Steam Might Be Bad for Small Developers

Most PC gamers tend to think of Steam, the distribution service from Valve, as being a very useful tool. It allows for games to be downloaded, patches are quickly applied, it eliminates the need to store a lot of disks and permits for all the game purchases to be tied to a single online identity. But it seems that some people in the videogame development world are not so keen on Steam.

Randy Pitchford of Gearbox, who is now working on Borderlands, told Maximum PC that “I'll tell you what. Steam helps. As a guy in this industry though, I don't trust Valve... I personally don’t trust Valve. But I'm just saying, honestly, I think a lot of the industry doesn't.”

The Borderlands developer sees a conflict between the fact that Valve maintains a distribution channel, in Steam, while also developing videogames. He adds that “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.”

It's weird to see Pitchford say that the smaller developers are getting the short end of the stick when it comes to Steam, with the digital distribution fees being too high for them, as Gearbox is anything but a small developer. And the argument can be made that quite a lot of smaller games from unknown studios would never make it to gamers in any form and would not bring their creators any money if it was not for the Steam service to distribute them.

The statements also overlook the fact that Steam is in no position to be a monopoly. It has competition from Impulse which is maintained by Stardock, on some segments, it has competition from Good Old Games and services like Gaikai and OnLive, which will rely on cloud computing to offer videogames on the PC, might also provide an alternative for smaller developers.