Everything except making a store people wanted to use? Ethan Evans, who was previously Vice President of Prime Gaming at Amazon, has a short retrospective of trying to take on Steam.
They can’t possibly be dev intensive to maintain, given what we know about how many devs Valve has.
They are VERY expensive and difficult to make, though, particularly if you don’t already own the PC platform. It’s not that every competitor wouldn’t like to match their feature set, it’s that Steam has had two decades of a head start and is a whole software company devoted entirely to this, as opposed to trying to simultaneously… you know, make games and stuff.
Steam Multiplayer, VAC and Steam Wallet integration are all extremely dev intensive examples, I’m not sure conflating team size with dev intensity is a great way to look at it since that’s not generally how software development works. (Unless you’ve got client accounts or deep customization, ofc)
Absolutely no argument about the rest, though. Steam built the entire concept of the market it dominates, and now people are trying to build their own little versions without any of the 20 years of novelty in even just defining the medium that valve has done.
They can’t possibly be dev intensive to maintain, given what we know about how many devs Valve has.
They are VERY expensive and difficult to make, though, particularly if you don’t already own the PC platform. It’s not that every competitor wouldn’t like to match their feature set, it’s that Steam has had two decades of a head start and is a whole software company devoted entirely to this, as opposed to trying to simultaneously… you know, make games and stuff.
Steam Multiplayer, VAC and Steam Wallet integration are all extremely dev intensive examples, I’m not sure conflating team size with dev intensity is a great way to look at it since that’s not generally how software development works. (Unless you’ve got client accounts or deep customization, ofc)
Absolutely no argument about the rest, though. Steam built the entire concept of the market it dominates, and now people are trying to build their own little versions without any of the 20 years of novelty in even just defining the medium that valve has done.