Well wipe my ass backwards and call me biscuit; I have been informed today.

No publicly traded company can compete with a well run private company. Infinitely growing profits breaks everything. Never take a company public if you can help it. It may even be preferable to shutter it if that is the only other option. Having stupid amounts of money is cool and all, but it does nothing useful. Money is only a tool if you actually use it... a golden hammer sitting on a shelf does no one any good.

I mean, they didn’t try making a good game store.

Also a company that isn't primarily a gaming company isn't going to overtake them.

GOG codes are the absolute best.

Yeah even apple is talking about potentially introducing ads into maps when their whole positioning of premium price has meant premium product and experience. But the pressure of continual stock increases means company has to keep chasing exponential growth as opposed to being content with sustainable growth.

They barely tried at all

Yeah I found that out too and have been cashing in

Steam? Set your sights lower. Maybe try to beat GOG or the EA launcher.

Steam will stay great so long as they stay a private company. It's the enshitification of going public and appeasing boardmembers and shareholders that ruin companies like Valve. I hope GabeN chooses a great successor when he decides to step down. Hoping for another 27 years of awesome.

No book store could ever take on a retail store....

You realize that the cut they're taking ends up being used to pay for a yacht collection, right? They don't need board members and shareholders to enrich the few at the expense of the many and to take anti diversity decisions...

Which means that's an area where they could've tried to set themselves apart from Steam.

Prime is better than Netflix imo. As is Disney Plus.

Yes they are now but it took a very long time to get there. And prime gets subscribers by default so to, well, prime . Netflix still has over 300m. I’m not even a sub, I cancelled a while back and only have Disney. What I was trying to say is, like steam, there was originally one platform in Netflix. Everyone was on it and it was a good time. Then, like steam, a lot of publishers left steam/Netflix and took their content in favour of their own platforms. And then years later due to costs and lower numbers than needed, ended up making their content not exclusive.

Prime was tragic for years with terrible interface and content. It’s only recently in the last year or so that it got to a decent level. Disneys content is very good these days, but their interface could still do with some work. I’m only a subscriber of Disney as their content matches my interests. I despise Amazon so only get a free trial or pay for a month when something like Reacher is on. Netflix own content no longer interests me especially after cancelling half the things I like. I feel like everyone is missing the point here.

Those are terms set by the games publishers, Steam and other platforms pass them on to the customer. The only platform big enough to strongarm publishers to not do that is Steam, but it would definitely make some publishers pull out of Steam completely.

Every single Amazon product is a half-arsed mess off things that barely function. They're basically just a delivery company that charges a percentage of the package value now.

Their Luna product seems to be different to Steam. It's a streaming platform like Playstation Now or the Google Stadia one that got shut down. The other games that they've got on there primarily seem to be DRM-free GOG codes, mixed with some for the Epic store. Maybe they meant they were taking on Steam by boosting their competitors?

Again, doesn't sound similar to me. There are plenty of exclusives both on the streaming and the videogames world. But the history on steam doesn't follow Netflix's history at all. I think the problem is equating a public trade, stockholders driven service that is entirely in the gutter of service quality and shitty corporate behavior. With a private company that has a mostly solid ethic track record (with few exceptions) that offers unrivaled added value. Netflix already lost the streaming wars. Max exclusives will never go to Netflix, Disney would rather feed children to the pigs than share their IPs. While devs already negotiate time windows to end the exclusivity deals with Epic right out of the gate. Publishers will foam at the mouth about exclusivity just to release steam versions two years later. It's a massively different situation to Netflix.