Thing is I don't think it would've been current blizzard management. To me it seems far more likely to have been OG blizz management, If they did steam first, and ended up with Valve's value, I doubt they'd have even sold to Activision back in the day. Really either way it's still a good bullet to dodge, just an incredibly different bullet.
@@samoclese6435 It was sold to activision coz of greed. It might've not been as bad, but it would still be publicly traded company with investors wanting more, forever. That's how good companies turn to shit
@@systemicbreakdown7864 I agree it's why steam is so much better at least till all the owners get to old or want to retire then who knows what will happen.
Shareholders in emerging markets get greedy and greed kills businesses. And greed isn't just wanting more money, everyone wants that. Greed is when you're so frenzied in your pursuit of wealth that you'll screw over everyone INCLUDING YOURSELF to try and get everything right now. Cutting open the goose that lays golden eggs to try and get all the gold at once. We're seeing that happen with tech stocks right now.
It couldn't have gone differently. Blizzard is not the kind of company that valve is. They would have prioritized companies over players and it would have killed the platform.
Oh like valve doesn't curate anything that goes on steam, in 2016 the Australian government force them to have a refund policy. Or that the refined un regularize gambling in CSG AND TF2 crate aka lootboxes also that you don't own any of the games you purchase just the license to play them.
exactly, being the first helped valve, A LOT, but it keeps winning simply because it's the superior platform. many publishers tried to move their AAA big seller games to their own exclusive platforms and it was a complete failure, because even missing a lot of exclusives, Steam is just better. it's hard to imagine Blizzard making and maintaining a platform that is so good and user friendly for so many years. hopefully MS will understand that and turn Battlenet into a platform that can actually compete with steam. game pass is already a really nice move, because it allows people to try games fully before buying them. but there are still a lot of features steam has that MS will need to implement to compete, not just for users but also to developers.
@@thomaskrogh1244 the refund policy complain from the Australian government was because they didn't offer refund for faulty games, only the 14days/2h refunds. and the "you don't own your games" thing was ALWAYS the case, even with physical media, you just owned a license to play the game, the difference is that companies didn't have the means to stop you from playing the game until digital only games became a thing. the change in the user agreement was just making it clearer to users.
@danilooliveira6580 what corporate Apologists.nothing more do you want me to find a way to post images of the physical library of the games I have. I'm waiting for you limb excuses.
Microsoft will end up not putting stuff on steam for like a year then when sales plummit they'll come crawling back just like EA, Ubisoft and every other company (except Epic) that has tried to compete with Steam. IMO the only reason Epic is still keeping at it (albeit without many paid exclusives these days) is due to Tim Sweeny having a personal grudge against Gabe Newall!
@@srdjan455 Steam. Because you don't use Ubisoft or EA launcher to browse and find things to buy, you don't launch them when you're interested in a game just released, you just treat them as mandatory, bothersome step to play a game you bought on Steam. They've spent money to develop their own platform, and players just see them as an annoyance, it can't be more of a loss thant that.
epic is going the "bribe senators" route. its not even a personal grudge. sweeny is a corpo stooge, and the publishers want the competition gone, even if they need to wait for gabes death to do it. epics customers are those corpos letting epic give away games. because they know file sharing never cost them a penny. because they know the players are a product on epic they will do what they can to farm that product.
@MrJay_White people already let corporations win by letting Steam be as big as it, games being mostly digital these day's? You can thank steam for that
Eh, they're lower than steam but in my experience they're not bad either. I don't know why steam utilizes so much more bandwidth, but Battlenet is still way faster than any downloads in my browser. Maybe it's your internet or their services we're stressed at the time you were downloading. Idk, it's been fine for me.
They used to be great with download speeds! Back in the Diablo2 days they basically just used bittorrent as the backend code and ever people like myself on dialup had great download speeds! But yes, since Diablo 3 they're a garbage company who only still exists due to people playing WoW and mobile games. :(
@@Serevarno you obviously aren't a gamer. I'm not a fan of blizzard but the launcher download speeds are fine. And you rarely have to download blizzard games or patches. You obviously haven't used other launchers and your connection is ass.
Steam would still be king, Steam is the best not because they came first, its because they put consumers FIRST, and then it comes Steam desires. When people push back on something that Steam does, Steam comes out saying "you are right , im wrong lets do things your way" thats why Steam is what its today.
So much this. Steam isn't king because they were first. Steam is king because they respect their costumers and costumers respect them in return. I would ALWAYS prefer to give my money to steam over any other digital storefront on the entire internet. If steam would sell other products that have nothing to do with gaming, I'd still choose them, because they have proven, that albeit being a business that has to earn money, they also do it in a way that at least tries to consider the consumer in all its processes and offer them good value in anything they do. Yes steam has lots of shortcomings and they aren't always ethical, but you can clearly see that at least they are trying to be.
Valve understands the value of building loyalty and retaining it. Nobody else understands this, constantly chasing the latest fad and attempting to extract the most they can while providing less.
do you know why? Valve is NOT a publicly traded company. it doesnt have share holders to answer to. when a company is publicly traded, like all other large gaming companies their clients stopped being the users and start being the investors, the users become the product being sold. but since valve is private their clients are us.
@@oldmanharley4018 true, but also there are companies that are also self published and they still act like other companies, shitting on their clients thinking they know better. Steam is that exception.
Agree. The only reason I have other launchers is either they regularly give out free games (Epic) or they are required for some game included in my Gamepass Ultimate subscription (Dragon Age Inquisition requires EA) and SC2 and D3 requires bnet, thou I rarely play them nowadays. I spent about 11 years only playing on xbox, and collecting 300+ digital games, and since I went almost pc only about 7 years ago, I've collected more that 4x as many games on steam. And a lot of the games I have on xbox I wish I could get on steam instead.
Don't get me started on how many mistakes Blizzard have made. While fans created DOTA (custom Warcraft 3 map back then), Blizzard thought it wouldn't be successful so they gave the rights to Valve for DOTA 2 instead. They never learn or listen for years.
