<story><title>A golden age of consumer convenience is passing</title><url>https://www.ft.com/content/a66bc898-1fb5-429e-a83a-4077ff046840</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>TheAceOfHearts</author><text>Media embedded advertising has already been a thing for years, but companies hate leaving money on the table so they cannot resist the temptation of showing more ads.&lt;p&gt;I wonder why it is that Steam hasn&amp;#x27;t had any issues remaining such a successful video game platform, while other forms of media have struggled to keep up.&lt;p&gt;You&amp;#x27;re competing with piracy, but you throw ads in my face. I can download any show or movie I want and have it playing in minutes without having to deal with multi platform bullshit. That&amp;#x27;s real convenience. Oh, and the show or movie never gets taken away because some execs decided to be greedy.&lt;p&gt;Although at this point I&amp;#x27;m so fed up with most modern media that I&amp;#x27;ve lost any interest to watch it, even if it&amp;#x27;s free and in a convenient format. Most stuff doesn&amp;#x27;t even seem interesting enough to pirate.&lt;p&gt;The age of mindless consumption is nearing an end. I&amp;#x27;m hopeful that the future will be a mix of locally crafted consumption balanced with a healthy mix of content creation.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>blibble</author><text>&amp;gt; I wonder why it is that Steam hasn&amp;#x27;t had any issues remaining such a successful video game platform, while other forms of media have struggled to keep up.&lt;p&gt;it&amp;#x27;s privately owned&lt;p&gt;and by someone that loves video games that was already wealthy when he founded the company</text></comment>
<story><title>A golden age of consumer convenience is passing</title><url>https://www.ft.com/content/a66bc898-1fb5-429e-a83a-4077ff046840</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>TheAceOfHearts</author><text>Media embedded advertising has already been a thing for years, but companies hate leaving money on the table so they cannot resist the temptation of showing more ads.&lt;p&gt;I wonder why it is that Steam hasn&amp;#x27;t had any issues remaining such a successful video game platform, while other forms of media have struggled to keep up.&lt;p&gt;You&amp;#x27;re competing with piracy, but you throw ads in my face. I can download any show or movie I want and have it playing in minutes without having to deal with multi platform bullshit. That&amp;#x27;s real convenience. Oh, and the show or movie never gets taken away because some execs decided to be greedy.&lt;p&gt;Although at this point I&amp;#x27;m so fed up with most modern media that I&amp;#x27;ve lost any interest to watch it, even if it&amp;#x27;s free and in a convenient format. Most stuff doesn&amp;#x27;t even seem interesting enough to pirate.&lt;p&gt;The age of mindless consumption is nearing an end. I&amp;#x27;m hopeful that the future will be a mix of locally crafted consumption balanced with a healthy mix of content creation.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>AstralStorm</author><text>Steam is successful because its advertising is rather low key, showing a popup with offers, and providing a search, directory plus suggestions. Their gain is from consumer analytics too. (They also take a cut for using their platform from the game developers or publishers.&lt;p&gt;It also provides some added value like achievements, basic social media in forms of forums and chat, some (somewhat broken at times) controller handling, some bug reporting, cloud save handling, voice communication handling, even some space to host game related content.
On the whole, more value added than taken by paltry ads. The bigger value minus is the &amp;quot;Steam DRM&amp;quot; - requirement for an online connection to use the downloaded application.
And providence help you if you post inflammatory comments under an account that owns game access licenses. You will lose that.&lt;p&gt;The other ones don&amp;#x27;t do it quite as effectively, esp. the suggestions part. Being a game library and download service is not what makes Steam in particular good, though it is an essential part.</text></comment>