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Cake day: September 11th, 2025

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  • Going back to the spike TV days, it has always seemed to me that Geoff just wants glitz and glamour in video gaming that he can enjoy. And then with age that makes the glitz and glamour crowd for him also get older. Video game developers, welcome to the art gallery world, film/book/music/stage/television awards. It’s a bunch of old people with money and glitz and younger glamour that call themselves producers of any kind they can think of predators trying to party and network and that’s about it. Thing is with the game awards is that award shows peaked back in like 2005-2010 before YouTube and social media really took over media gossip. The game awards has been trying to make some prestige event out of a dying format that lost credibility with how non-inclusive these awards actually are. And I’m not talking about American social politics inclusiveness, I’m talking awards shows that want to be American/Euro-centric in a media landscape that is increasingly not that. So awards shows we know out here are declining marketing platforms for their potential domestic sponsors too because they’re just not able to appeal to people like they used to when these shows aren’t recognizing peoples super favorite game from like Colombia or China that was a hit on Steam but never paid a dime in advertising to American and European media organizations so get no media coverage


  • Remind people that a monopoly isn’t illegal. Abusing a monopoly to prevent competition and using a monopoly as a means to create unfair market conditions in other categories - Windows and web browsers in the past or Apple’s monopoly on iOS software distribution.

    Consoles are even more restrictive than an iPhone is still in the US and was in the EU. Complain about Steam all these devs and people want, unless it can be proven that Valve is using their market share to stop other companies from competing well, it’s a moot point calling them a monopoly. That Wolfire lawsuit when I read the initial court filings they put out was a joke. It was citing Twitter posts and blogspam articles citing anonymous forum posts

    Steam was not the first PC digital distribution store. It wasn’t even great until like 2006/2007. In the early days Impulse could have been competitive but Stardock sold it to GameStop who in dumb move of the last 2 decades did nothing with it. Desura did not improve. GFWL was terrible. Windows Store used to have issues with making storage unreclaimable without a reformat of the drive. Direct2Drive never improved. GamersGate just stayed a key seller. GoG was never going to grow without regular day one games which wasn’t going to be competitive as DRM free. Humble Store stayed a key seller.

    Amazon and Epic’s idea was to just give away games. Ubisoft and EA stores barely even had games they didn’t publish. So sparse I bet they didn’t have self publishing tools. Those 2 puzzlingly regularly had issues maintaining login sessions persisting over time. PC gaming is dieing was the mainstream meme until like 2015. Epic on Android doesn’t even have a library of owned games view and it’s been almost a year since that released.

    Valve didn’t make Amazon, Microsoft, Epic, EA, Ubisoft, Stardock+GameStop, Direct2Drive, … all under invest and/or mismanage their PC game store platform efforts. It’s not up to Valve to stop making the platform more appealing. EGS is 7 years old. Those other companies have been doing PC game stores for much longer. I remember buying and downloading PC games from Amazon before Prime gaming. It was just like Direct2Drive. Since 2004 Direct2Drive was always a storefront for any publishers game whereas Steam didn’t start listing 3rd party games until 2005.

    If any service was comparable to like end of 2013 Steam, that would easily be second best store platform. Instead every store is at best like 2010 Steam with nicer animations, bigger buttons. And today there’s way more resources to make a competitor. More cloud service providers with mature onboarding tools. NPM install. A lot more open source databases. Kubernetes. Git. Etc. Should be able to do better than 7 year old Steam in 7 years from these companies that were far larger than 2002/2003 Valve when they got into PC game distribution. The big publishers were probably all wealthier than Valve up to like 2015

    It’s not Sony and Nintendo’s fault that since the Kinect on the 360, Microsoft hasn’t been able to manage their studios to be competitive with Nintendo and Sony studios



  • Sparking Zero had huge buzz around it. It was hyped up as the successor to Budokai Tenkaichi. It was pretty popular on social media. It had meme-y meta moments like using Yajirobe online for a while. Huge playable roster really added to the hype. Dragonball is incredibly popular. Dragonball may actually be more popular today than the early 2000s. It’s had a huge resurgence since the series canon resumed with the battle of the gods movie

    Parents I know are very active users of parental controls from what I’ve seen


  • It sucks but my impression is that people familiar with releasing games on Steam all seem to immediately see why this could happen and gave feedback. Also it doesn’t seem like a beloved early access game in general by those that bought into early access. It had its hype period a long time ago and limped out of early access. Now Valve is trying to help them market

    Steam for the most part is the primary marketing platform for indie games. Not just for PC, also PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo because of how lackluster those shops are for discoverability of games that aren’t front page advertised with large thumbnail/poster placements. Success on Steam is viral marketing for other platforms

    Still recommendations are always to try to build a following both on and off Steam. Twitter for a while were the major social media accounts indies should spend time building up a following. Now it’s Tiktok. YouTube and Twitch influencers are also a good choice for getting viewers converted to customers but you can’t just pick a popular person, got to be mindful for if their viewers watch for game recommendations or for the personality only. So in that way, it’s not as simple as pay a popular streamer to play your game and their fans will play the game

    Regardless Steam is the best for marketing. Steam curators are way smaller than YouTubers, streamers, Tiktok but it’s highly directed at spending customers. Some Steam reviewers have followers. You can follow game developer/publisher pages. That’s how I learn of some games. I get emails and check out publisher Steam pages of games I like.

    Until any competitor actually tried to compete with Steam as a service, I’m not going to knock Valve heavily over Steam. They keep improving. Itch is not anything close to marketplace that can compete with Steam. It’s even more barebones of a service than Desura over a decade ago. At the basic level to compete with Steam, it needs a desktop client and social media functionality for developers to build followers. Maybe it needs to open source and join under the Linux foundation or KDE or something to help guide it to the next level