It's not that they *gave away* the rights to Valve, they didn't pursue the opportunity when it arose and were late to the race when they realized what they lost. The game itself was already long gone from their grip, the only thing they could hold on to was the name, and that was only changed through compromise as a result of the lawsuits prior to the release of the game itself. It's the hubris and lack of hindsight that burned Blizzard, because they didn't value the content of their userbase like Valve did and still does.
Battle net wouldn't get me to swap. Namely because it does a terrible job of re-logging into my account every time I open my laptop from sleep mode. Steam never gives me this problem.
Thank god they didn't succeed. A world without steam would be a dark place for gaming. Steam might have flaws, but it is by far the only company in gaming that doesn't feel like its screwing over gamers constantly. If blizzard had been the go to platform, i don't think it would be so wildly successful. You think a company as revolting as activision blizzard would let players return games so easily?
Its partly why things like EA's Origin never took off outside what was absolutely necessary, nobody trusted them as a company, nobody liked or wanted it as a service. Even when it was mandatory, some ppl just wouldnt play a game if they had to use Origin to play it.
Ironically we may have held onto physical games for far longer if Steam hadn't been what it has. Who can say what timeline is better; bad steam, keep physical games or good steam, lose physical games.
There is just one problem. Instead of revamping their already existing store front they want to add another. How often do we think people are going to be jumping from store to store to store to figure out what is sold where? Steam, Epic, GoG, Xbox, Ubisoft and Battlenet. Except worse, Battlenet is now under Microsoft so now you gotta go between Xbox app and Battlenet to make your purchase. It's cumbersome and Microsoft would be better off using the tech between the two and just choose one or the other.
let's hope gaben lives to be immortal. no suit should be able control, milk and manipulate the gaming industry as blizzard especially were trying to do.
No, he has gotten Iazy. He is not an Andrew Wilson or a Bobby Kotic, but he isn't a Swen Vincke like he used to be either. Valve is a shell of its former self, they traded that in for csgo skin money. Gabe is to thank for that.
I'm still old enough to remember when everyone hated Steam just as much as say Uplay, for being an intrusive application. Now some people won't even buy a game unless it's available on Steam. It's pretty interesting what gamers have grown to accept over time.
I'm old enough to know this isn't true XD Uplay ALWAYS was more hated for their intrusiveness. I was there when Steam was olive green and I will not stand for this slander lol.
i think you got it a bit wrong with this. People would not use steam at all if they could buy their phisical copies still...i mean, most of us would. but since thats not really doable, il stick with steam, i preffer only 1 platform to be my library so i can focus all my haterd towards it when they do something shitty.
Steam adds considerable value to games bought on their platform. A good mod management system, cloud saves, pre-compiled shaders on linux to avoid stutter, etc. It has its downsides with the DRM, but it also has quality of life improvements.
Battle net doesn't have near the feature-set of Steam. I don't see it working out. Maybe at one point just having WoW would have catapulted it to success, but that time has passed and plenty of other games are on par with WoW in terms of player numbers, namely CS:GO which may even be beating WoW now in terms of active players.
Honestly, it _did_ have problems back then. Thing is, Valve _listened._ It's hard to say the same about the companies running some of these other digital storefronts.
As someone with a 21 yo Steam account - Yes, yes it was that bad. The difference is that Valve was actually interested in making a good experience and got better...
It’s the perfect start, not a huge title to cause as many issues and gets some in the door. They’ll crank it up later, don’t worry Not to say any of this is gonna be good or bad, but they got the bank to throw around and the willingness to play like valve won’t
Even if steam shut down tomorrow i’d never use game pass for the rest of my life. Microsoft is the absolute worst, that doesn’t give two shits about the consumer.
I feel like ppl forget that Microsoft has its own PC store, which I think used to be separate from the windows app store and Xbox stores. It also has the Minecraft launcher. Wonder if they'll finally move it all into one thing. All I know is that it sounds like Microsoft really wants to combine it all into one cloud gaming subscription service. It both terrifies me and makes me curious.
Honestly if they're gonna use Battlenet like that, they really need to fix the update agent, as that's usually the main reason that we're suffering from connection problems. I've lost count on how many times I've had to quit my games, close the launcher and go into the control panel to force shut the update agent and lunch it all again, just so that I could play with a good connection
"But guys, building a digital storefront is hard! Steam sucked when it started too!" "Steam sucked more than a decade ago and they learned. Why can't you learn from them?" "Learning from others? That doesn't make sense!"
@@TheRogueWolfValve also made Steam with their own capital as an entirely private business which was but a fraction of the investor capital Epic raised by selling shares. They have no excuse besides incompetence.
When Steam launched, its memory footprint was gigantic for what was essentially a launcher for Half-Life 1 games. The only reason it survived is that PCs got better AND it added a store that sold their own and third-party games.
Good thing Blizzard rejected the pitch, can't imagine living in a world where pc gaming is controlled by the current activision blizzard. Btw, you should correct the game pass pricing, somehow you included a very outdated pricing list 🤔
I played Guild Wars back in the day and loved it. Amazing game still, really. This makes me love it even more because the idea of Blizzard being the industry leader/standard rather than Valve sounds like a true nightmare
The problem with this new strategy, is there is not a desire from the market for a new video game marketplace, because steam has been a fairly benevolent, pro consumer, marketplace. Gamers have a huge preference towards steam, (and all of their games are already bought on that platform) so much so that the hey don’t want to use other marketplaces, in other words, steam would have to “enshitify” itself in order for there to be room for a real competitor.
Not only would have this secured revenue from selling other companies' games, this would have introduced people from new generations (my generation, i'm 19) to blizzard games. Many people from my age group found out about other valve games by having steam installed.
If we have to live in a world where one company has a _de facto_ monopoly on digital game sales, I'd rather it be the company that _doesn't_ have stockholders constantly pressuring it to find ways to squeeze ever more money out of us.
And here I was thinking we were living in the darkest timeline. I bet a lot of services would have been behind some kind of subscription if they made it big.
The industry grows and gets better when current people in the industry gets tired of their company not doing what they want to happen so those people leave to form new companies that does what they want. That is how stale old companies dies and new companies grows course sometimes the old companies will try to absorb those newer companies because they were actually wrong about how the future looks like.
