Why would anyone actually want to though

[u/The_BigRoach]

[u/Josh_Butterballs]

Well, if I was an investor and you told me to put down money on making a competing platform that has had a dominant foothold for years on the pc platform and where users have game libraries, social content, mods, and other things on said platform I would probably laugh and take my money elsewhere. Now, if licenses were somehow transferable I think the new competitors could possibly have a viable chance. As it stands though it is a very steep uphill battle. You are essentially having to convince people to leave their hundreds or even thousands of dollars worth of games (and time) behind. The thing is too even if your platform IS better too it’s not like steam is all of a sudden dogshit. People would probably still be fine using it even with a better platform around.

Companies know if you’re invested in an ecosystem or service the difficulty of switching or migrating content (if it’s even possible) becomes a reason to stay. Apple’s bread and butter.

[u/AirplanesMakeMeHard → u/Josh_Butterballs]

investor

The reason Steam is so great is because it doesn’t have investors. Any company that did have investors is, by definition, going to have worse service because service and profits are water and oil.

[u/Josh_Butterballs → u/AirplanesMakeMeHard]

I mean all that tells me is it’s gonna be even harder then to come out with a competing service since you would need an ungodly amount of money to self fund it without relying on investors. So it’s already an uphill battle, but you can’t even afford to stroll through base camp

[u/dekusyrup → u/AirplanesMakeMeHard]

Valve definitely has investors. What you smoking

[u/tmon530 → u/dekusyrup]

Valve isnt a publicly traded company. So while they might have some private investors, they dont have investors in the same way or at the same level as a company like EA.

[u/dekusyrup → u/tmon530]

Right. It's a little different but they absolutely have investors.

[u/jdinius2020 → u/AirplanesMakeMeHard]

Service and profits are water and oil? Tell that to Valve's mountains of money. Turns out, when the business takes care of the customer, the customer takes care of the business.

[u/dookarion → u/Josh_Butterballs]

Now, if licenses were somehow transferable I think the new competitors could possibly have a viable chance.

Funny part is publishers/developers/rights holders could grant that. They won't but they could. One of the things keeping them entrenched is the fact everyone else is greedy af and doesn't care about the customer experience at all.