I'm totally cool with just downloading it from their website. Or they could send me a flash drive. Wasn't Steam originally the cheaper, easier option instead of designing a box and writing a bunch of disks?

Do you think you would get the same buggy mess if every single publisher had 30% more budget to work with?

Yes, 1000%.

Games are buggy because developers/publishers/players don't care. Money has nothing to do with it and if they had more money, they would just pocket it and release garbage for people like you.

Shareholders always want more money, i.e. as much money as is extractable from the consumer. So yes, I think companies would still invest as little as possible to make a game profitable, even if that leads to bugs.

Steam, GameStop, Toys-R-Us, Walmart… Someone always makes a profit on selling games, or any products - even digital. Steam has not reinvented the wheel here. It’s not a new concept. Are you arguing that the idea of stores should be eliminated?

In return, the game is more likely to be seen, just like placing a product in a real store where people walk by it. It also gets advertised, reviewed, has another community outlet, and Steam uses their own servers and bandwidth to distribute it.

It’s not a bad deal for the devs and publishers.

Do you think you would get the same buggy mess if every single publisher had 30% more budget to work with?

Has capitalism given you cause to think otherwise thus far?

i mean, games launched on epic arent perfect either... and devs get much more of a cut, and a bonus if its unreal engine.

FF7R for example ran poorly, stutters in directx modes due to a poor implementation of shader compilation and these bugs STILL exist in the game today last ive seen.

the developer didnt take a 30% cut for the game, being epic exclusive and being unreal means the oppisite, they got PAID and still released a buggy POS.

its a fallacy to assume if a dev had 30% more budget that a game would be bug free.

i think if steam took 0%, the number of bugs in larger games would remain completly unchanged.

It might help the smaller devs, but not the big games.

We have plenty of examples of this.

No Man's Sky came out to much fanfare, and was kind of shit. They took their massive profits (of which a significant chunk went to distributors, publishers, etc., just like back when physical copies were the norm) and used them to transform their initial offering into something that was far more like their vision than the original product.

Minecraft also followed this paradigm for a very long time.

Now, how many very successful game developers just took the money and ran? A lot? Yeah, a lot. The simple fact is not many companies are willing to spend already-earned profits for a fraction more sales.

I think you severely underestimate the cost of hosting servers for ~46.000 Games, across 9 regions, in 190 countries, with 500Mbit download speeds. On top of that billions of screenshots, trillions of lines of text, customer service, development of new features and hardware, etc.

Valve has an est. revenue (not profit) of roughly $10 Billion this year. Tencent Games has an est. $85. How is Steam even remotely considered to be a monopoly in gaming?

In fact I do think that, but it's not like I'm arguing in the interest of his bank account either; I don't see this directly affecting me, so I don't care.

The inverse of 70% is not 130%

It's weird to me how people(are they?) here bend over backwards to defend a monopolistic drm platform like steam.

I get gamers like their games. But come on.