Steam succeeded because they had HL2 as the kickstart, sure, but more importantly because the launcher was actually good. The first big Steam sale was a huge moment in game distribution history. For the first time ever, consumers thought buying games digitally could be a good thing. In the entire history of Bnet, no one has ever LIKED Bnet. It's a necessary evil to play Blizzard games, that's it. They'd best roll out "Bnet2" ( or a merger of Bnet & their other stores ) asap and completely change who's in charge / the design philosophy if they want to succeed. The current bloatware + crashfest + giant ad banners eyesore + ad-popup spamfest that is Bnet has no chance. That you would unironically say "it is quite a solid app" makes one question your good faith / authenticity TBH.
This is almost as bad as my old wow guildie who traded bit coin by the hundreds or thousands a day back when it first launched. I think he said it got used for accessing servers in other countries for his IT job.
I remember hating Steam. Now they are my single point of failure for over a hundred game titles, and I am happy to keep using their store. Private ownership is a huge part of that.
Right now.. i feel dirty just thinking about playing anything that Blizzard touched. Where as Big Gabe? He's been a champion of the common pc gamer for decades. Microsoft would have to have a superior product, at a lower price to even tempt me at jumping ship at this point, and honestly i don't think Microsoft even knows how to do that anymore.
As interesting as the idea is that Blizzard could have been THE PC marketplace instead of Steam, if not for the decision of Blizzard to decline it... I'm glad the timeline went the way it did. Even around the time the idea was pitched, Blizzard was a part of a publicly owned company, meaning that even back then there was the push to increase the revenue year by year. If Blizzard went with the idea with this type of owner above them, i can't even imagine what type of shit show the PC market would be today.
No, I would not. One HUGE thing Steam has going for it that these other companies dont, trust. They have my trust as a customer that they are looking out for their customers. Not for the producers. Any other marketplace this cannot be said about.
Microsoft was never primarily interested in WoW at Activision Blizzard, anyone who believes that should take a look around, they had completely different fillet pieces in mind.
Ever since I got a free game pass month I've been using and paying for the game pass every month. Pretty much half of the games I had on my steam wishlist were actually included in the game pass and ever since then I've been mostly playing those games :D
Just as I don't use multiple streaming services I wouldn't use multiple game platforms. I trust Steam to look after my games and not take them away. Blizzard took away my Overwatch deluxe edition and gave me a far worst experience instead of what I purchased which everyone else got for free, no way in the depths of hell am I trusting them with a catalogue of games. Since OW2 I haven't even been tempted by anything Blizzard Activision and it's not going to start now. If Steam suddenly vanishes i'd rather put my PC in the trash and give up with gaming all together than use their products or services. The fact is Steam for the most part cares about gamers, Blizzard only cares about short term cash and milking their players for every penny they can get and no matter how good the deal, I will not support that.
At this point, almost any attempt to avoid Steam is going to fail and fail hard, because over the years, by constantly providing a quality user experience vastly better than what other stores do, Steam has built brand loyalty to the point that half the PC gamer market wouldn't buy the cure for cancer if it wasn't offered on Steam. We saw this with Epic and all their exclusives. The playerbase wasn't interested in wrestling with an inferior store experience just to save a few bucks or to get access to a game; they'd just say "I don't need this game." At this point, only Steam is going to beat Steam, if they break away from their consumer-friendly store practices in favor of corporate short-term cash grabs that actively drive the customer base away.
You may want to re-install your bnet launcher. There should be little to no lag in loading your launcher. I haven't opened mine in months and it took less than a second to load everything.
It certainly would be interesting to peak into that world. Blizzard wouldn't have sold to Activision, but still the problems that California found had happened would have been there as well, so perhaps there'd be blood in the water in that case.
I don't know if the xbox app is the reason for people to not buy game pass pc. I think people buy game pass pc when there are atleast 2- 3 games they are interested in. They may buy 1-2 month subscription and cancel after completing said games. That is how i use atleast.
lmao yeah lets splinter the gaming community even further and make cross-platform communities even harder to maintain! Woo! Clearly microsoft is taking direct inspiration from the balkans and is set on carving out their kingdom regardless of what it costs the community.
That was the point of Microsoft buying all those devs/publishers, forcibly carving out a chunk of the oligopoly despite having failed at it by their standards. When ppl were celebrating all that it was pathetic. Now those same people are like "oh no, what might Sony do to FromSoftware?!" yeah, exactly.
@@mediumvillain Everyone talking about Sony taking over FromSoft seems to be unaware that Kadokowa was already in talks of being taken over. Sony taking the lead is better than the other options.
Bro that is the worst comparison you could have chosen, the Balkans were never supposed to be united. The wars of genocides during its fragmentation were the price for having so many people who can't stand each other being forced to live together.
If that means gamepass games work on linux, may at some point give it a trial, otherwise I am not the target audience for it, just prefer to play games slowly and well after release.
I won't touch any Microsoft store associated product until they drop UWP for their games. different versions than steam or other platforms and makes modding almost impossible.
if steam earns $9 mill per employee for pc game users. How large cut do they charge? what is the best for devs, Steam, Gamepass or Playstation Plus? not the end user. I believe Sony's model seems to be best because they have the best games. The only game I missed was Starfield but No mans Sky keeps improving constantly even 8 years after release.
Good to know Battle Net can be competitive, but TF2 and Deep Rock Galactic are on Steam and current Blizzard is a shell of its former self, so I'll pass.
Id pay £10 and immediately unsub to do the Cod Campaign and do the camo grind. The only reason I haven't played Cod since MW2 is the £70 price tag. COD is an annual reskin of the same game and never worth more than £30, especially as its full of additional monetisation.
My favorite part of Battle net is it and overwatch WONT LEAVE MY COMPUTER. It's there in the files but wont let met delete it. And the last 4 times I've had to use it I had to fight the UI. There is nothing they could offer that would make me use it. I'd sooner use Epic and I hate them.
