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Steam’s most successful venture yet, Steamworks, has helped Steam get an increasingly firmer hold on the market. In my opinion, Steamworks is 90% copy protection, 10% game-related features. I know that publishers are looking at Steamworks as a replacement to SecuROM for protecting games.The problem is that Steamworks requires the user to have a Steam account and Steam installed to use it – even if you buy it at retail or through a third party like Direct2Drive. I think that’s the basic strategy for Steamworks -- give developers a bunch of “free” features that they used to have to pay for (copy protection, DRM, GameSpy type stuff) with the only catch is that the user has to become a Steam user and have Steam installed. As a result, something like Dawn of War 2, for instance, won’t be on Impulse. Even with the case of Steamworks, competition has helped here too though, since Stardock is producing Impulse Reactor to compete with Steamworks. Impulse Reactor doesn’t require Impulse (the client) to even be installed to work.
If a company so chooses to in the future, can they remove the need of Steam from their game themselves so you can run their game without it?Or do they have to ask Valve for permission to do so?
Consumers are largely unaware of what happens behind the scenes and how businesses can create dominant positions that make them difficult to compete with.For example, Steamworks is being adopted almost exclusively for the DRM features in it. SecuROM got hammered due to the response to it in Spore and such and publishers started looking for alternatives and Steamworks exists and is proven technology.The gotcha is that Steamworks requires the game to bundle the Steam client and for the user to become a Steam user. And multiple major publishers, right now, are in the process of integrating Steamworks into their game, often without realizing that other publishers are doing that too at the same time.Publishers could quickly create a self-perpetuating market dominance for Steam by "standardizing" on Steamworks. Because pretty soon, if the major publishers are turning all their customers into Steam users, then you have a situation where Steam could have 20X as many users as #2 and at that point, they have such a commandling lead that it would be extremely difficult to provide a viable competitor because the publishers aren't going to bother dealing with partners that only have a tiny % of the market. In that scenario, users wouldn't even have the choice of using Steam or not. They would have to use Steam if they wanted to play games from a lot of the major players.And imagine the scenario then if one of the major publishers suddenly acquires Valve. In one fell swoop one publisher would have all the customer accounts of all the other publishers. Over the next few months, watch carefully on new game releases.Stardock's goal with Impulse isn't to "beat" Steam. But rather, to ensure there's a viable alternative to Steam. I don't think it's in anyone's interest that any entity become dominant in such an emerging market.I may love my iPod Touch but I'm sure glad Zune exists. Because I would hate to see a situation where songs were only available to purchase on iTunes.Impulse has a lot of catching up to do in terms of features to be a viable competitor to Steam in the games arena (in the non-games area, it obviously has a tremendous advantage). But that will come in time.
