Yep. Was a collector for decades of pc games, steam killed that off. Discs with nothing but the client on t, key sales etc. It was the end of the good days. Now digital products are worthless, just a means to tie you to the net for mass marketnf and data mining. I also went to the ps3/xbox for games drm'd. Unfortunately its not getting any better, worse in fact. Every company now wants their own client. Greedy corporate gollums to a one. Still, I have a lifetime of games to get through so fuck em.

I can give you 1580 reasons. And they're here. They have been, all along.

PC games are actually currently stronger than they've ever been, in fact, PC sales might have surpassed console market. Reasons why do AAA games sell better on consoles are entirely different and as for involvement of Steam, PC sales rose significantly with introduction of Steam for precisely the same reason Console games are popular - Steam is convenient.

PC sales in the West actually only amount to about 5 Billion compared to around 20 Billion in Console sales (in the west, globally it's bigger as I give the global numbers below). People like to think PC sales are up, but it's because they don't look at the statistics of the sales.

Overall, PC sales have beaten console sales for several years globally. The current PC market is around 50 billion dollars, but that includes Tablet games sales. For PC only sales, it appears to be between 22 billion to 25 billion globally, coming close to 25 to 26 billion this year, which will surpass the console sales overall (being around 25 Billion dollars for the industry...unless you count the other gaming consoles outside of the PS4/Xbox One/Wii-U/3ds arena, in which case [some of this also includes tablet game sales from former console only game makers] it can shoot up to close to 40 billion.

For strictly PC game sales, you are looking at most of the market being found in Asia. Most of those DO NOT BUY THEIR GAMES FROM STEAM...believe it or not.

The biggest PC games in Asia are MMOs which make around 14 Billion to 15 Billion dollars. The rest are similar to the PC market in the West, accounting for another 5 billion. Asia makes up the bulk of the current PC market (especially China, oddly enough) with around 20 Billion in PC sales...where as a bulk of the console sales are from North America and Europe.

Consoles themselves, without the games also make a huge market. The Xbox One and PS4 together are estimated to have sold around 60 million, with a total of around 18 billion to 25 billion over the past two years, which is not included in the numbers above.

In the West, PC gaming is pretty much dead compared to Console gaming. In China, (as I said, I think it's ironic) PC gaming is monstrous compared to console gaming (Korea is pretty big with the PC gaming as well).

However, 5 Billion is still quite a bit of money. I'd imagine steam, as the biggest PC game seller in the West probably takes in a good chunk of that. Even if they only take in 1 to 2 billion dollars annually, that's enough to be one of the biggest vendors of PC gaming in the world. I'd imagine they are bigger than blizzard or any other Western company.

Consoles, on the otherhand, are the market to be in. That's why you see so many AAA titles that would have been PC exclusives only a mere decade ago now being on the consoles. In fact, I'd say consoles in the West get more AAA games sold than any thing on Steam.

The only reason I see that could change is the MS directive where they'll have Xbox One games running on your PC and vice versa. Xbox One games right now don't have DRM restrictions on sign in/password like Steam (which is a reason they can outsell Steam outright on things like the GTA series). Combine that and I think MS can beat steam at it's own game...Win 10 could be the future of Xbox and Win 10 gaming.

Unfortunately, MS shot themselves in the foot originally. A LOT of console gamers are ex-PC gamers and moved to consoles because of the DRM debacle. I don't think MS realized this and when they did their initial announcement of Xbox One using DRM like Steam...it killed their presales (PS4 was originally outselling Xbox one 4 to 1 in presales). MS realized their mistake and reversed the decision, but it's a mistake they've suffered from ever since (with the PS4 outselling them by a 2-1 margin since then). I highly doubt they'll make that mistake again, but I do see that they could take a HUGE chunk of PC gamers from other areas with their Win10 initiative, or even make many console gamers into PC gamers once again!

Great post

One of the reasons PC gaming is so big in China is the government limited the import of consoles.

2 other problems MS has with beating Steam.
Firstly UWP Apps under perform and have limited functionality compared to standard programs, though I'm guessing they will get better.
Secondly, the windows Store is one fugly beast

Yup.

"In the West, PC gaming is pretty much dead" is a gross overestimation. First of all, and you said it yourself, the market share PC gaming holds is not really something to scorn at, especially given ease of multi-platform development today. Secondly, PC market might be close to dead for AAA games (and it has been for like past 15 years so eh... It's dead for a very long time in spite of seeing more AAA multi-platform releases than ever :-P), but there's also a massive amount of niche products available only on PC - that's a big chunk of indie market or grand strategy games, for example. Oh right, indie games, another thing that Steam massively popularized on PC. And yes, majority of Steam's successes stem from it being the first massive digital distributor backed by Valve, not necessarily from being ... Well, Steam.