As long as they don't advertise things to me, I don't mind all that extra stuff on Bnet, but I do mind when they advertise to me. Like I'm paying for a world of Warcraft subscription you don't give me ads, please
they already did... look at the court case in 1996 - they were ruled as a monopoly and forced to break up into multiple smaller companies, just like google is doing now. This is why you have things like Xbox Game Studios separate from the Microsoft that works on Windows, and another Microsoft that works on 1st party software (i.e. office, edge), and yet another that works on Business "solutions", and yet another still for "other" hardware (Surface computers/tablets). While all of them have Microsoft's name on them, they are all separate companies that work on targeted aspects of computer related technology, and could even function all completely independently should one of them fail (i.e. windows will still exist if Xbox as a console dies, Xbox wont be affected if Microsoft quits selling Office, etc). Saying "Microsoft" owns Activision Blizzard is a little misleading... Xbox Game Studios owns Activision Blizzard.
@@sirgouki6207 The case was over Internet Explorer the legal remedy was not to break up Microsoft. Il just leave this here. "In the last week of March 2000, the New York Times published the terms of the Microsoft and DOJ negotiations conducted under Judge Posner’s supervision. The published information implied that DOJ and Microsoft were not far from an agreement, but that some States that were part of the litigation disagreed with the settlement terms. The terms of the final draft of the proposal of DOJ were:42 1. Microsoft would create a pricing schedule that would apply to all buyers, so that prices would not be conditioned on other Microsoft products that a buyer buys. The schedule would allow for different prices for different quantities. 2. Microsoft would not be allowed to have exclusive contracts that do not allow the other party to use, display, or feature its opponents products. 3. Microsoft would be required to share technical information without discrimination among the potential recipients of this information. 4. Microsoft would be required to disclose the application interfaces (APIs) that link applications to Windows. 5. Microsoft cannot increase the price of old versions of Windows when new versions are released. Microsoft would be forced to sell the old version at a constant price for three years after a new release. 6. Microsoft would produce a Windows version without IE. Computer manufacturers would be allowed to license some part of the Windows code so that they could change the opening screen, and choose the default browser 42 New York Times, April 2, 2000. See also Brinkley and Lohr (2000), page 286-7. 28 7. Tying by contract would be prohibited, but Microsoft would be allowed to integrate functions, applications, and features in its products.43"
I bought one game in the Microsoft/Xbox store and will never do it again. Both are a bad experience that won't work half the time. And since Minecraft migrated I got the same experience again. Even with a new launcher the whole Account system is still very broken.
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stalker2 is in game pass
You should rectify the game pass pricing chart. It's outdated
100% very good explination of the biz model ... kudos on logic as always mate.
We dodged meteor sized bullet here, imagine current blizzard management having the reach of Valve
It'd be an empty place. Steam only got where it is by being the best option that people want to engage with.
Thing is I don't think it would've been current blizzard management. To me it seems far more likely to have been OG blizz management, If they did steam first, and ended up with Valve's value, I doubt they'd have even sold to Activision back in the day.
Really either way it's still a good bullet to dodge, just an incredibly different bullet.
I Blizzard managed to become that succesfull I don't think they would have been bought by Activision
yeah with the best deals, or atleast it used to. Humble Bundle and GOG are better these days.
@@samoclese6435 It was sold to activision coz of greed. It might've not been as bad, but it would still be publicly traded company with investors wanting more, forever. That's how good companies turn to shit
I don't want ANY publicly traded company to even touch trying to be a video game marketplace.
@@systemicbreakdown7864 I agree it's why steam is so much better at least till all the owners get to old or want to retire then who knows what will happen.
Any... More?
Gaben Protects.
Shareholders in emerging markets get greedy and greed kills businesses.
And greed isn't just wanting more money, everyone wants that. Greed is when you're so frenzied in your pursuit of wealth that you'll screw over everyone INCLUDING YOURSELF to try and get everything right now. Cutting open the goose that lays golden eggs to try and get all the gold at once.
We're seeing that happen with tech stocks right now.
@@Falzyker We need to entomb Gaben on the Golden Throne when the time comes.
It couldn't have gone differently. Blizzard is not the kind of company that valve is. They would have prioritized companies over players and it would have killed the platform.
Oh like valve doesn't curate anything that goes on steam, in 2016 the Australian government force them to have a refund policy. Or that the refined un regularize gambling in CSG AND TF2 crate aka lootboxes also that you don't own any of the games you purchase just the license to play them.
exactly, being the first helped valve, A LOT, but it keeps winning simply because it's the superior platform. many publishers tried to move their AAA big seller games to their own exclusive platforms and it was a complete failure, because even missing a lot of exclusives, Steam is just better. it's hard to imagine Blizzard making and maintaining a platform that is so good and user friendly for so many years.
hopefully MS will understand that and turn Battlenet into a platform that can actually compete with steam. game pass is already a really nice move, because it allows people to try games fully before buying them. but there are still a lot of features steam has that MS will need to implement to compete, not just for users but also to developers.
It doesn't hurt that Gabe, being willing to take risks the way he is, tries to make does he does so without fucking shit up
@@thomaskrogh1244 the refund policy complain from the Australian government was because they didn't offer refund for faulty games, only the 14days/2h refunds. and the "you don't own your games" thing was ALWAYS the case, even with physical media, you just owned a license to play the game, the difference is that companies didn't have the means to stop you from playing the game until digital only games became a thing. the change in the user agreement was just making it clearer to users.
@danilooliveira6580 what corporate Apologists.nothing more do you want me to find a way to post images of the physical library of the games I have. I'm waiting for you limb excuses.
Microsoft will end up not putting stuff on steam for like a year then when sales plummit they'll come crawling back just like EA, Ubisoft and every other company (except Epic) that has tried to compete with Steam. IMO the only reason Epic is still keeping at it (albeit without many paid exclusives these days) is due to Tim Sweeny having a personal grudge against Gabe Newall!
EA and Ubisoft still reauirs you to make an account with them, some games even uses steam to launch the Ubisoft launcher. So really who won?
