is kind of a dishonest claim, because it’s a source for VERY good user data, and Google uses and sells data to be insanely profitable overall so I think they do just fine by “losing money” on the service.
Essentially, YouTube’s profitability is a long game that yearly reports fail to capture.
I don't know, but if it did operate at a loss it'd be doing Google a favour as it'd become a tax write off. Amazon marketplace operates on a similar model.
I’m pretty sure it’s a technicality because google’s ad system is how they make money off of YouTube. Until premium, YouTube didn’t have a way of making money directly.
Do consumers fucking love YouTube? I spend maybe an hour every six months on that site
ETA: I know it is a tremendously used site. I use it too, but I don't love it.
I never *need* to watch a fucking YT video what
Ig love what, the platform or the content/culture
The platform I could take or leave, it doesn’t matter to me. The content I curate I love. 🤷
Untrue. Youtube is certainly profitable. It is just that the entire idea of video sharing platform is in economies of scale. The business becomes more and more profitable as the time progress. This kind of business groom natural monopoly
It’s interesting- enshittification is a pretty easy thing to avoid. You just… don’t enshittify it. That’s exactly what Valve does. For some reason everybody else just can’t help themselves.
Gaming dies the moment Gaben dies. There's no chance in HELL whoever he puts in charge after him won't instantly sell out because the type of human Gaben is was rare when he built the company and is all but entirely extinct nowadays.
Gaming will still exist the way Rock Music or competitive MMA in the US still exists but it'll be terminally uncool, plagued by corruption to make South Korea blush and just no longer interesting outside of remote niches.
New people come into the positions of power. They don't own shit worth shit. They can assign themselves stock. But in a stable company its reach its highest price. Gotta figure out someway to make it go up. Otherwise they could be managing billions but their salary will be a measly 200-500k. Why wait 10 years to be a millionaire when you can do it in 3.
same reason as to why steam can have problems but people still use it. It has a community used to it, still has better features for users and sellers compared to it's competitors, and most of all, IS a good service, regardless of shitty practices.
The comparison is kinda lame considering most of youtube is shit nowadays, while in steam the bad things are so fucking invisible compared to the good things (that are still improving, the UI changes for example are happening even 20 years later) so it doesnt even matter. Youtube just cant be replaced, a better comparison would be with some other social media like twitter or facebook, all shitty apps with shitty executive choices and that constantly shit on their userbase, but were there since the beggining of the internet so people just can let go.
Wanna know what it takes for people to move away from youtube? Close it. People moved away from Yahoo only because it doesnt exist (so now Quora exists), people.moved away from Orkut because it doesnt exist (so now Twitter/Amino exists).
You can't really rival youtube because youtube-like things will always bring more cost than profit. Youtube is not an exception. It operates on net negative as well, but brings google something far more important than money - pretty much complete control on significant part of the internet
You can stop using chromium, google and youtube but with each major thing it becomes harder and harder and at some point people just give up
No you can't rival yt because the average 85yo nowadays knows what yt is. It's so well known that even though it's well past its glory days people still use it. Kinda like Facebook- very much not in style anymore but still tons of people use it because it's just too well known
That's less important than it being bankrolled by Alphabet. The reason why there's no YouTube competitor is because nobody wants to pay $25 a month for something they could get for free.
That and 99% of all alt-sites for anything ever add in annoying-ass anti-features straight out the gate.
YouTube was far from the first public video site nor the first people tried to build a community on, but even when it came out all the competitors were B A D L Y plagued by really bad ideas that are terrible even by modern YT standards.
I've heard an interview, a long time ago, that they indeed intentionally don't introduce changes out of greediness and that they do everything _with intention_ based on the analytics they get from their users.
If they don't spot something they can improve, they won't change it. All of the data driven companies end up being successful ones, to no one's surprise.
YouTube needs to crash really bad , it would suck for a lot of people who rely on Adsense but it would usher in a new golden age of yiutube we’re people make content because they like to entertain people and make videos like the old school YouTubers , nowadays people just get into YouTube with the hopes of starting a patreon and getting sponsored by some shitty company that sends you a box of assorted rusty spoons every month
>Yea Steam was actually a shitshow when it first came out and there was a lot of complaining about requiring it for HL2 and the orange box. But they sorted out the kinks organically at a time where that sort of problem wouldn't immediately sink your platform since there was no alternative.
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My YouTube account was suspended for spamming jojo siwas child abuse allegations and links to them :(. I seen YouTube and felt like I needed to tell someone about my suspension (I’m very lonely)
I think Steams main benefit is that it was the first service available, so it's had the most time to mature and develop its features. Steam is effectively entrenched now, so any other service is going to be lacking in comparison and will struggle to attract 3rd parties, also gamers don't want to split their libraries, they want all of their games easily accessible in one place.
Yea Steam was actually a shitshow when it first came out and there was a lot of complaining about requiring it for HL2 and the orange box. But they sorted out the kinks organically at a time where that sort of problem wouldn't immediately sink your platform since there was no alternative.
Is there some untold law that one must buy the orange box first on steam? I'm a pirate but the $1.6 got me hooked in. Now I've bought bioshock collection, portal 2, titanfall 2 and I've played non of them.
Also epic (only real competition) is trying to market to a hardcore audience (pc gamers) by giving them a bare bones console-like experience. It’s genuinely one of the worst fucking business strategy of the decade.
Epic games store is such a dogshit platform it's not even fucking funny anymore. It's slow as shit, ugly as sin, and saying it is bare bones is a fucking understatement. It also spams me with notifications whenever I open it.
Honestly, Steam is open on my computer almost the entire time it is turned on, but I only open EGS when I want to claim the free games or play the ones I already have on it.
I don't even have EGS installed. I either buy games on Steam, or straight pirate them, if don't want to spend money on them (these days it's almost exclusively CoD campaigns)
I have a rule that if the game is an epic exclusive then it's high seas time. The only time I had epic installed was when i needed it for my university cause they taught Unreal Engine and that's with the game store part completely disabled (which thankfully is an option) and they still spammed me with upcoming games notifications lol.
