The Escapist Bulletin: Valve is coming to get me
Being afraid of the wrong thing
Who’s the biggest, baddest and most evil company in gaming? Well, according to Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford the answer might just be Valve and its insidious Steam platform.
In Pitchford’s eyes, Valve is an unscrupulous company that exploits smaller developers by taking too large a cut of the profits - something that most gamers, given Valve’s proclivity for giving out free stuff to its customers, would find difficult to believe.
It’s an interesting position to take, especially after the amount of work that Gearbox has done with Valve in the past. And it’s never wise to trust a man who fears money quite as much as Pitchford seems to.
The landscape of gaming is changing and the focus is shifting from the traditional retail model to online distribution, whether through Steam, Direct2Drive or any one of the myriad other download services. Downloading PC titles isn’t a new phenomenon of course: Doom’s first episode was available on BBS’s back in 1993, but the big change is that now consoles are getting in on the action.
Xbox Live and PSN both let console gamers download classic games, indie or otherwise, small titles and relatively new current-generation games with Microsoft’s Games on Demand service or the new PSPgo, which has no way to accept traditional media and can only play downloaded games. Even the initially reluctant Nintendo has Virtual Console and Wii Ware.
Which brings us back to Mr Pitchford and his Valve-o-phobia. Does he trust Sony any better, or maybe Nintendo? He said that he’d quite like to see Microsoft take over online distribution if it stopped focusing so quite so hard on the Xbox 360. Y’know, that platform that it owns?
Pitchford depicts PC gaming as being squashed under the iron fist of Steam. In fact, Steam is an example of how the industry should work, with choices for consumers and developers.
If you don’t want to use Steam, you don’t have to - you can use Stardock or Direct2Drive instead -but if you want DLC on an Xbox 360 you have to go via Microsoft. And thus we arrive at the crux of the issue: downloading content for consoles means dealing with the platform holder.
If you want to break out the tin-foil hats and head to the bunkers so that Valve won’t steal your thoughts, then that’s fine, but while you’re stocking up on tinned food and bullets, the console download market grows increasingly specialised as developers as push into making games for the perceived audience of the platform.
There’s no real harm in the platforms having something unique to offer, but without more choice for consumers and developers a platform quickly becomes stagnant.
Unfortunately, with the sizeable investment that console manufacturers make in each new generation, and the huge loses they make in the early stages that are only recouped through software sales, they are not likely to loosen their grips any time soon.