@@srdjan455 Valve, cause they're paying them a 30% cut lmao
@@srdjan455 Steam. Because you don't use Ubisoft or EA launcher to browse and find things to buy, you don't launch them when you're interested in a game just released, you just treat them as mandatory, bothersome step to play a game you bought on Steam. They've spent money to develop their own platform, and players just see them as an annoyance, it can't be more of a loss thant that.
epic is going the "bribe senators" route.
its not even a personal grudge. sweeny is a corpo stooge, and the publishers want the competition gone, even if they need to wait for gabes death to do it.
epics customers are those corpos letting epic give away games. because they know file sharing never cost them a penny.
because they know the players are a product on epic they will do what they can to farm that product.
@MrJay_White people already let corporations win by letting Steam be as big as it, games being mostly digital these day's? You can thank steam for that
The biggest issue with the battle net launcher is that download speeds are abysmal compared to literally any other launcher.
Battlenet is borderline malware
Really? Is maybe during peek hours, as I can't tell with my 30Mbps lol
Eh, they're lower than steam but in my experience they're not bad either. I don't know why steam utilizes so much more bandwidth, but Battlenet is still way faster than any downloads in my browser. Maybe it's your internet or their services we're stressed at the time you were downloading. Idk, it's been fine for me.
They used to be great with download speeds! Back in the Diablo2 days they basically just used bittorrent as the backend code and ever people like myself on dialup had great download speeds! But yes, since Diablo 3 they're a garbage company who only still exists due to people playing WoW and mobile games. :(
@@Serevarno you obviously aren't a gamer. I'm not a fan of blizzard but the launcher download speeds are fine. And you rarely have to download blizzard games or patches. You obviously haven't used other launchers and your connection is ass.
My brain simply does not comprehend "back in 2004" as 20 years ago! Nope.
Wanna make it worse? Google for 2004 movies.
@@Dethectic
Damn...the first Hellboy movie came out 20 years ago?!
=fossilizes=
what? you're joking! it's only 10 years ago! but seriously, 2019 feels just a couple of years ago and 2012 feels just 2 years before that.
20 years ago is, like, the 80s man!
Steam would still be king, Steam is the best not because they came first, its because they put consumers FIRST, and then it comes Steam desires. When people push back on something that Steam does, Steam comes out saying "you are right , im wrong lets do things your way" thats why Steam is what its today.
So much this. Steam isn't king because they were first. Steam is king because they respect their costumers and costumers respect them in return. I would ALWAYS prefer to give my money to steam over any other digital storefront on the entire internet. If steam would sell other products that have nothing to do with gaming, I'd still choose them, because they have proven, that albeit being a business that has to earn money, they also do it in a way that at least tries to consider the consumer in all its processes and offer them good value in anything they do. Yes steam has lots of shortcomings and they aren't always ethical, but you can clearly see that at least they are trying to be.
Valve understands the value of building loyalty and retaining it. Nobody else understands this, constantly chasing the latest fad and attempting to extract the most they can while providing less.
do you know why? Valve is NOT a publicly traded company. it doesnt have share holders to answer to. when a company is publicly traded, like all other large gaming companies their clients stopped being the users and start being the investors, the users become the product being sold. but since valve is private their clients are us.
@@oldmanharley4018 true, but also there are companies that are also self published and they still act like other companies, shitting on their clients thinking they know better.
Steam is that exception.
Agree. The only reason I have other launchers is either they regularly give out free games (Epic) or they are required for some game included in my Gamepass Ultimate subscription (Dragon Age Inquisition requires EA) and SC2 and D3 requires bnet, thou I rarely play them nowadays. I spent about 11 years only playing on xbox, and collecting 300+ digital games, and since I went almost pc only about 7 years ago, I've collected more that 4x as many games on steam. And a lot of the games I have on xbox I wish I could get on steam instead.
Don't get me started on how many mistakes Blizzard have made.
While fans created DOTA (custom Warcraft 3 map back then), Blizzard thought it wouldn't be successful so they gave the rights to Valve for DOTA 2 instead.
They never learn or listen for years.
It's not that they *gave away* the rights to Valve, they didn't pursue the opportunity when it arose and were late to the race when they realized what they lost. The game itself was already long gone from their grip, the only thing they could hold on to was the name, and that was only changed through compromise as a result of the lawsuits prior to the release of the game itself. It's the hubris and lack of hindsight that burned Blizzard, because they didn't value the content of their userbase like Valve did and still does.
they should release their older games to steam
🤣good one
fr, I want the SC1 and 2 and warcraft trilogy in Steam.
@@revanlord05 The original, without Reforged.
Battle net wouldn't get me to swap. Namely because it does a terrible job of re-logging into my account every time I open my laptop from sleep mode. Steam never gives me this problem.
If it doesn't have user reviews, I don't want it.
Thank god they didn't succeed. A world without steam would be a dark place for gaming. Steam might have flaws, but it is by far the only company in gaming that doesn't feel like its screwing over gamers constantly. If blizzard had been the go to platform, i don't think it would be so wildly successful. You think a company as revolting as activision blizzard would let players return games so easily?
You think you'd see any game sales at all. And they probably say you can't sell your game under $50 no matter how simple it is.
Corporate is where good ideas go to get monetized.
Its partly why things like EA's Origin never took off outside what was absolutely necessary, nobody trusted them as a company, nobody liked or wanted it as a service. Even when it was mandatory, some ppl just wouldnt play a game if they had to use Origin to play it.
Ironically we may have held onto physical games for far longer if Steam hadn't been what it has.
Who can say what timeline is better; bad steam, keep physical games or good steam, lose physical games.
There is just one problem. Instead of revamping their already existing store front they want to add another. How often do we think people are going to be jumping from store to store to store to figure out what is sold where? Steam, Epic, GoG, Xbox, Ubisoft and Battlenet. Except worse, Battlenet is now under Microsoft so now you gotta go between Xbox app and Battlenet to make your purchase. It's cumbersome and Microsoft would be better off using the tech between the two and just choose one or the other.
I hope they just trash the Xbox app for PC. It *is* better than it used to be, but still pretty clunky.
let's hope gaben lives to be immortal. no suit should be able control, milk and manipulate the gaming industry as blizzard especially were trying to do.