Anyway, PC gaming has been "dying" long before Steam became popular. I'm pretty sure consoles already surpassed PCs in sales around 2000...Something, and before them, Arcades were the king. My point was that DRM is not really to blame, since:
a) Even a computer with Steam games installed restricts use of those games a lot less than having it on console. Steam or no Steam, you can still mod your games for instance. Consoles offer no such benefit.
b) If people refused to use Steam because it's DRM, it would not grow as large as it did in the first place. Your proposed scenario would essentially have to look like this for that to happen: People who noticed Steam exists migrated to consoles before it even became popular, and the rest started using Steam.

You seem to have decent knowledge of the market, so purely to humor me, could you find info on purely AAA PC market revenues since 2000 to like 2010 in US or Europe? Now that would be interesting information to see.

really?
we have 50 xbox games and 2 xboxes, when 1 game is in use the other 49 are playable

I have 80 steam games and 8 computers, when 1 steam game is being usedthe other 79 are locked

Well technically if you have 50 Steam games and 8 computers, all can play from the same account, provided they're playing from offline mode or all can play via family sharing, given the host account remains offline. Not really how it's supposed to be used, but hey, you're not supposed to lend the console games you bought for yourself either.

Still, I get your meaning, it's very much a matter of perspective - what I care about is that I can play on good and steady framerates, pick my preferred controller method and that I'm capable of modifying the game files in any way I see fit (including removing dependency on Steam if need arises, which I certainly can't do with a console game). If what you care about is... Actually, what do you care about? On modern consoles, retailer can cut access to crucial patches for modern games so the game disc is not sufficient anyway and you're dependent on decisions of a third party. I think the only other way to go is really DRM-free approach on PC, otherwise you'll eventually run into similar issues.

I consider Valve to possess an immoral quasi-monopoly over the PC games market. I see how they employ less people and make more money every year. I see how entire websites are dedicated to selling their keys. I see how developers NEED to get on Steam to SURVIVE. I see how Valve possesses a greater market share in digital PC games distribution than Apple in digital music, Amazon in ebooks and google in search engines.

I want PC games to thrive, and that necessitates a healthy, competitive market situation. In short, I can not in good conscience support Valve. I'm sure the remaining backbone of human resources at Valve is a collection of swell guys, but still Electronic Arts – usually the greatest shitbag around – has way more than twice the number of employees in support alone than 3 bn. $ equity company Valve has, total. Does that seem right to anyone?

I can not in good conscience support Steam. If that means abstaining from a whole lot of crowning achievements of AAA games, so be it. If that one day means to give up PC gaming altogether, I will give up PC gaming.

DRM is always a good question and often the argument for GOG.com – it isn't even my main concern with Valve though. If Valve decided to offer DRM free installers tomorrow, without asking their business clients (thus exemplifying and exerting their absurd market influence), I still couldn't support Steam.

This is the same for me as well. I had purchased before Half-Life 2 and deeper DRM implementation in the games more than 90% of my PC games. I started to buying games, because of all the physical stuff in the boxes. In last 5 years, the only PC game, which I have purchased besides GOG, was Pillars of Eternity as a kickstarter backer. I rather paid 140USD for the DRM free product, than I would pay 5USD for something which requires Steam spyware to run. Digital games, do not offer me as a collector satisfaction. Some of the physical games, which I have purchased in the pre-DRM age, are now selling on ebay for hundreds of USD (even unsealed). While sealed physical boxes of HL2, for example is currently listed for under 5GBP...

Nowadays, most of my purchases are full-priced console games, which are exclusive to consoles, which have almost no chance ever to be released on PC. I do not wait for sales. I just support the companies, which offer me some physical stuff.

I never buy digital only releases for console, though. The only place for digital purchases for me, is GOG. And with my current backlog on console, because I spent most of the time with games from GOG, is getting pretty big. That means, I do not even need to consider to buy anything on PC outside GOG. The only thing, which I am sad, that I was so far unable to play Fallout New Vegas.

Because Steam is not mandatory to have a good gaming experience.

This thread is being posted on the forums of a platform specialized in DRM-free games, expecting to enlighten someone about what they are missing by not using another platform that doesn't cater their needs or preferences?

