I remember when 9 million was a lot.
I remember when 1 million was a lot.
this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2024
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38 million only? I thought there were way more gamers out there. Isn't it a market bigger than TV and cinema combined? (maybe even sports included?)
These are concurrent users, i.e. the number of players all playing at one time. The total number of Steam users is WAY higher.
I wonder how many millions they need to be inspired to update their platform so it doesn’t need a regular outage every Tuesday.
I love steam, but let's get real here for a second. Valve will change some day. Enshitification is inevitable.
GabeN will not live forever. The vultures circle endlessly, and one day they will win. There is no good ending here (for now).
Consider building a tower, downloading everything youve purchased on steam, and keep it offline. Maybe have a 2nd set of hard drives as a backup. Put these priceless artifacts in your will.
Plan accordingly and enjoy the ride while it lasts.
I love steam, but let's get real here for a second. Valve will change some day. Enshitification is inevitable.
Steam is an example where I'm not sure when it would happen.
It already comes with a hefty fee of 30% per sale on the platform. I don't think they can raise that without serious backlash. And there also isn't really a need, Steam prints money. It prints money because it's where users are. Users are there because they like the features. Some good features are only there because of laws (e.g. refunding); Valve can't remove these.
So how would you make the service even more profitable?
Enshittification happens because corporations want (more) money out of a service that built a userbase. These were often running at a loss. To turn a profit, they need to change.
Steam can sell you licenses to games you don't own already. It's up to each publisher. Valve doesn't care, they just deliver.
They could add a fee to re-download games, a subscription requirement to use friend invites, start throwing spam notifications on your screen/in your email inbox about “sponsored content”, upload your browser history for better ad targeting, etc. the list gets pretty long pretty quickly. Just look at what the Epic store does right now (hint, it’s almost all of those things already).
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They will never go public so enshittification rules don't necessarily apply
Never say never, but I don't think it's going to happen while Gabe is in charge
I doubt gabe would choose a successor that would make steam public either, though.
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steam survey says 1.92% is on linux. So there's about 736,651 linux users on steam?! neat
Many of those Steam Deck, I bet.
Bazzite on my desktop and a Steamdeck here!
https://partner.steamgames.com/ says there are 132 million monthly active Steam users, so that's more like 2.5 million Linux users on Steam.
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Wild that the video game industry is so big, and this still isn't even 1% of people on earth.
Also keep in mind this is peak concurrent players. I imagine the MAU is much higher, since most of the world doesn't game at the same time.
This is just steam. It's estimated that about 3 billion people regularly play video games.
Yeah but you'd think more what use steam. I wonder what the platform breakdown is .
90% mobile phones my guy.
Sure, but 38,000,000 x $60 = $2,280,000,000. And that's if they all spend only $60/year, and only on Steam, and the average I'm sure is much higher.
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It's still crazy to me that this is the same program I used to browse CS zombie mod servers. There was no real store to speak of then.
All of them playing that KFC dating Sim
Cant believe this actually exist xd https://store.steampowered.com/app/1121910/I_Love_You_Colonel_Sanders_A_Finger_Lickin_Good_Dating_Simulator/
Still wild to me how competition shoots themselves in the foot. It's even worse than streaming services.
At this point, there's nothing anybody can do to compete with Steam. GOG exists, and despite their awesome raison d'etre, their launcher UI is crap. Epic is probably the closest thing to a competitor, and even its nonstop free game offerings (mostly unheard of indies now) isn't enough to get me to switch. Also, it's UI is crap and the launcher itself is really unstable (constantly refreshes your library and sends you back to the top). The time to launch a competitor was in 2005, when Steam wasn't that good yet.
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