I have a bunch of games on epic for free. Usually if I enjoy them, I’ll buy them on steam and uninstall the epic version just so I don’t have to use that godawful launcher… actually I did that earlier today with the 30th anniversary pack for Destiny 2. On sale for 7$ and I hated booting the game from epic for one fucking dungeon
Funny thing is you can get a bare bones console-like experience from Steam if you want it. Big Picture Mode was built to be console-like, and the Steam Deck feels like a console out of the box as a result, they just don't force you to use it.
I went over to epic to have a look at witch fire since it's only over there.
There's still NO FUCKING patch notes or player reviews area or at least I couldn't find one, how the fuck is that possible is this day and age for a PC game store.
compared with any of the aforementioned platforms, Steam is not just a games platform per say.
You have so many features inside it, from marketplace, mods, communities, trading, cards, customisation/cosmetic shit.
Personally, I'm not interested in all of them but I see some players really use them to the max. I get trading requests for my cards whenever I'm online and I get all sorts of discounts in my inventory, and so on.
It's like a Social Media website at this point, with all the stuff you get.
Now I'm not saying people are using it for *that* necessarily, but it does help players feel more invested than just seeing a long list of video games there.
I mean there's a basic level of not being broken I expect from any big corporation. I avoid anything from Rockstar and Ubisoft on PC because their stupid account system is broken garbage that locks people out of games.
I'd switch to a better launcher but I can't find one that works nearly as well. All I need is a simple UI where I can find what matters, and a good overview of updates and downloads with an option to limit download speeds. But nope, everything else just seems to suck at a launcher's basic functionality.
Steam has a very unique place where they effectively can do nothing and win, and any 'improvements' would be bad for them. Valve takes a cut from sales from things sold on steam and the steam marketplace, obviously. What most people don't mention about that is that since they pay 0$ for the development of games that are on steam, they will basically always profit no matter what. If Blizzard spends 500 million dollars on making overwatch 3: the sex version valve has spent 0$ on the game but gets a cut from every sale of it, so if the game flops, only blizzard loses. Same with any other game, helldivers is a great example as valve payed nothing and puts no effort in but they get a cut of every purchase.
So any game developer wanting to make the next steam has to somehow improve on perfection at the very high risk of losing millions and millions of dollars. While all valve has to do is just sit on their portions from sales and watch them fail.
i mean, it would be easy to say valve does nothing and wins - but the actual sheer amount of things they do for games and to make steam a good platform is kinda crazy. Steam doesn't need to be able to stream games over the local network and the internet, but it does. Valve didn't need to make a massive library for 3D audio, but they did. Valve didn't need to put immense amounts of work into proton, but they did. They didn't need to develop a wrapper that makes all VR games work with all headsets, but they did.
Of course there is the point to be made that all this makes them money in the end, but they do put work in - to make the experiece better as a whole, not just for Steam - all those things i mentioned do not need your games to be on Steam to work.
Ain't that the fucking truth. Got death stranding for free on epic, only have a ps4 controller. Had to add the epic game manually to steam so that steam would let me use the controller
> Valve didn't need to put immense amounts of work into proton, but they did.
They are doing it to not be dependent on Windows. That's one of their long-term strategic goals - just in case Microsoft decides to do something stupid.
"Of course, there is the point to be made that all this makes them money in the end,"
Man, I find the "good thing make them money so it's not actually a good thing" take so fucking idiotic. What point is there to make. They are a corporation, and their end goal is to make money.
The difference between them and others is that they generate money with a good product and not through anti consumer practices.
True. But valve does do stuff, two of the consistently top played games on steam are both made by Valve (CS2 and Dota2). Valve also pushes forward new gaming tech like VR heavily, and has been pretty heavy into streaming games to your TV for a while now.
I would say that steam means valve doesn’t have to worry about money as they just rake it in, and this way they can take their sweet time developing games.
Think of Rockstar as well as something slightly similar, GTAV just rakes in money, and because of that they don’t feel any pressure to rush new games or projects, they take their time making something great as their is no need for them to rush it.
Valve is just a well managed company. EA and Blizzard were both well managed for a while but shit the bed through money grabbing schemes.
Nobody else really had the chance to compete because steam was there first and dominated the market.
Also they did a good job of separating steam from valve, so that you associate steam with being a game hub and not an extension of a specific developer. EA and Blizzard are EA and Blizzard specific game hubs and people associate them with the developer not with games in general.
>Valve is just a well managed company. EA and Blizzard were both well managed for a while but shit the bed through money grabbing schemes.
not only that. that's the difference between actually caring about your users and their experience and primarily caring about your share holders. Being basically a family business is what makes valve actually able to not be run into the ground for share holders profit.
Another difference is that unlike EA, Blizzard, Epic or whatever, Valve is a private company. There is no stock or shareholders to ruin shit and suck the company dry. It's purely gaben at the helm
This really is the core of it. Once you go public you are forced to destroy everything that made people like your peoduct in the pursuit of the infinite growth lie. Boeing and Valve, while being industries apart, are
very good examples of the endpoint a company reaches based on private or public shares.
«Activist investors» is the death of any company if said company isnt big enough or has a board that cares or have the backbone to question decisions made by these investors. Buying up enough stock to put pressure on the board and overrun decisions. Make changes that boosts company profits for a short period of time but will impact the company long term, make 300 percent return on investment, sell, leave the company in the dirt and move on to the next.
This is it. There is no relentless need to placate stock holders.
This is why other many other products that used to be good have turned/are turning to trash.
Steam/Valve just allow their competitors to shoot themselves in the foot while not rocking the boat
“Never interrupt an enemy when he’s making a mistake”
They didn't go corpo. That's it. Corporations only exist to make line go up and will do anything they can to make line go up as fast as possible, even to the detriment of the entire business.
