I feel like you could have said the same about google or facebook. They made a dominant early platform and could have comfortably lived off that success?
There are a bunch of companies trying to compete with valve. They are not behind any more of a moat than anyone else.
> There are a bunch of companies trying to compete with valve.
What strikes me as a bit odd with relation to specifically competitors to the Valve client (essentially a game library and store rolled together), the competitors that come to mind are...
* EA/Origin
* Epic
* Ubisoft
EA and Ubisoft are only selling games they publish, IIRC. Epic sells games from other publishers, but always gives Fortnite preferential treatment (and has the Unreal Editor in its own tab in the client, or did last I paid attention).
Valve is still by a large margin the only one that comes to mind that feels as close to a neutral store/library as you can find (even when they released Artifact and Alyx, neither of those were permanently pinned to the top like Fortnite is in the Epic store). Of course, developers can still buy preferential treatment, but it at least feels like you're competing with other developers and not "the house".
I'm not making an argument that Valve's being anti-competitive here, just it's surprising to me how hard these competitors -aren't- trying to be a real competitor. I expect due to internal pressures from their respective game publishing branches.
Ah, of course, I knew I was forgetting one. They did start that way although they've branched out since then. For example they sell Everspace 2, which is a much newer game.
They actually might be my favorite since all the games they sell are DRM-free. You can download the installer of every one of their games locally and they'll run "forever" without any dependency on GOG or their Galaxy library app (unlike Steam). Though their selection is more limited since IIRC they manually review every game they list.
However, even they tend to favor their "in-house" games (they're a sibling company of CDPR which developed the Witcher games and Cyberpunk 2077 and you'll frequently see those featured prominently there). Not as bad as Epic, though. More in the style of how Steam advertised Half Life 2 and Portal in the early days of Steam.
I'd dare to say that Google is very bad at doing products. They tried so many times and almost always failed, the list of products killed by Google is huge, They really succeeded in search, maps and gmail; all of these products are engineering-first products, created in the early days.
One might argue that YouTube and Android should go in that list, but I disagree.
YouTube was acquired and it never managed to become something really big (it failed to compete with Netflix for video streaming, with Spotify for music and with TikTok for social network).
Android also, was acquired and without a pletora of hardware vendor supporting it, it would have failed too (I'd say that Android without Samsung is nothing -- of course, it's big on embedded things, like cars or TVs, but it's not a world-wide product like gmail).
And likewise it is failing in AI, against OpenAI, which looks like another engineering-first product.
It's not that it's not big. It's that it's not as big as it could be. It's not gmail-big or maps-big, at least for me. It is outclassed by many other, in their respective niches (video streaming, music, and social networking), and despite the huge efforts, Google never managed to turn it into a subscription-based service.
It's not that it's not big, it's that it is not on the same level than maps or gmail, IMO.
Atleast according to average daily watch time reported in 2019, Netflix was at 164 million hours and YouTube was at 1 billion. I doubt that ratio has changed much since then
How do you think YouTube failed? If you tried to get someone to name a search engine that's not Google, they could maybe think of Bing or DuckDuckGo or something. If you tried to get someone to name a email service that's not Gmail, they could maybe say Outlook or Yahoo if they're older. But try to get someone to name a user-generated video platform that's not YouTube? YouTube has comparable revenue to Netflix. And Netflix has direct competitors -- such as Hulu, Amazon Prime Video, Disney+ to name a few that are pretty big on their own right.
I don't know about that, they made some good products, or invested in ones that already existed.
I don't consider creating a product, and then retiring a product after many years a failure myself. Its more like a nuanced then, some producdts don't change with the times, and others dont work.
I did watch that TV series on how some people at google did some unethical things to incorporate the maps idea from a German company. Not sure how true that is, but if it is, then google is just like any other corrupt establishment, willing to do shady things at the expense of the original inventors.
I strongly believe that Google Video would have been killed by Google long ago. They bought YouTube because they couldn't create it themselves. And they never managed to turn that into a real product, IMO.
Did Google or Facebook do anything that is not "living comfortably off early success"? AFAIK they had a very poor track record in monetizing anything they built in the last ten years or so.
I think that's their point. If Google or Facebook had stayed with a Valve-sized team and stuck to their knitting, would they really have made any less money?
Would this preclude buying Instagram? That was considered expensive at the time, but I think was a great buy for them and is a significant part of keeping Facebook competitive now and for the next half-decade.
Facebook marketplace and groups are other successful (IMO) sub-products that might not get built if "stick to your knitting" was the mantra.
both had slump but I think Facebook has been much better shape after Zuck did layoffs and pivoted away from metaverse. Llama and Meta Smart Glasses both feel like groundbreaking products.
There are a bunch of companies trying to compete with valve. They are not behind any more of a moat than anyone else.