Get your head out your arse, Gabe is the reason DRM exists and you don't own anything you buy.
No, he has gotten Iazy. He is not an Andrew Wilson or a Bobby Kotic, but he isn't a Swen Vincke like he used to be either. Valve is a shell of its former self, they traded that in for csgo skin money. Gabe is to thank for that.
@@変質者-o8j Pretty sure DRM was a thing long before Steam.
I'm still old enough to remember when everyone hated Steam just as much as say Uplay, for being an intrusive application. Now some people won't even buy a game unless it's available on Steam. It's pretty interesting what gamers have grown to accept over time.
To be fair, Steam used to be a bit shit
I'm old enough to know this isn't true XD Uplay ALWAYS was more hated for their intrusiveness. I was there when Steam was olive green and I will not stand for this slander lol.
i think you got it a bit wrong with this. People would not use steam at all if they could buy their phisical copies still...i mean, most of us would. but since thats not really doable, il stick with steam, i preffer only 1 platform to be my library so i can focus all my haterd towards it when they do something shitty.
Steam adds considerable value to games bought on their platform. A good mod management system, cloud saves, pre-compiled shaders on linux to avoid stutter, etc. It has its downsides with the DRM, but it also has quality of life improvements.
Yeah but unlike Steam Uplay never stoped being bad an annoying.
Battle net doesn't have near the feature-set of Steam. I don't see it working out. Maybe at one point just having WoW would have catapulted it to success, but that time has passed and plenty of other games are on par with WoW in terms of player numbers, namely CS:GO which may even be beating WoW now in terms of active players.
I remember transitioning from CS:1.6 to CS:Source and everyone bitching about Steam and how it's the worst thing ever made xD
Honestly, it _did_ have problems back then. Thing is, Valve _listened._ It's hard to say the same about the companies running some of these other digital storefronts.
As someone with a 21 yo Steam account - Yes, yes it was that bad. The difference is that Valve was actually interested in making a good experience and got better...
yeaaah, Avowed isn't gonna be the "in'" they think it'll be
Remember when Starfield was supposed to be a system seller?
@@GinaRanTruthEnforcer you don't trust Obsidian as a studio?
It’s the perfect start, not a huge title to cause as many issues and gets some in the door. They’ll crank it up later, don’t worry
Not to say any of this is gonna be good or bad, but they got the bank to throw around and the willingness to play like valve won’t
@@Iggysdust The Obsidian died a long time ago. What we have now is just a skinsuit.
@@Iggysdust Just look they last games, and compare this with their old work. The writing of the studio noways is atrocious.
Even if steam shut down tomorrow i’d never use game pass for the rest of my life. Microsoft is the absolute worst, that doesn’t give two shits about the consumer.
It kind of reminds me of Microsoft saying - No - to BG3. Or every single publisher that said no to Powerwash Sim.
Larian said no to MS because the financial offer was dismally low. MS didn't say no to BG3.
Microsoft didnt care about Larian. They thought the Game and Company is wasted time…
I feel like ppl forget that Microsoft has its own PC store, which I think used to be separate from the windows app store and Xbox stores. It also has the Minecraft launcher. Wonder if they'll finally move it all into one thing. All I know is that it sounds like Microsoft really wants to combine it all into one cloud gaming subscription service. It both terrifies me and makes me curious.
Mike O'Brien then left Arenanet and has been working on a new game and a new networking back-end to allow for less lag with synchronized physics.
DOTA/LOL Will always be the absolute biggest loss in gaming history. I can't believe blizzard fumbled the ball so hard on that 1.
9:48 I would rather pay full price for it on Steam, thank you very much.
Seeing the differences between how Valve and Blizzard treat their customers I think on this point we live in the better timeline.
Honestly if they're gonna use Battlenet like that, they really need to fix the update agent, as that's usually the main reason that we're suffering from connection problems. I've lost count on how many times I've had to quit my games, close the launcher and go into the control panel to force shut the update agent and lunch it all again, just so that I could play with a good connection
This seems like more of a threat to Epic than Steam.
if WoW vanilla launched with a game-store platform attached it would have been just been over for anyone else.
Didn't they try this before, with Destiny 2?
No matter how good the Micro$oft or Blizzard option is. Steam will always be the choice because Valve are not a bunch of two faced snaked crooks.
I'd say "epic should take notes," but they havent added that feature yet.
"But guys, building a digital storefront is hard! Steam sucked when it started too!"
"Steam sucked more than a decade ago and they learned. Why can't you learn from them?"
"Learning from others? That doesn't make sense!"
@@TheRogueWolfValve also made Steam with their own capital as an entirely private business which was but a fraction of the investor capital Epic raised by selling shares. They have no excuse besides incompetence.
I'd die under valve rather than live under Blizzard
When Steam launched, its memory footprint was gigantic for what was essentially a launcher for Half-Life 1 games. The only reason it survived is that PCs got better AND it added a store that sold their own and third-party games.
So Blizzard Execs rejected both becoming Steam and letting the entire MOBA market go. Good times.
So, what's the difference between EGS and BNet then? Besides BNet having possibly even less titles on it without the free games.
Good thing Blizzard rejected the pitch, can't imagine living in a world where pc gaming is controlled by the current activision blizzard.
Btw, you should correct the game pass pricing, somehow you included a very outdated pricing list 🤔
The best timeline we currently live, for now...
I do have to wonder if Blizzard would ever have been in a position to be bought out if they'd struck that digital storefront paydirt first.
What is overlooked here: you are locked in to Windows, though. There is no way, getting Xbox-App games run on Linux at present.
Back in 2000 I remember a thing called MPlayer and that's where I played Quake and Unreal.
I played Guild Wars back in the day and loved it. Amazing game still, really. This makes me love it even more because the idea of Blizzard being the industry leader/standard rather than Valve sounds like a true nightmare
The problem with this new strategy, is there is not a desire from the market for a new video game marketplace, because steam has been a fairly benevolent, pro consumer, marketplace. Gamers have a huge preference towards steam, (and all of their games are already bought on that platform) so much so that the hey don’t want to use other marketplaces, in other words, steam would have to “enshitify” itself in order for there to be room for a real competitor.
