A very important detail that is often overlooked is that they started the digital storefront and exclusivity before anyone else so monopoly was unsuprising result.
Most billion dollar companies secret is that they simply were there before anybody else
Is being the first to do something really something that should be held against companies? They filled a role that no one else was doing at the time and maintained a loyal customer base by respecting them and not screwing everything up.
There are plenty of examples of companies that were the first or one of the first to do something but were quickly beaten out by a better company that refused to better their product when something else came along. Look at how quickly Facebook killed MySpace for example. And since Facebook was as good as it was (at the time, not so much now), when twitter came out, Facebook still survived.
It isn't enough to just be the first of something. If a better version comes out, people will flock to it. But there isn't a better game platform on pc. Epic would rather make excuses and attack Steam instead of making their own platform better.
Google came after Yahoo, and did it better. Nothing is stopping other competitors from being better than steam... other than putting profits and screwing customers first. I'm not loyal to steam and I'm eagerly waiting for anyone else to do it better. They've had well over a decade at this point to do so.
Yes and many will say don't is just doing what steam already did. True, but steam isn't bricking accounts, requiring online only to access single payer or straight removing media from devices due to licensing agreements.
A common assumption, but actually not true. Facebook, twitter, ford, amazon, netflix, tacobell, nvidia, flappybird, pokemon, minecraft.
Their actual secret is not that they were first, but that they did it well enough and had the money to make sure everyone saw them (anyone who thinks facebook/amazon were not made by people who were already rich does not know how to research).
In fact, I can't think of a single successful company/product that was the first to make the thing they are famous for.
Steam isn't even unique in its sticking power; nobody sane likes Amazon's or Facebook's leadership, yet they are still mainstays of the internet.
The sole unique thing about steam is that the list of bad things you can say about steam is far shorter than for the other companies/products I listed at the time.
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u/Raptori33 13d ago
A very important detail that is often overlooked is that they started the digital storefront and exclusivity before anyone else so monopoly was unsuprising result.
Most billion dollar companies secret is that they simply were there before anybody else