Age of Steam Might Not Last

A recent editorial piece published in the Edge gaming magazine proclaims that gaming has entered a so called “Age of Steam” during which the digital distribution service from Valve is set to become more and more important for gaming on the PC.

Not many people would have the guts to disagree with this evaluation, given the success of Steam, the money it makes for Valve and the prominent role it plays in the evolution of recent releases like Dawn of War II and Empire: Total War.

Still, the Chief Executive Officer of Stardock, Brad Wardell, has the guts to pen a dissenting opinion, talking about how Valve and Steam need competition and concluding that, in 18 months, the service will probably be facing stiff competition from “other services such as Impulse, Games for Windows Live, Amazon.com, GamersGate.” He points out that Valve was very intelligent in making Steam necessary for Counter Strike matches and that “outstanding” releases of games like Left 4 Dead and Half Life 2 cemented the early lead the Valve service has. He adds that the customer base of Steam is still rather small, considering the extent of the gaming market.

But Wardell also says that users and developers should be careful about the way they use Steam. According to him, the fact that Steamworks is used by videogames and makes it compulsory for the product to use Steam could be seen as a threatening practice, if coming from other companies, like Electronic Arts or Google.

The Stardock CEO, who is working hard on making the Impulse digital distribution platform attractive, uses a parallel with the early days of social networks to point out to how Steam might evolve. He says that “Steam does a lot of things right. But there's certainly room for improvement which viable competition encourages. After all, MySpace once looked unbeatable in the social networking world but such premature assumptions look quaint in 'the age of Facebook.'”