Not only would have this secured revenue from selling other companies' games, this would have introduced people from new generations (my generation, i'm 19) to blizzard games. Many people from my age group found out about other valve games by having steam installed.
If we wanted to patch counterstrike, we had to visit "planet half life" and then wait in a line at file planet....Whole series of planets.
Considering the kind of company that Blizzard has become, I am so glad that things have turned out the way the have and Valve sits on the throne.
It's baffling how they failed with store marketplace while having the edge early on. Same with dota hah.
I only ever used battle net for Overwatch 1, and we all saw how spectacularly they fucked that up.
Never. Don't need another money maker for a company that is way beyond a conglomerate. No Thanks.
I remember the days when steam was clunky and the UI sucked. That all changed in… 2014 lol
this made me realize how expensive coffee is, for what it is 10 bucks is wild.
This is about as big as a blunder as Blockbuster executives rejecting the offer to buy Netflix.
If we have to live in a world where one company has a _de facto_ monopoly on digital game sales, I'd rather it be the company that _doesn't_ have stockholders constantly pressuring it to find ways to squeeze ever more money out of us.
And here I was thinking we were living in the darkest timeline.
I bet a lot of services would have been behind some kind of subscription if they made it big.
happy to see i live in the correct timeline for these things
I don't think they can compete with these massive sales events that Steam has.
its crazy how much talent blizzard used to have
No I like to use it as little as possible because i hate opening multiple lanuchers for games i combine everything into steam as much as possible.
Blizzard is the modern age Blockbuster. Let that sink in.
They had years of it...
Yeah, years and years for internet to actually be able to support the model.
The industry grows and gets better when current people in the industry gets tired of their company not doing what they want to happen so those people leave to form new companies that does what they want. That is how stale old companies dies and new companies grows course sometimes the old companies will try to absorb those newer companies because they were actually wrong about how the future looks like.
Still not gonna go back, i swore off Blizzard at their moral purge, haven't heard them publicly going back on that since.
Steam succeeded because they had HL2 as the kickstart, sure, but more importantly because the launcher was actually good. The first big Steam sale was a huge moment in game distribution history. For the first time ever, consumers thought buying games digitally could be a good thing.
In the entire history of Bnet, no one has ever LIKED Bnet. It's a necessary evil to play Blizzard games, that's it. They'd best roll out "Bnet2" ( or a merger of Bnet & their other stores ) asap and completely change who's in charge / the design philosophy if they want to succeed. The current bloatware + crashfest + giant ad banners eyesore + ad-popup spamfest that is Bnet has no chance. That you would unironically say "it is quite a solid app" makes one question your good faith / authenticity TBH.
Imagine WoW, Wc3, Sc2 on Steam - anything what steam offers. Would be a dream.
the fun thing with the pass the price increase sneaks up on you
This is almost as bad as my old wow guildie who traded bit coin by the hundreds or thousands a day back when it first launched. I think he said it got used for accessing servers in other countries for his IT job.
I remember hating Steam. Now they are my single point of failure for over a hundred game titles, and I am happy to keep using their store. Private ownership is a huge part of that.
Right now.. i feel dirty just thinking about playing anything that Blizzard touched. Where as Big Gabe? He's been a champion of the common pc gamer for decades. Microsoft would have to have a superior product, at a lower price to even tempt me at jumping ship at this point, and honestly i don't think Microsoft even knows how to do that anymore.
As interesting as the idea is that Blizzard could have been THE PC marketplace instead of Steam, if not for the decision of Blizzard to decline it... I'm glad the timeline went the way it did.
Even around the time the idea was pitched, Blizzard was a part of a publicly owned company, meaning that even back then there was the push to increase the revenue year by year.
If Blizzard went with the idea with this type of owner above them, i can't even imagine what type of shit show the PC market would be today.
No, I would not. One HUGE thing Steam has going for it that these other companies dont, trust. They have my trust as a customer that they are looking out for their customers. Not for the producers. Any other marketplace this cannot be said about.
Microsoft was never primarily interested in WoW at Activision Blizzard, anyone who believes that should take a look around, they had completely different fillet pieces in mind.
Ever since I got a free game pass month I've been using and paying for the game pass every month.
Pretty much half of the games I had on my steam wishlist were actually included in the game pass and ever since then I've been mostly playing those games :D
Just as I don't use multiple streaming services I wouldn't use multiple game platforms. I trust Steam to look after my games and not take them away. Blizzard took away my Overwatch deluxe edition and gave me a far worst experience instead of what I purchased which everyone else got for free, no way in the depths of hell am I trusting them with a catalogue of games.
Since OW2 I haven't even been tempted by anything Blizzard Activision and it's not going to start now. If Steam suddenly vanishes i'd rather put my PC in the trash and give up with gaming all together than use their products or services. The fact is Steam for the most part cares about gamers, Blizzard only cares about short term cash and milking their players for every penny they can get and no matter how good the deal, I will not support that.
At this point, almost any attempt to avoid Steam is going to fail and fail hard, because over the years, by constantly providing a quality user experience vastly better than what other stores do, Steam has built brand loyalty to the point that half the PC gamer market wouldn't buy the cure for cancer if it wasn't offered on Steam. We saw this with Epic and all their exclusives. The playerbase wasn't interested in wrestling with an inferior store experience just to save a few bucks or to get access to a game; they'd just say "I don't need this game." At this point, only Steam is going to beat Steam, if they break away from their consumer-friendly store practices in favor of corporate short-term cash grabs that actively drive the customer base away.
Uhh when I open the store theres quite a looong wait before the page loads up on that launcher. Never experience that on steam or xbox app
You may want to re-install your bnet launcher. There should be little to no lag in loading your launcher. I haven't opened mine in months and it took less than a second to load everything.
It certainly would be interesting to peak into that world. Blizzard wouldn't have sold to Activision, but still the problems that California found had happened would have been there as well, so perhaps there'd be blood in the water in that case.