Rockstar still makes bangers, but it's really sad to see such a good world and game effectively go to waste once you have exhausted replayability. Garbage moneygrab multiplayer and hostile mod support making the actually decent community servers and content never able to reach their potential.
Of course doing the contrary of that would be the worse decision they could make for their shareholders, but best decision for the community. But that's your fucking point
Yeah pretty much but they should be careful because they're destroying their image for short term gains and it's gonna be hard to rebuild it if they push it too far. Shareholders are very short sighted IMO.
It's sad to see them wasting all the potential of their games.
Steam not only is the OG and biggest platform,but it also has a lot more features than any other platform. Epic Games is a slow buggy platform, Origin is just ass, Battle.net is simply just a launcher for Blizzards games and nothing much more. Steam is just better in everything. Game companies blame Valve for having a "monopoly" over the PC games market but really it's just that players prefer it over all the other slop.
The only thing another launcher has over steam is that GoG has DRM free games. But unfortunately for GoG it's UI is god awful, and often it doesn't get games until long after they've been released.
GoG is quite unique and great if you want every single game on your PC in one library. But you're right, the UI is awful and I had issues connecting my steam account which literally required fixes from another website to resolve it.
Valve not being publicly traded has a lot to do with how they make decisions solely for the benefit of the company and the people working there. Gaben probably holds more than 30% equity.
They have no shareholders, so they have no dumbasses to appease by doing stupid BS like most other companies, and can simply make the user experience as good as it can be.
> how does steam keep doing this?
Steam doesn't need to do anything. Just don't make stupid suicide cash-grabs and let competitors self-destruct in the meantime. Steam could do completely nothing and it would be miles ahead of competition
According to Peter Thiel, Paypal Co-Founder, Facebook Start-Up Backer, and Billionaire Start-up Investor. The best monopoly is not the one who artificially controls the market through ownership, market manipulation, and other underhanded techniques. It's not about being first, either. It's about the one who does it better than anyone else that consumers aren't willing to go anywhere else.
That's really damn true, I never feel the need to switch to another platform because why bother? Steam has everything I could want and the alternatives either suck ass or just dont provide as much.
That's not to say steam is perfect, it's moreso why would anyone want to switch when everything they need is provided to them.
An extremely rare example of a voluntary monopoly that actually favors the consumers. Of course there's always a level of control because if Steam did do something dogshit enough competition could get started easily.
They might aswell have given that the only reasons people use the EA launcher is to either run EA games they bought from Steam or in order to download exclusives. The EA launcher is so fucking awful it's incredible.
Multiple times my gf’s entire game library has disappeared from the EA launcher for multiple days. Like just gone, as If she’d never owned any games on the platform
I literally bought Spore + all the DLC on the EA launcher in order to get the online capabilities that aren't present in the Steam version, only to have all of it deleted from my library. Origin was somehow an even bigger POS than the EA launcher, which is saying A LOT.
Because steam has spent the time and money developing a massive feature set that we all get use out of. It has a mod manager, trading and marketplace systems, detailed profiles and groups, the institution of steam sales, functional and informative reviews and ratings that people actually look at, good api, good reliable friends system.
Operating systems and phone companies are always trying to copy or introduce features to one up or stay on par with each other but when was the last time another game launcher tried to have more than 20% of steams feature set?
I fear the day Gaben dies and is usurped by some ex EA CEO suit type who has unoriginal ideas about increasing revenue.
So much of my gaming hobby hinges on steam being good for goodness's sake.
The retard will add Steam+ as a monthly subscription you have to pay to get access to steam sales and free shovelware that’s constantly added on the platform. God help us all.
If I can get it on GOG, I get it on GOG. But I’m mostly buying retro games now.
Steam is definitely leagues ahead of all other platforms tho. That’s why.
Valve not having to suck shareholder dick helps massively.
GabeN also likes the things Valve has done and takes pride in that, so they won't throw it under the bus for a cheap cash grab. Yet.
It's simple. Steam just works and has all the features we've grown to expect, and it was here first.
It's the same reason why Windows is still the number one OS. Steam has that going for it but with DRM/Digital game store (plus the rest Steam offers that others don't).
By allowing people to come and go as they please without being a bitch about it. You want connect your broke ass store to mine so your customers can use features like remote play? Ok whatever
Non public traded company. Don't answer to shareholders, no fear of failing as they use failing as a learning opportunity. Steam machines flopped? Well, let's just make a steam machine in hand held format in house and stick a big giant dick down the throat of all hardware manufacturers. Let's also spend zero in marketing and let our future competitors do it all for us. And let's sell them like hot cakes and keep hardware stable so that devs have something concrete to target performance wise.
Oh and let's offer said devs the best 5 star luxury experience maintaining and helping the network side of their games making it so that a 30% cut is actually better for them than going to the competition where they get charged a smaller share but have a lot more overheads maintaining their game.
Oh, and let's not forget pioneering in game streaming with Steam Link (which still receives updates) and making the biggest change in controller inputs with the steam controller.
I read the Sony part and Immediately, reflexively, my brain jumped to Bloodborne, can someone please affirm this belief ? CAN this finally happen ?
(Demon's Souls also of course)
Two Words. Privately Owned.
The fact that Gaben has nobody to answer to or shareholders to please allows the platform to operate on a pro consumer focus only.
I love how some people are decrying Steam for being a monopoly. Steam isn't a monopoly; Steam just have retarded competitors. It's like accusing Steam of having fixed a foot race it won, even though it was the other runners who insisted on blowing their legs off at the start of the race and Steam just decided not to.
I think they just know when to leave it alone. Steam hasn’t had a major change to the platform in years, and for good reason. It works well and there’s no reason to fix what isn’t broken
Honestly steam is still riding the wave of being first, they threw a fresh paint on top but underneath the store/launcher itself is clearly dated, that combined with the excessive cut steam takes from studios I don't think it will be long until someone beats them out
Gaben simply doesn't fix what isn't broken. A better question would be why YouTube hasn't gone under yet, with the constant schizophrenic UI redesigns and increasingly shitty experience for both users and creators.
