Steam holds a “horrid conflict of interests”, says Gearbox CEO
Valve’s often-praised Steam service has been publicly criticised for an alleged ‘conflict of interest’ and verging on a monopoly in the digital PC space.
Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford believes that Steam’s growing dominance in the digital PC space has brought about inherent tensions.
“It would be much better if Steam was its own business,” Pitchford told MaximumPC.
“There’s so much conflict of interest there that it’s horrid. It’s actually really, really dangerous for the rest of the industry to allow Valve to win.”
Pitchford made it clear that Gearbox itself does not have a business conflict with Valve, adding that he loves Valve’s own titles.
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“But, I’m just saying, Steam isn’t the answer. Steam helps us as customers, but it’s also a money grab, and Valve is exploiting a lot of people in a way that’s not totally fair.”
“Valve is taking a larger share than it should for the service its providing. It’s exploiting a lot of small guys. For us big guys, we’re going to sell the units and it will be fine.”
The Gearbox CEO admitted that Steam will help the studio sell copies of its upcoming title, Borderlands.
“Steam helps,” he said. “As a guy in this industry though, I don’t trust Valve.”
You've got to be kidding me.
People are now complaining about the savior of the PC. some idiots have no effing clue how lucky they are.
After having first hand experience with Steam, it does seem they are now turning their backs on the people they first set out to save.
Care to elaborate, Scooter?
Always found steam to be bad. It got forced on while I was playing CS, at that point adding absolutely zero value while being a mandatory install. The system requirements got higher, the service was very buggy, disabled LAN play for a very long time ( don't know if that's resolved yet ). I still find it bad in a lot of ways even though a lot of issues have been resolved. I've heard of royalty rates around of 50 / 50, in the beginning with the excuse "it's just in the beginning, it will get better". The large reason for switching to digital distribution was to short cut the retailer and physical distributer chain to increase the profits of the developer, this hasn't really happened, instead steam sits in that position and grabs that share while making HUGE profits.
