Over the course of this last week, I had noticed that Steam was reaching out to the indie community. They were helping out developers by giving them an established distribution system and stepping it up in offers (see: Machinarium on Steam). To my surprise, however, I read an interview from Maximum PC stating otherwise. According to the article, Randy Pitchford of Gearbox Software—the guys who are most recently doing Borderlands—believes that Valve are actually taking advantage of independent developers.

“It’s actually really, really dangerous for the rest of the industry to allow Valve to win,” he said after proclaiming that Valve’s conflict of interest proves that Steam should be its own business. Pitchford is the CEO of Gearbox Software, which rose to fame because of their work on the Half-Life expansion pack titled Half-Life: Opposing Force. When the interviewer says “but you’ve worked with them a lot!” Pitchford’s rebuttal is that while he “personally” trusts them, he knows many in the industry don’t.

I found this to be surprising news only because I felt that Steam was a great distribution service. But then again, much is not visible to us as gamers rather than developers. In reality, Microsoft’s XBOX Live Indie Games and Valve’s Steam serve as excellent services because they reach a lot of people. On the other hand, you can be sure that the developers will be getting less of a share for their games than they deserve.

He comments on Microsoft as well, saying “Microsoft has every single one of us running Windows, and it could solve this [distribution] problem in a second if done right. It’s not hard, but either the company doesn’t know how to do it, or it’s not willing to invest, or it’s got other priorities. Gamers can see the prioritization. Microsoft is focused on the console platform. For the time being, that’s nice, because some of us aren’t sure we want Microsoft to control [distribution].” That’s true too. If Microsoft did control distribution, its control would be vast. This monopolizes their role and could potentially destroy smaller services. Pitchford then jokingly goes on, “Frankly, at this point, I’d rather trust Best Buy and Wal-Mart.”

“The thing I love about the digital method is that I’m buying a credential. When I buy a credential, I can log in from any terminal and my content can follow me, but I don’t care who I buy it from. I’d rather buy it from someone whose only interest is serving me. I’m cool with it being a digital retailer, but I want that to be their only business. And then I’ll really trust them.” Obviously, the gentleman knows what he’s talking about. Valve is a developer that seeks to make money and even if it makes money off other developers’ games, it is money nonetheless. The CEO’s argument that perhaps Valve should give up Steam is not unfounded. Think about it: should a developer be in charge of other developers’ games? Worse even, should they be able to dictate the portion of the cut they receive? You’re welcome to post any thoughts you may have.

Source: Maximum PC