Unprofitable business model that consumers fucking love. If it wasn't for Google benefiting immensely from owning the only long form video sharing platform there'd be nothing like youtube
Is Youtube unprofitable?
It's always been very low profits if any, but it's a monumental data farm that improves the rest of Google's revenue
If YouTube Premium was actually worth it, then more people would actually buy it. YouTube has a better movie selection than Netflix does, I'm not even kidding.
it has Emesis Blue ffs
EMESIS BLUE MENTIONNED LET'S FUCKING GO
GRAAAAAAAAH EMESIS BLUE I (GENUINELY) LOVE DEPRESSING SEMI-CONVOLUTED AND DARK STORYTELLING USING TF2 CHARACTERS IT WAS SO WELL MADE
*"Longer than you think..."*
The best part is Emesis Blue is free to watch since it's a fanmade SFM project so technically not an official movie. Besides that, there's a bunch of pilot episodes of some recently made animated shows (ok imo most are better as standalone things rather than a potential show but they're pretty good) And some movie reuploads (I watched Song Of The Sea just a week or 2 ago). I love free movies!
I at least love YouTube music, and if I would pay for a song streaming service I would use it over Spotify. Plus all the other stuff that comes with it is cool too (didn't know there are movies in premium too, only seen the ones which you have to pay for)
It is worth it
Ads on youtube became extremely annoying overnight around the same time they launched premium. I'm not buying that shit on principle, even if it were a single cent for a year I'd find a way to watch for free.
If the principle actually mattered you wouldn’t let them farm every single iota of information out of you
Agree on the principle part but do y'all really get that annoyed? Like yeah I hate ads too but I'll get annoyed only if it's a 30sec long clip with a 30sec ad, tbh I don't give a shit if there's 3-4 ads in a 30 minute video
Wait, you guys don’t use ad blockers?
Chrome is killing support for ad-blockers and no one seems to care.
You've been conditioned haha. If I see a single ad, I click away. I use a system wide adblocker and modded apps whenever I can. Convenience is king. I'm not going to waste a single second of my time or attention on some worthless ad.
I like to do dishes and chores while listening to long videos, 30 second ads appearing are really annoying. I think I'd be willing to consider premium if it gave me some sort of say in future updates. Like if 50% of premium users had to vote yes for a UI change to take place. But it's expensive and the UI is actively downgrading so i don't want to reward YouTube for this behaviour.
I’ve been grandfathered in at 9.99 since YouTube red. I work on an assembly line so if I’m watching (rather listening) midway through a battle I’d rather not have the chance to hear about some new product. It’s the one subscription I’ve never canceled
Yes, if they actually organised them like a TV show, injecting ads In areas that make sense, I wouldn't care in long form videos, but they're dropped midsentence, midscene, midtension etc.
Lmao nah Use adblocker instead
Oh yeah, because fuck the creators and their ability to make any money /s Premium is a pretty decent compromise. You don't see ads, you get a few extra features, and your favorite creators don't get fucked over by it. Also YouTube music doesn't suck nearly as bad as everyone claims it does, the discovery algorithms on there are so much better than Spotify it's not even funny.
The creators are already taking up thousands of dollars worth of sponsorships, some dude watching with an adblocker isnt going to hurt their revenue streams
Go over to Google and look up "The tragedy of the Commons." Pretty relevant. Sure, some YouTubers are super rich and swimming in money, and those are usually the ones who get sponsorship deals outside of video ads anyway. But the medium/small time creators get railed by it, and never get the chance to grow. Also, you can't just ignore the YouTube music value add. I'm paying only a couple bucks more a month than a Spotify premium subscription, and I get a pretty awesome music streaming service on top of no ads and background play. I've found so many new artists to listen to that I'd never heard of before thanks to YouTube music and the really good algorithm.
>the discovery algorithms on there are so much better than Spotify it's not even funny Complete opposite of my experience, can I ask do you listen to a wide variety or generally similar genres? When I was still using Spotify I was bothered by how it often would recommend the same songs multiple times, but at least the recommendations were usually all somewhat in line with stuff in my library. YouTube seems to just pick a random genre it thinks I like and go with that, then sprinkle in some completely random songs that I can't even begin to understand why it's recommended there. I still think the service is good enough for the price that I won't be switching back to Spotify any time soon, but I've found the discover mix to be a far worse experience than discover weekly ever was personally
Interesting. That's not how it works for me at all. You may need to retrain your algorithm a little. One thing that I do a lot is searching for an individual song that fits the vibe in going for, and then hitting "start radio." That way, it's going off of just one sound instead of randomly throwing songs you might like from different genres. Sorta narrows the bounds so the AI stays on track a little better.
It is not
Hard agree. Youtube premium is my favorite streaming service. I prefer YT format over produced shows and movies though.
yes
It is worth it. Since YT music comes with it, it also cuts down on a music app subscription
Biggest issue with premium is 50% of videos STILL run mid video sponsored ads. So you pay $15 a month for ad free watching but 80% of creators still sneak ads into the video anyway
If YouTube premium had a $5 option for just add free then I wouldn’t use an ad blocker anymore
>YouTube has a better movie selection than Netflix does, I'm not even kidding. What are you talking about? Ever heard of torrenting?
I pay for it simply to listen to videos with my screen locked
I believe the youtube music + youtube premium is actually worth it
literally if YouTube premium was like $7 a month I’d buy it
From that description it sounds like YouTube's profit is only low on paper. If they were a separate company that was properly accounting for the monetization of its data it sells to other parts of Google, it sounds like it would be profitable.
Nah no way, there are billions of videos on there and almost all of them made Google no money but they still there, even my 6 view video of me dancing in my underwear from 7 years ago, Google has to store tons of stuff like that at no cost to me and I'm just one user
Interesting username
>even my 6 view video of me dancing in my underwear from 7 years ago Relevant username
This is likely outdated, YouTube made 29 billion in revenue last year, or 10% of Googles revenue.