Basically, Blizzard will be able to get away with a lot of stuff, while Valve woudn't
Why would I switch from using steam , where I have my library to using multiple launchers
Nah, nothing beats the value that offers Steam. GOG for older titles and Steam for modern ones.
People really forget just how much everyone hated Steam back in the day.
The gist of the lesson today is, Blizzard don't care, Valve pick up the gem and ran with , every single time! LOL
>be gabe newell
>do nothing
>competition shoots itself in the foot
>win
How does he do it?
@@mekaniklboltmb4880 deal with the devil?
I don't know if the xbox app is the reason for people to not buy game pass pc. I think people buy game pass pc when there are atleast 2- 3 games they are interested in. They may buy 1-2 month subscription and cancel after completing said games. That is how i use atleast.
I'm not a linguistics expert but I'm pretty sure 'most costly' is not the way to phrase that
GOG Galaxy is all I will add to this topic.
lmao yeah lets splinter the gaming community even further and make cross-platform communities even harder to maintain! Woo! Clearly microsoft is taking direct inspiration from the balkans and is set on carving out their kingdom regardless of what it costs the community.
Microsoft's longest "sentence" was the 16-word-long "Give money me give eat money me eat money give me eat money give me you."
That was the point of Microsoft buying all those devs/publishers, forcibly carving out a chunk of the oligopoly despite having failed at it by their standards. When ppl were celebrating all that it was pathetic. Now those same people are like "oh no, what might Sony do to FromSoftware?!" yeah, exactly.
@@mediumvillain Everyone talking about Sony taking over FromSoft seems to be unaware that Kadokowa was already in talks of being taken over. Sony taking the lead is better than the other options.
@@Qb3nsis The other option being nobody buying Kadokawa and FromSoft, which would have been much better.
Bro that is the worst comparison you could have chosen, the Balkans were never supposed to be united. The wars of genocides during its fragmentation were the price for having so many people who can't stand each other being forced to live together.
If that means gamepass games work on linux, may at some point give it a trial, otherwise I am not the target audience for it, just prefer to play games slowly and well after release.
Omg I remember hating the first release of steam. It felt so slow and unnecessary
I won't touch any Microsoft store associated product until they drop UWP for their games. different versions than steam or other platforms and makes modding almost impossible.
if steam earns $9 mill per employee for pc game users. How large cut do they charge? what is the best for devs, Steam, Gamepass or Playstation Plus? not the end user. I believe Sony's model seems to be best because they have the best games. The only game I missed was Starfield but No mans Sky keeps improving constantly even 8 years after release.
Good to know Battle Net can be competitive, but TF2 and Deep Rock Galactic are on Steam and current Blizzard is a shell of its former self, so I'll pass.
Id pay £10 and immediately unsub to do the Cod Campaign and do the camo grind. The only reason I haven't played Cod since MW2 is the £70 price tag. COD is an annual reskin of the same game and never worth more than £30, especially as its full of additional monetisation.
when you realize this video was just a long winded ad for game pass xD
My favorite part of Battle net is it and overwatch WONT LEAVE MY COMPUTER. It's there in the files but wont let met delete it. And the last 4 times I've had to use it I had to fight the UI. There is nothing they could offer that would make me use it. I'd sooner use Epic and I hate them.
too little too late, Microsoft have a lot of ground to cover if they want to even remotely try to compete with Steam...
As long as they don't advertise things to me, I don't mind all that extra stuff on Bnet, but I do mind when they advertise to me. Like I'm paying for a world of Warcraft subscription you don't give me ads, please
yeah but imagine kotick as ceo of steam
blizzard miss out on a lot of money between this and DOTA
Microsoft and Blizzard are too greedy for me...
I'm staying with Steam
Got a friend with game pass, that is getting it for me on steam.
Win win moment!
I think the DOJ should break up Microsoft like how they are breaking up Google now.
they already did... look at the court case in 1996 - they were ruled as a monopoly and forced to break up into multiple smaller companies, just like google is doing now. This is why you have things like Xbox Game Studios separate from the Microsoft that works on Windows, and another Microsoft that works on 1st party software (i.e. office, edge), and yet another that works on Business "solutions", and yet another still for "other" hardware (Surface computers/tablets). While all of them have Microsoft's name on them, they are all separate companies that work on targeted aspects of computer related technology, and could even function all completely independently should one of them fail (i.e. windows will still exist if Xbox as a console dies, Xbox wont be affected if Microsoft quits selling Office, etc). Saying "Microsoft" owns Activision Blizzard is a little misleading... Xbox Game Studios owns Activision Blizzard.
@@sirgouki6207 The case was over Internet Explorer the legal remedy was not to break up Microsoft. Il just leave this here.
"In the last week of March 2000, the New York Times published the terms of the
Microsoft and DOJ negotiations conducted under Judge Posner’s supervision. The
published information implied that DOJ and Microsoft were not far from an agreement,
but that some States that were part of the litigation disagreed with the settlement terms.
The terms of the final draft of the proposal of DOJ were:42
1. Microsoft would create a pricing schedule that would apply to all buyers, so that
prices would not be conditioned on other Microsoft products that a buyer buys.
The schedule would allow for different prices for different quantities.
2. Microsoft would not be allowed to have exclusive contracts that do not allow the
other party to use, display, or feature its opponents products.
3. Microsoft would be required to share technical information without
discrimination among the potential recipients of this information.
4. Microsoft would be required to disclose the application interfaces (APIs) that link
applications to Windows.
5. Microsoft cannot increase the price of old versions of Windows when new
versions are released. Microsoft would be forced to sell the old version at a
constant price for three years after a new release.
6. Microsoft would produce a Windows version without IE. Computer
manufacturers would be allowed to license some part of the Windows code so that
they could change the opening screen, and choose the default browser
42 New York Times, April 2, 2000. See also Brinkley and Lohr (2000), page 286-7.
28
7. Tying by contract would be prohibited, but Microsoft would be allowed to
integrate functions, applications, and features in its products.43"
I bought one game in the Microsoft/Xbox store and will never do it again. Both are a bad experience that won't work half the time. And since Minecraft migrated I got the same experience again. Even with a new launcher the whole Account system is still very broken.