Steam has now reached 38 million concurrent users

I love steam, but let's get real here for a second. Valve will change some day. Enshitification is inevitable.

GabeN will not live forever. The vultures circle endlessly, and one day they will win. There is no good ending here (for now).

Consider building a tower, downloading everything youve purchased on steam, and keep it offline. Maybe have a 2nd set of hard drives as a backup. Put these priceless artifacts in your will.

Plan accordingly and enjoy the ride while it lasts.

I love steam, but let's get real here for a second. Valve will change some day. Enshitification is inevitable.

Steam is an example where I'm not sure when it would happen.

It already comes with a hefty fee of 30% per sale on the platform. I don't think they can raise that without serious backlash. And there also isn't really a need, Steam prints money. It prints money because it's where users are. Users are there because they like the features. Some good features are only there because of laws (e.g. refunding); Valve can't remove these.

So how would you make the service even more profitable?

Enshittification happens because corporations want (more) money out of a service that built a userbase. These were often running at a loss. To turn a profit, they need to change.

Steam can sell you licenses to games you don't own already. It's up to each publisher. Valve doesn't care, they just deliver.
- They could add a fee to re-download games, a subscription requirement to use friend invites, start throwing spam notifications on your screen/in your email inbox about “sponsored content”, upload your browser history for better ad targeting, etc. the list gets pretty long pretty quickly. Just look at what the Epic store does right now (hint, it’s almost all of those things already).
- Think of it more like Netflix. Netflix was great, then the market fractured and Netflix enshitified in response.
  
  What it would take here is for a publisher to become a real distributor in the space, but competition is weak right now. Just like it really took Disney wading in to disrupt Netflix, it would take someone equally large, like Microsoft, to disrupt Steam. Sorry Ubisoft, but you don't cut it.
Arrg matey!
- I don't play many AAA games but I'm forever gutted that the fight to make them able to be pirated is a losing battle. I want to pay for my indie games but on occasion I look online at the crack status of AAA games from oecen 2-3 years ago and they're still not playable.
  
  It creates a weird dichotomy where people who pirate or at least don't buy expensive games don't take part in the mainstream gaming conversation at all, which is totally different from the rest of pirated media.
They will never go public so enshittification rules don't necessarily apply
- Never say never, but I don't think it's going to happen while Gabe is in charge
Sure, but hopefully that's a very long time away, and there's always piracy. Hopefully Gabe lasts for another 20 years or longer. Hopefully he has a high-quality person as a successor.
Not gonna happen
https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/steam

Was valve ever good to begin with? Their main products is a useless proprietary software launcher and they make billions off abducting kids into gambling and selling their data.
- I loathe their lootbox system but I'd say valve is better than their rivals in most places. I'd put them far above Epic, Playstation, and Xbox for their games marketplace, far above meta in the VR space and on par with the game developers I respect in basically every aspect except lootboxes.
  
  I don't think we should respect, like or trust any large businesses but Valve is certainly the lesser evil of many choices.

steam survey says 1.92% is on linux. So there's about 736,651 linux users on steam?! neat

Many of those Steam Deck, I bet.
- Bazzite on my desktop and a Steamdeck here!
https://partner.steamgames.com/ says there are 132 million monthly active Steam users, so that's more like 2.5 million Linux users on Steam.
- so cocurrent means monthly active?

Wild that the video game industry is so big, and this still isn't even 1% of people on earth.

Also keep in mind this is peak concurrent players. I imagine the MAU is much higher, since most of the world doesn't game at the same time.
This is just steam. It's estimated that about 3 billion people regularly play video games.
- Yeah but you'd think more what use steam. I wonder what the platform breakdown is .
Sure, but 38,000,000 x $60 = $2,280,000,000. And that's if they all spend only $60/year, and only on Steam, and the average I'm sure is much higher.
- We i need to tech bro take over whatever industry actually gets to all 7 bln
- It's not counting yearly users either, it's concurrent players

huh, what dropped in 2020 that caused that big spike?

COVID-19. 😏
- Damn, you reply quick. yep, I realized the instant i asked and felt stupid, eheh.
- Gaben behind Covid-19 confirmed?

I remember when 9 million was a lot.

I remember when 1 million was a lot.

To think that we have lived so long.

It's still crazy to me that this is the same program I used to browse CS zombie mod servers. There was no real store to speak of then.

All of them playing that KFC dating Sim

Cant believe this actually exist xd https://store.steampowered.com/app/1121910/I_Love_You_Colonel_Sanders_A_Finger_Lickin_Good_Dating_Simulator/

Still wild to me how competition shoots themselves in the foot. It's even worse than streaming services.

Permanently Deleted
- I would say gog is probably closer than epic. Its actually managed to still be a thing despite steam being op as f in every way possible. And the last time i used it it was decently competent launcher compared to epic which was a travesty.

I honestly thought the number of concurrent users was a lot higher a lot longer ago, but either way, it's come a long way since ~2003?

38 million only? I thought there were way more gamers out there. Isn't it a market bigger than TV and cinema combined? (maybe even sports included?)

These are concurrent users, i.e. the number of players all playing at one time. The total number of Steam users is WAY higher.

Believe in Gabe 👁️ 👃 👁️

I wonder how many millions they need to be inspired to update their platform so it doesn’t need a regular outage every Tuesday.

Fuck this platform.

Fuck mandatory DRM.

Fuck the garbage runtime that takes minutes to start every time I wanna play a goddamn single player game.

Fuck mandatory updates every time I want to play a goddamn single player game.

Fuck popup advertisements for events that reappear year by year no matter how many times I've disabled them

This platform prevents you from owning anything..

I don't know how anyone could support this garbage.

Steam forces games to have DRM?

I guess i didnt notice the DRM of the games installed from steam that i was able to play without steam installed
- Steam does not force DRM
- I assume it does force DRM. I can't play Terraria, skyrim, elder ring, etc. without it. I have not encountered one release which I can play without the runtime.
  
  Terraria in particular shouldn't use it unless it was forced to do so based off the fact that they're available on gog which mandates games be drm free.
  
  I'm not even allowed to run that game without updating it if it's out of date. I literally can't play a modded game because it may be rendered unplayable at any moment by the publisher. Makes the whole workshop people talk up all but useless.
If like you say Steam is only garbage, make a list of good alternative.

Epic Game (worst)

Launcher -> horrible and worst than Steam. Actually you can use heroic games launcher (less problems)

Store -> really bad

DRM

Need update to play game

Only Windows / Mac (i don't care about mobile for the small amount of game)

Not version for Linux and Tim Sweeney not like Linux and say a big amount of stupidity.

Doesn't have all the tools and feature for dev like Steam

No Workshop alternative

Gog (need more game and feature)

Gog galaxy (latest test in 2022) -> good launcher but no Linux version

Games for Windows, Linux, Mac

Not all game can be found here because it's only DRM free game

Doesn't have all the tools and feature for dev like Steam

No Workshop alternative

From what i can see, Steam is not perfect but it's better than Epic for sure, and have more feature and game than Gog. I don't include itch because for me it's not a gaming store.

If anyone have another store, or want to correct anything.
- What about... Physical media? Like, ordering a dvd from amazon with your game on it that you then play on a machine that's not even connected to the Internet?
- Gog could use more games but if it's between using a platform that forces you to use a runtime and nothing at all, I'd much rather play nothing at all.
Found Tim Sweeney.