Towards the tail end of an interesting interview with Maximum PC, Randy Pitchford, Gearbox’s CEO, has some things to say regarding the conflict of interest with Valve owning one of the largest PC distribution channels; Steam. He said some other things in the interview too, and if you’re interested in PC gaming or Borderlands, go check it out.
Talking to MPC Pitchford says:
I’ll tell you what. Steam helps. As a guy in this industry though, I don’t trust Valve.
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I, personally, trust Valve. But I’m just saying, honestly, I think a lot of the industry doesn’t.
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It would be much better if Steam was its own business. There’s so much conflict of interest there that it’s horrid. It’s actually really, really dangerous for the rest of the industry to allow Valve to win.
I never really thought too long or hard about this in the past, but he has a very good point. Imagine how many posts we would publish if Activision owned something on par with Steam?
Whilst right now I’m not too worried, after all Valve come across as a “nice” company, I think he makes a very interesting point worth keeping in mind.
Via: GamePolitics
iTunes
Never really thought about that before…
But as you said, Valve comes across as a nice company, so I’m personally not too concerned.
*Spider Sense is tingling*
Someone just criticised Valve. Defense Force…ACTIVATE!
I think at the moment there are still two major factors keeping Valve honest. You have services like Impulse which although nowhere near as big, still serve as competition to some degree. Also there’s still a market for boxed PC games.
As the boxed retail market declines further, it’s going to be left up to Impulse to keep it competitive and that’s worrying. The combination of retail and rival download services is just enough to keep things competitive, if one of those died out then we grow closer to a monopoly.
If this were Resident Evil, Stardock might want to try making something like Nemesis to take them down.
“VAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAALLLLLLLLLLLLLLVVVVVE”
Most people don’t bother to think much about Steam. They should. Steam is pretty much the WORST possible implementation of a digital distribution platform. The following is a list of things Steam could do very easily, but has consciously chosen to forbid:
Allow users to sell ‘used’ licenses.
Allow users to give away ‘used’ licenses.
Require publishers to charge no more than 50% retail price.
Require publishers to make the game available no more than 1 hour after it “goes gold.” (Instead of waiting 2 weeks for it to get to retail shelves, while pirates are playing a week or two earlier than loyal customers.)
Forbid intrusive DRM.
Require games to play without Internet access to Steam servers.
Anyone that chose to embrace digital distribution, instead of trying to implement it in a way that shelters retailers, would do many, if not all, of those things. Anyone short-sighted enough in the gaming industry to believe that the used games market hurts sales shouldn’t survive long. Anyone who thinks it is acceptable for pirates to be able to reliably get games to fans faster and in better configuration (no DRM, etc) than the actual game publisher is obsessing over the moral implications of piracy when they should be concentrating on the BUSINESS implications.
Also, digital distribution is the perfect opportunity to ban the ESRB. Their chilling effect on free speech in the games market is staggering, and it prevents the industry from producing meaningful content that would raise public opinion of games. A digital distribution platform that concentrated on delivering the best experience possible to the gaming community would engage in content labelling, but refrain from assigning “appropriate ages” to the games. Doing so removes the ability of parents to choose what content they raise their child to be mature enough to handle and what content they leave their child ignorant and scared of.
Gamers should really wake up and start giving thought as to how the industry is run. It is more hostile to its customers than any other entertainment industry and saddled with the most restrictive censorship for no good reason. The reason you don’t see ratings on books is not because books are “less harmful”, it’s because when such nonsensical plans are discussed, readers have the spine to stand up and refuse to listen to the insane theories of authoritarian pop psychologists. Businesses run roughshod over gamers because the gamers don’t resist at all. We see brand new hardback books at Amazon selling for $9.99 on the Kindle in digital format. And on Steam, we often pay MORE for the digital format than we would at retail. Gamers need to realize that it doesn’t have to be this way. There are people who MADE it this way, and they are people that can be influenced by the gaming community.