I, too, was a late finder of GoG. Before that, I was quite content with Steam as far as I used it (since I knew nothing else by then and Steam looked like a novahot thing to use). "A client where I can have my games tidied up in a library, automaticaly updated, getting them at ridiculously low prices
and a public profile for everyone to see whatever I might want to share and a friend list to see who's online and who's playing what. Neat!"

Then, I found GoG out of sheer luck.
Then, I began to read.

About how such low prices for games could appear on Steam.
About how G2A and similar sites work.
About how exactly worked to "buy" a game on Steam and what it implied.
About what DRM was (since I had no clue about why I had to open Steam to play some games).
About the necessity of developers to rely on Steam to survive(and with it, to end up adapting to their model), because they got such a monopoly handled with iron grip that they simply HAVE to do that.
Refusing to publish on Steam would be, in Shadowrun terms: "As good as a one-way ticket to the Walled City".

It was something not pleasant to read, and it wasn't pleasant either to know that after shelling quite some money and getting a +150 games library.
Suddenly, features that I considered handy proved to be not enough to compensate the bad things about Steam.

There were things that I was totaly against, but unaware that I was sustaining/perpetuating/call it whatever you want with my own money.

From what I learned here, I found out that I was actualy backfiring my attempts to have a better gaming experience:

Paying such low prices doesn't really benefit any of the sides.
Having a tidy library means nothing if you can't access it freely due to some external error, hold a decent amount of control of things that you actualy paid to use as you see fit (within logical/legal means), nor share it without some shoddy workaround that either way rends one of the two sides unable to play. It's simply not worth the effort.

Therefore, I can't in good conscience keep purchasing there and bolster their numbers/income. It simply comes down to ethics.

There are too many alternatives really valid for almost any title too, and this doesn't only apply to Steam like others mentioned above me.

For me, Steam is no longer worth it: I've ended up relating it to shovelware and unnecessary content in my games, godforsaken wild-west forums and unexistent support in my somewhat extended experience there.

Here I can expect a reasonable response within a sensible amount of time, both in a ticket and asking on the forums. I actualy got problems with the first game I bought here and got them explained and solved in 24h.

There, I still have a game developer hounding me for leaving a negative review, still waiting for an answer to a ticket made on January.

Perhaps it's about the size of both communities and the % to find assholes in their ranks? Probably, but the fact for me is that I feel comfortable here, and I don't feel so anymore there. Personal preferences play a lot in these matters, and mine are pretty satisfied by how GoG handles things.

I do use Steam though to purchase games unavailable here as a last resort (such as War of Human Tanks series) and that's because WoHT games are DRM-Free, so I purchase, get the game and remove Steam, but seeing as how GoG is getting more and more attention I'll probably end up not even needing to do that. It is what I would like.

If I had discovered GoG sooner I wouldn't be regretting purchases such as Darkest Dungeon, Torchlight II and the like. I expect Connect to solve that in the future, and I expect GoG to grow enough to please their users as much as possible so we don't have to rely on platforms that don't align with our interests or morals.

This is how (and why) I don't use Steam in 2016: by using what I consider a better one, because it is better for me.

Edit: typos, format errors.

It's not quasi, it's a fullblown one:
<span class="bold">Steam: Monopoly &amp; Monopsony</span>

The text regarding lending on games and music is misleading.

A console game is a licensed copy of copyrighted material, the same as a book or DVD or music.
You have the absolute legal right to lend that game to any private individual you choose, no matter what is writen on the disc.

You do not have the right to publicly lend though.

Yup. The inability of anyone else but -you- to use your Steam account is also, to my knowledge, only rooted in Steam's EULA. In fact, the Steam family sharing thingy is not even breaking that in any way. The approaches I proposed are all perfectly legal.

No not exactly.
If you got all your consoles games, and books, and dvd, and CD's, then opened up your own lending library on your front lawn then you would be breaking the law.
Actual criminal law, a police can take you to a police station and put you in jail.

Civil law, the type used for contracts and the like, they can't send police - just letters telling your to see them in court.

Steams SSA is not a contract, legally its closer to a note on a shop wall saying "no refunds".

The problem here is VALVe can do what ever they want with your account, and by extension your games, regardless of whether it is legal or not. And if you disagree, then your only option is to send them a letter and take a multi billion dollar company to court.

As for SFS not breaking the SSA, Steams Family Filter however does. There is no way for a parent to apply family filter to an account they don't own. Even now the SSA only says VALVe can give permission, but nowhere have they given such permission.