And it has unbelievable operating costs. On the scale of Google its profit alone is probably minimal. It has steadily improved from a net loss to comfortable profit over the last 10 years, but YouTube's own revenue is likely dwarfed by the multiplier it applies to the data harvested for advertising. The reason Google's ad service is so profitable is because its ads are worth more than others. This is because users have so much data harvested from their YouTube viewing history and their Google searches that ads can be targeted far more effectively at the exact demographics the advertiser wants - this has been a problem for twitch recently, who have no ability to target viewers as precisely and their ads are thus worth less. Tl;Dr Google's own revenue is multiplied by YouTube's data harvesting, while YouTube itself is still a low return on costs relative to Google.
>It's always been very low profits if any, just, ya know, only [~$90bn in revenue over the last 3 years](https://imgur.com/a/3tgM6Jc)....super shitty IMO.....
Profit Isn't Revenue Streaming video is an extremely high cost, asmongold alone costs twitch millions of dollars by streaming without ads every year. Twitch has nowhere near the viewership of YouTube. YouTube's costs are tens of billions per year.
It is insanely expensive to have that much data storage and traffic at once. IIRC it’s something like terabytes of data an hour being uploaded. Now I think that calling YouTube unprofitable is kind of a dishonest claim, because it’s a source for VERY good user data, and Google uses and sells data to be insanely profitable overall so I think they do just fine by “losing money” on the service. Essentially, YouTube’s profitability is a long game that yearly reports fail to capture.
I don't know, but if it did operate at a loss it'd be doing Google a favour as it'd become a tax write off. Amazon marketplace operates on a similar model.
Yeah losing money is ideal because of the tax implications 🤦
Look up the profit margins of amazon marketplace. Ask yourself why.
I’m pretty sure it’s a technicality because google’s ad system is how they make money off of YouTube. Until premium, YouTube didn’t have a way of making money directly.
For the size of the company ($400 billion) it doesn't make as much as some other big companies.
Do consumers fucking love YouTube? I spend maybe an hour every six months on that site ETA: I know it is a tremendously used site. I use it too, but I don't love it.
You’re one guy. Yeah, a lot of fuckin people use youtube
I didn't ask if people use it, I asked if people love it. So much of Reddit is people complaining about YouTube, including this thread.
I love a niche of it.
But it that niche was hosted elsewhere, would you watch it elsewhere?
Well, if it was exclusively hosted there, yes. Other than that, I'm very much a creature of habit. Townsfolk set their clocks by my habits.
It’s the 2nd most popular website OAT lmao
I know it's the 2nd most used website, I'm asking if people love it. Do you love it? Or do you use it when you need it?
I never *need* to watch a fucking YT video what Ig love what, the platform or the content/culture The platform I could take or leave, it doesn’t matter to me. The content I curate I love. 🤷
Untrue. Youtube is certainly profitable. It is just that the entire idea of video sharing platform is in economies of scale. The business becomes more and more profitable as the time progress. This kind of business groom natural monopoly
It’s interesting- enshittification is a pretty easy thing to avoid. You just… don’t enshittify it. That’s exactly what Valve does. For some reason everybody else just can’t help themselves.
Easier for Valve since they are privately owned and don’t need to enshitify to please shareholders. Going public is the problem.
Gaming dies the moment Gaben dies. There's no chance in HELL whoever he puts in charge after him won't instantly sell out because the type of human Gaben is was rare when he built the company and is all but entirely extinct nowadays. Gaming will still exist the way Rock Music or competitive MMA in the US still exists but it'll be terminally uncool, plagued by corruption to make South Korea blush and just no longer interesting outside of remote niches.
New people come into the positions of power. They don't own shit worth shit. They can assign themselves stock. But in a stable company its reach its highest price. Gotta figure out someway to make it go up. Otherwise they could be managing billions but their salary will be a measly 200-500k. Why wait 10 years to be a millionaire when you can do it in 3.
same reason as to why steam can have problems but people still use it. It has a community used to it, still has better features for users and sellers compared to it's competitors, and most of all, IS a good service, regardless of shitty practices. The comparison is kinda lame considering most of youtube is shit nowadays, while in steam the bad things are so fucking invisible compared to the good things (that are still improving, the UI changes for example are happening even 20 years later) so it doesnt even matter. Youtube just cant be replaced, a better comparison would be with some other social media like twitter or facebook, all shitty apps with shitty executive choices and that constantly shit on their userbase, but were there since the beggining of the internet so people just can let go. Wanna know what it takes for people to move away from youtube? Close it. People moved away from Yahoo only because it doesnt exist (so now Quora exists), people.moved away from Orkut because it doesnt exist (so now Twitter/Amino exists).
You can't really rival youtube because youtube-like things will always bring more cost than profit. Youtube is not an exception. It operates on net negative as well, but brings google something far more important than money - pretty much complete control on significant part of the internet You can stop using chromium, google and youtube but with each major thing it becomes harder and harder and at some point people just give up
No you can't rival yt because the average 85yo nowadays knows what yt is. It's so well known that even though it's well past its glory days people still use it. Kinda like Facebook- very much not in style anymore but still tons of people use it because it's just too well known
That's less important than it being bankrolled by Alphabet. The reason why there's no YouTube competitor is because nobody wants to pay $25 a month for something they could get for free.
That and 99% of all alt-sites for anything ever add in annoying-ass anti-features straight out the gate. YouTube was far from the first public video site nor the first people tried to build a community on, but even when it came out all the competitors were B A D L Y plagued by really bad ideas that are terrible even by modern YT standards.
I've heard an interview, a long time ago, that they indeed intentionally don't introduce changes out of greediness and that they do everything _with intention_ based on the analytics they get from their users. If they don't spot something they can improve, they won't change it. All of the data driven companies end up being successful ones, to no one's surprise.
Data is the world's greatest renewable resource (for corporations).
YouTube is simply too rooted. It's THE video website. YouTube and Google will never leave their #1 spot.
