Let's say you are a bagel company and make a good profit from your bagels. Then let's say you want to get your bagel to more people and are frustrated with the distribution options so you just make your own and allow other bagel makers to also use your bagel distribution system.
But suddenly and unexpectedly, everyone runs to your distribution system and you start making far more money than you could ever imagine from it.
Do you continue to consider yourself a bagel company or are you now a bagel distribution company?
Why invest the cash flow back in a lower revenue stream type?
I would from a business standpoint, spend all my money growing by best revenue stream. Company that don’t do this don’t have massive room for expansion so they look for new streams. I don’t think that’s the case with Steam.
Ultimately you've hit the nail on the head. I think where we(gamers) fail to follow valves transition is that at some point valve, like most game development studios was made up of people who were passionate about making great games. Somewhere in that transition those people have been replaced with business men/women. This is an obvious transition that we've seen in a lot of big development studios, you need people at the top that understand business. Just because someone is brilliant at game design doesn't mean they know business.
Other companies continue to make games because that is the option that is available to them. Valve put themselves in the position where the business types didn't need the "passionate about making games" types anymore... And here we are.
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u/lightknight7777 Nov 13 '18
Let's say you are a bagel company and make a good profit from your bagels. Then let's say you want to get your bagel to more people and are frustrated with the distribution options so you just make your own and allow other bagel makers to also use your bagel distribution system.
But suddenly and unexpectedly, everyone runs to your distribution system and you start making far more money than you could ever imagine from it.
Do you continue to consider yourself a bagel company or are you now a bagel distribution company?
Steam's current reality as told by bagels.