Comment on What's up with Epic Games?

• AlteredStateBlob@kbin.social ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Exactly. Steam didn't invest in marketing nonsense and gimmicks to get people on their platform. For consumers it is simply the superior product, DRM not withstanding.

  They got their issues, no doubt. But I have never seen a quasi monopoly be more consumer oriented than steam.

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• MudMan@kbin.social ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Well, that's cultivating an image.

  I have this conversation weirdly often around here. Steam launched under a TON of pushback. They effectively did what people criticise Epic for doing and locked down Half-Life 2 under Steam, and in turn under always-online DRM. People were very angry, nobody wanted that crap and it was pretty controversial. As I recall, Valve didn't react much. They just kept going, adding more first and third party content until they were the de facto storefront. They targeted their publishing and purchasing strategies to keep content first and consistently avoided controversy via the silent treatment, outside of having Gabe talk in public here and there and keeping his persona out there, along with a couple of select employees, although once they phased out game development for pure publishing even that went away.

  They are very careful to not demistify themselves and to keep that semi-accidental conflation of being the de facto monopoly with being pro-consumer. It's kind of insane how resilient to speaking publicly or being perceived as speaking publicly they are, especially with how much they had to let go of that in regards to the scandals related to CS gambling grey markets, game greenlighting processes and a few other key snafus. But it works. The brand is sticky and they know if they don't say anything the community will do the job for them, so they just... shut up, avoid constructed corpo PR when they can and favor having their content makers handle communication whenever they can, including product launches.

  By the numbers Valve is a fairly standard tech upstart: comes from Microsoft vets, uses traditional disruption tactics, throws everything against the wall to see what sticks, fixes broken things later. Their branding is up there with Coca-Cola, though. Hell, Disney wishes they looked as squeaky clean as the "we had kids gambling on gun skins" guys. It's kinda nuts.

  I mean, good for them. I don't know why they aren't more of a mainstay in PR and marketing degrees. It's kind of amazing.

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  • Hajotay@kbin.social ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    This image you are painting of Valve is just... funny to me. Anybody who plays Valve games could tell just how oblivious they are to PR or marketing. This is a company composed almost entirely of engineers that basically only communicates in patch notes. If they are trying to cultivate an image, they are doing a hilariously bad job at it.

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    • MudMan@kbin.social ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      That's a hilarious thought. Valve is primarily an online storefront company that runs organized sales events multiple times a year. Their marketing arm is ruthlessly efficient. They invented maybe half of the GaaS strategies in the books and are arguably still one of the best at deploying them.

      And they do have at lest one more vector of PR. Normally you'd think third party relations is a different category, because it's a business-to-business thing, but when you get as big as Steam and have effectively removed or crowdsourced all greenlinghting and discovery you're in a different space. Like Unity, Valve has a small ninja army of dev relations guys they send around the world to events and gatherings to deliver the good word of our lord Valve and ensure that indie devs know what they're supposed to be doing to fit within their strategy. I assure you you haven't heard more refined PR-speak in your life.

      But again, they're amazing at being quiet and keeping up that image of "just a buncha engineer underdogs in a room fixing the games industry, ya know?" I don't hate them, or even dislike them. I don't hate any game publisher. Games are games, it's an entertainment industry, it doesn't warrant love or hate of companies or corporations, beyond the larger questions of how copyright and IP work in an online world. But this idea that Valve is a magic wonderland with no agency on how their image is handled or moneymaking strategy or community management is... a lot.

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      • Hajotay@kbin.social ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Valve is primarily an online storefront company that runs organized sales events multiple times a year. Their marketing arm is ruthlessly efficient.

        "Their marketing arm?" So... Kaci? The person they hired about a couple years ago to film silly minute-long YouTube videos about 5 times a year? Yeah she's really ruthless...

        Just look at the guys they send out to do Steam Deck interviews and tell me Valve has PR people working for them full-time. No offense to Pierre-Loup Griffais but there's a reason companies hire good-looking celebrities to push their products.

        Valve has a small ninja army of dev relations guys they send around the world to events and gatherings to deliver the good word of our lord Valve and ensure that indie devs know what they're supposed to be doing to fit within their strategy.

        jfc lmao does this "ninja army" sneak some shurikens pass the TSA so they can take out employees of rival PC gaming stores!? This doesn't even sound remotely nefarious, just sounds like Valve sends out some guys to consult companies on how best to use their products and do a little salesmanship and networking. The horror.

        But this idea that Valve is a magic wonderland with no agency on how their image is handled or moneymaking strategy or community management is... a lot.

        So give me some proof of Valve's "ruthless" marketing arm then? So far most you can say regarding Valve's "image handling" is that Valve sends some devs out to talk up Steam to developers. Meanwhile, most companies spend BILLIONS UPON BILLIONS on marketing and PR. Can you not see the insane difference between these?

        We already know a little how Valve works (here's an old employee manual). Note the line "There are not different sets of rules or criteria for engineers, artists, animators, and accountants." So yes, even Valve's marketing team (which so far as we know consists of one person) has a flat structure. So it's a little hard to see without any sort of management apparatus how "Valve" (as a whole) makes any concerted efforts towards these things.

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  • stevecrox@kbin.social ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    As someone who bought Half Life 2 when it was released ..

    I only remember people being excited about Steam, Web stores weren't a thing back then and they were the future! (It was the following years of audio and ebook stores locking stuff down and evapourating that taught us to hate it).

    Game/Audio CD DRM hacking the kernel and breaking/massively slowing down your PC was pretty common back then and Steam' s DRM didn't do that.

    The HL2 disc installer didn't require you to install Steam, once installed it asked you to setup Steam and there was a sticker under the DVD with the Steam code for you to enter.

    You were then rewarded with a copy of HL2 Deathmatch and Counterstrike Source.

    Steam wasn't always on DRM, back then ADSL/DSL was relatively new and alot of people were still stuck on Dial Up modems.

    Steam let you sign in and authorize your games for 30 days at which point you would need to log into Steam again. This was incredibly helpful feature for young me.

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    • MudMan@kbin.social ⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I was there, I was an audilt. I was mad and I was online enough to know I was not alone. In fairness, some of the being mad part was from people being locked out by login and server issues, which is a slightly different kind of mad.

      But I personally did not play HL2 for a while because I was boycotting Steam. I remember so distinctly holding the box in my hand and going "hell no" and putting it back.

      You're technically right that I wasn't always online, though. It required you to go online to authorize it, as you say, which was something people were already mad with others about (EA, I remember distinctly as well) that I already had a standing veto on anybody attempting it.

      I pirated HL2 when it came out entirely in protest of Steam. I don't know how long it took me to relent, because I don't have my Steam account on hand at the moment, but I think it was a couple of years at least. Honestly, to this day I still default to GOG, so I'm still a bit testy about it.

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