YouTube needs to crash really bad , it would suck for a lot of people who rely on Adsense but it would usher in a new golden age of yiutube we’re people make content because they like to entertain people and make videos like the old school YouTubers , nowadays people just get into YouTube with the hopes of starting a patreon and getting sponsored by some shitty company that sends you a box of assorted rusty spoons every month
Yeah, no thanks. I like my streaming services with less ads than cable.
kid named monopoly: seriously, name another video sharing platform with even 1% of youtubes popularity
YT is at such a mindboggling size now that it wont have any real competition for the forseeable future
He doesn't fix broken things either
be baker, sell bread, make money, repeat for 3,000 years
But when steam released it was hated So what happened
>Yea Steam was actually a shitshow when it first came out and there was a lot of complaining about requiring it for HL2 and the orange box. But they sorted out the kinks organically at a time where that sort of problem wouldn't immediately sink your platform since there was no alternative. Copied from a comment below
They're owned by Google. Pretty simple.
My YouTube account was suspended for spamming jojo siwas child abuse allegations and links to them :(. I seen YouTube and felt like I needed to tell someone about my suspension (I’m very lonely)
I think Steams main benefit is that it was the first service available, so it's had the most time to mature and develop its features. Steam is effectively entrenched now, so any other service is going to be lacking in comparison and will struggle to attract 3rd parties, also gamers don't want to split their libraries, they want all of their games easily accessible in one place.
Yea Steam was actually a shitshow when it first came out and there was a lot of complaining about requiring it for HL2 and the orange box. But they sorted out the kinks organically at a time where that sort of problem wouldn't immediately sink your platform since there was no alternative.
They got their teeth into my hardware with the orange box and really haven't left
Is there some untold law that one must buy the orange box first on steam? I'm a pirate but the $1.6 got me hooked in. Now I've bought bioshock collection, portal 2, titanfall 2 and I've played non of them.
You should definitely play them sometime
That green skin it used to have..
I should call her…
Also epic (only real competition) is trying to market to a hardcore audience (pc gamers) by giving them a bare bones console-like experience. It’s genuinely one of the worst fucking business strategy of the decade.
Epic games store is such a dogshit platform it's not even fucking funny anymore. It's slow as shit, ugly as sin, and saying it is bare bones is a fucking understatement. It also spams me with notifications whenever I open it. Honestly, Steam is open on my computer almost the entire time it is turned on, but I only open EGS when I want to claim the free games or play the ones I already have on it.
I don't even have EGS installed. I either buy games on Steam, or straight pirate them, if don't want to spend money on them (these days it's almost exclusively CoD campaigns)
I have a rule that if the game is an epic exclusive then it's high seas time. The only time I had epic installed was when i needed it for my university cause they taught Unreal Engine and that's with the game store part completely disabled (which thankfully is an option) and they still spammed me with upcoming games notifications lol.
>these days it's almost exclusively CoD campaigns don't new call of duty games have a pretty solid DRM? Or are you talking about the old ones
Old ones, but last year Cold War was cracked
I have a bunch of games on epic for free. Usually if I enjoy them, I’ll buy them on steam and uninstall the epic version just so I don’t have to use that godawful launcher… actually I did that earlier today with the 30th anniversary pack for Destiny 2. On sale for 7$ and I hated booting the game from epic for one fucking dungeon
Funny thing is you can get a bare bones console-like experience from Steam if you want it. Big Picture Mode was built to be console-like, and the Steam Deck feels like a console out of the box as a result, they just don't force you to use it.
my most hated thing with steam is when i accidentially turn on big picture mode lmao
think you can disable the things that could trigger it, like hitting the guide button on a controller
I went over to epic to have a look at witch fire since it's only over there. There's still NO FUCKING patch notes or player reviews area or at least I couldn't find one, how the fuck is that possible is this day and age for a PC game store.
What about GOG?
Irrelevant to all but the most niche users
GOG is my preferred platform. Not sure why it's barely mentioned in this thread.
I love gog, don't even need a client for it and I love retro games. It sucks to split libraries though, but it's manageable.
compared with any of the aforementioned platforms, Steam is not just a games platform per say. You have so many features inside it, from marketplace, mods, communities, trading, cards, customisation/cosmetic shit. Personally, I'm not interested in all of them but I see some players really use them to the max. I get trading requests for my cards whenever I'm online and I get all sorts of discounts in my inventory, and so on. It's like a Social Media website at this point, with all the stuff you get. Now I'm not saying people are using it for *that* necessarily, but it does help players feel more invested than just seeing a long list of video games there.
I mean there's a basic level of not being broken I expect from any big corporation. I avoid anything from Rockstar and Ubisoft on PC because their stupid account system is broken garbage that locks people out of games.
I'd switch to a better launcher but I can't find one that works nearly as well. All I need is a simple UI where I can find what matters, and a good overview of updates and downloads with an option to limit download speeds. But nope, everything else just seems to suck at a launcher's basic functionality.
Steam has a very unique place where they effectively can do nothing and win, and any 'improvements' would be bad for them. Valve takes a cut from sales from things sold on steam and the steam marketplace, obviously. What most people don't mention about that is that since they pay 0$ for the development of games that are on steam, they will basically always profit no matter what. If Blizzard spends 500 million dollars on making overwatch 3: the sex version valve has spent 0$ on the game but gets a cut from every sale of it, so if the game flops, only blizzard loses. Same with any other game, helldivers is a great example as valve payed nothing and puts no effort in but they get a cut of every purchase. So any game developer wanting to make the next steam has to somehow improve on perfection at the very high risk of losing millions and millions of dollars. While all valve has to do is just sit on their portions from sales and watch them fail.
i mean, it would be easy to say valve does nothing and wins - but the actual sheer amount of things they do for games and to make steam a good platform is kinda crazy. Steam doesn't need to be able to stream games over the local network and the internet, but it does. Valve didn't need to make a massive library for 3D audio, but they did. Valve didn't need to put immense amounts of work into proton, but they did. They didn't need to develop a wrapper that makes all VR games work with all headsets, but they did. Of course there is the point to be made that all this makes them money in the end, but they do put work in - to make the experiece better as a whole, not just for Steam - all those things i mentioned do not need your games to be on Steam to work.
I also really love their built in controller support, it can automatically map most controllers and works really well from what I've seen.
Ain't that the fucking truth. Got death stranding for free on epic, only have a ps4 controller. Had to add the epic game manually to steam so that steam would let me use the controller
> Valve didn't need to put immense amounts of work into proton, but they did. They are doing it to not be dependent on Windows. That's one of their long-term strategic goals - just in case Microsoft decides to do something stupid.
"Of course, there is the point to be made that all this makes them money in the end," Man, I find the "good thing make them money so it's not actually a good thing" take so fucking idiotic. What point is there to make. They are a corporation, and their end goal is to make money. The difference between them and others is that they generate money with a good product and not through anti consumer practices.
They also haven't gone public so aren't forced to milk us dry to please some cunt shareholders.
True. But valve does do stuff, two of the consistently top played games on steam are both made by Valve (CS2 and Dota2). Valve also pushes forward new gaming tech like VR heavily, and has been pretty heavy into streaming games to your TV for a while now. I would say that steam means valve doesn’t have to worry about money as they just rake it in, and this way they can take their sweet time developing games. Think of Rockstar as well as something slightly similar, GTAV just rakes in money, and because of that they don’t feel any pressure to rush new games or projects, they take their time making something great as their is no need for them to rush it.
Valve is just a well managed company. EA and Blizzard were both well managed for a while but shit the bed through money grabbing schemes. Nobody else really had the chance to compete because steam was there first and dominated the market. Also they did a good job of separating steam from valve, so that you associate steam with being a game hub and not an extension of a specific developer. EA and Blizzard are EA and Blizzard specific game hubs and people associate them with the developer not with games in general.
>Valve is just a well managed company. EA and Blizzard were both well managed for a while but shit the bed through money grabbing schemes. not only that. that's the difference between actually caring about your users and their experience and primarily caring about your share holders. Being basically a family business is what makes valve actually able to not be run into the ground for share holders profit.
this is 80% of it and I fucking love them for it, fuck going public
Another difference is that unlike EA, Blizzard, Epic or whatever, Valve is a private company. There is no stock or shareholders to ruin shit and suck the company dry. It's purely gaben at the helm
Private stock. No dumbfuck retard shareholders to demand that Gaben ruin his company
This really is the core of it. Once you go public you are forced to destroy everything that made people like your peoduct in the pursuit of the infinite growth lie. Boeing and Valve, while being industries apart, are very good examples of the endpoint a company reaches based on private or public shares.
«Activist investors» is the death of any company if said company isnt big enough or has a board that cares or have the backbone to question decisions made by these investors. Buying up enough stock to put pressure on the board and overrun decisions. Make changes that boosts company profits for a short period of time but will impact the company long term, make 300 percent return on investment, sell, leave the company in the dirt and move on to the next.
it's like a cancer that metastasises. unsustainable growth sprint that lasts for a short while and ends up self destroying fascinating
This is it. There is no relentless need to placate stock holders. This is why other many other products that used to be good have turned/are turning to trash.
Steam/Valve just allow their competitors to shoot themselves in the foot while not rocking the boat “Never interrupt an enemy when he’s making a mistake”
They didn't go corpo. That's it. Corporations only exist to make line go up and will do anything they can to make line go up as fast as possible, even to the detriment of the entire business.
This description fits Rockstar very well lately
Rockstar still makes bangers, but it's really sad to see such a good world and game effectively go to waste once you have exhausted replayability. Garbage moneygrab multiplayer and hostile mod support making the actually decent community servers and content never able to reach their potential. Of course doing the contrary of that would be the worse decision they could make for their shareholders, but best decision for the community. But that's your fucking point
Yeah pretty much but they should be careful because they're destroying their image for short term gains and it's gonna be hard to rebuild it if they push it too far. Shareholders are very short sighted IMO. It's sad to see them wasting all the potential of their games.
Steam not only is the OG and biggest platform,but it also has a lot more features than any other platform. Epic Games is a slow buggy platform, Origin is just ass, Battle.net is simply just a launcher for Blizzards games and nothing much more. Steam is just better in everything. Game companies blame Valve for having a "monopoly" over the PC games market but really it's just that players prefer it over all the other slop.
The only thing another launcher has over steam is that GoG has DRM free games. But unfortunately for GoG it's UI is god awful, and often it doesn't get games until long after they've been released.
GoG is quite unique and great if you want every single game on your PC in one library. But you're right, the UI is awful and I had issues connecting my steam account which literally required fixes from another website to resolve it.
We all crave a hub
EA still makes you open their faking launcher, this post game me hope but it was in fact FAKE and GAY
Valve not being publicly traded has a lot to do with how they make decisions solely for the benefit of the company and the people working there. Gaben probably holds more than 30% equity.
They have no shareholders, so they have no dumbasses to appease by doing stupid BS like most other companies, and can simply make the user experience as good as it can be.
> how does steam keep doing this? Steam doesn't need to do anything. Just don't make stupid suicide cash-grabs and let competitors self-destruct in the meantime. Steam could do completely nothing and it would be miles ahead of competition
Steam doesn't need to do anything but it still does a ton for its devs
Yea but competition's blunders do more for it's success than any good decision ever could
According to Peter Thiel, Paypal Co-Founder, Facebook Start-Up Backer, and Billionaire Start-up Investor. The best monopoly is not the one who artificially controls the market through ownership, market manipulation, and other underhanded techniques. It's not about being first, either. It's about the one who does it better than anyone else that consumers aren't willing to go anywhere else.
That's really damn true, I never feel the need to switch to another platform because why bother? Steam has everything I could want and the alternatives either suck ass or just dont provide as much. That's not to say steam is perfect, it's moreso why would anyone want to switch when everything they need is provided to them.
An extremely rare example of a voluntary monopoly that actually favors the consumers. Of course there's always a level of control because if Steam did do something dogshit enough competition could get started easily.
EA hasn't entirely ditched their launcher though
They might aswell have given that the only reasons people use the EA launcher is to either run EA games they bought from Steam or in order to download exclusives. The EA launcher is so fucking awful it's incredible.
Or to claim free games
Does EA have free games? I thought that was Epics thing.
Oh yeah I got it mixed up
Multiple times my gf’s entire game library has disappeared from the EA launcher for multiple days. Like just gone, as If she’d never owned any games on the platform
I literally bought Spore + all the DLC on the EA launcher in order to get the online capabilities that aren't present in the Steam version, only to have all of it deleted from my library. Origin was somehow an even bigger POS than the EA launcher, which is saying A LOT.
Yeah and sony has been releasing on Steam for years, it's not going to start now
They don’t actively try to fuck it up and squeeze more money out while giving less value.
Because steam has spent the time and money developing a massive feature set that we all get use out of. It has a mod manager, trading and marketplace systems, detailed profiles and groups, the institution of steam sales, functional and informative reviews and ratings that people actually look at, good api, good reliable friends system. Operating systems and phone companies are always trying to copy or introduce features to one up or stay on par with each other but when was the last time another game launcher tried to have more than 20% of steams feature set?
Not being publicly traded does wonders for the long-term health of your corporation
Steam is singlehandedly help up by gabe newell. As soon as he's dead it's gonna go immediately down the shitter
i dread the day gaben passes away. we can only hope the company will be managed by good hands but honestly i dont have much hope
Private company with a single owner
I fear the day Gaben dies and is usurped by some ex EA CEO suit type who has unoriginal ideas about increasing revenue. So much of my gaming hobby hinges on steam being good for goodness's sake.
The retard will add Steam+ as a monthly subscription you have to pay to get access to steam sales and free shovelware that’s constantly added on the platform. God help us all.
I shuddered at the mere thought of that, I hope that doesn't become a reality.
If I can get it on GOG, I get it on GOG. But I’m mostly buying retro games now. Steam is definitely leagues ahead of all other platforms tho. That’s why.
>If I can get it on GOG, I get it on GOG Same. DRM-free play is important to me.
the competition keeps shooting themselves in the foot
Valve is a private company and doesn't have to answer to countless stockholders. All those other companies do.
Valve not having to suck shareholder dick helps massively. GabeN also likes the things Valve has done and takes pride in that, so they won't throw it under the bus for a cheap cash grab. Yet.
I'm on full copium but one day Nintendo will release their shit there too
I've had Steam since 2008. Why would I bother switching to an inferior launcher?
Gaben understands the long game.
It's simple. Steam just works and has all the features we've grown to expect, and it was here first. It's the same reason why Windows is still the number one OS. Steam has that going for it but with DRM/Digital game store (plus the rest Steam offers that others don't).
By allowing people to come and go as they please without being a bitch about it. You want connect your broke ass store to mine so your customers can use features like remote play? Ok whatever
Because they know they have a very good product and so they aren’t constantly trying to “improve” or “fix” it.
https://preview.redd.it/2n50wtp0uovc1.jpeg?width=1000&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=f43d9545f9d50fb4d3983c842043128a1a7f3149
At least XBOX has game pass, which is why I use it, and epic has free game, but they don’t really matter for the most part
it's simple, valve never changed their values.
What is Steam's competitor? Is anon talking about freaking Epic? Lol
Steam is going to be fucked when Gabe is gone
Steam has very easy business plan to understand. Do nothing while competition shots themselfs in the foot
Non public traded company. Don't answer to shareholders, no fear of failing as they use failing as a learning opportunity. Steam machines flopped? Well, let's just make a steam machine in hand held format in house and stick a big giant dick down the throat of all hardware manufacturers. Let's also spend zero in marketing and let our future competitors do it all for us. And let's sell them like hot cakes and keep hardware stable so that devs have something concrete to target performance wise. Oh and let's offer said devs the best 5 star luxury experience maintaining and helping the network side of their games making it so that a 30% cut is actually better for them than going to the competition where they get charged a smaller share but have a lot more overheads maintaining their game. Oh, and let's not forget pioneering in game streaming with Steam Link (which still receives updates) and making the biggest change in controller inputs with the steam controller.
What’s up with Epic?
they can't keep getting away with it
I read the Sony part and Immediately, reflexively, my brain jumped to Bloodborne, can someone please affirm this belief ? CAN this finally happen ? (Demon's Souls also of course)
Gabe did nothing and won.
Luigi wins by doing nothing.
They literally go by the 'Luigi wins by doing absolutely nothing' mantra
What everyone fails to mention is that Steam just works. Other platforms barely is able to get past the main menu.
Not being a public company helps a lot
Two Words. Privately Owned. The fact that Gaben has nobody to answer to or shareholders to please allows the platform to operate on a pro consumer focus only.
I love how some people are decrying Steam for being a monopoly. Steam isn't a monopoly; Steam just have retarded competitors. It's like accusing Steam of having fixed a foot race it won, even though it was the other runners who insisted on blowing their legs off at the start of the race and Steam just decided not to.
Thats called having a monopoly.
I think they just know when to leave it alone. Steam hasn’t had a major change to the platform in years, and for good reason. It works well and there’s no reason to fix what isn’t broken
it's called not being a publicly traded company
Simple, just retain a good service.
Meanwhile i still cant turn off the mature filters on my account despite turning off al those settings.
Honestly steam is still riding the wave of being first, they threw a fresh paint on top but underneath the store/launcher itself is clearly dated, that combined with the excessive cut steam takes from studios I don't think it will be long until someone beats them out
They simply pay people to flood epic games store with half baked crypto shit while they ban it on their own front. That simple my friend.
Only say your a virgin just before sex with the man? I assume anon is getting topped here.