A growing number of the biggest PC games are making use of Valve’s SteamWorks tools and that doesn’t seem to bond well with traditional game retailers who don’t want to promote their competitor’s services.
“If we have a digital service, then I don’t want to start selling a rival in-store,” the digital boss at one of the biggest UK games retailers told MCV-UK. “Publishers are creating a monster and are telling suppliers to stop using Steam in their games.”
The head of sales at a big-name digital service provider agreed: “At the moment the big digital distributors need to stock games with Steam. But the power resides with traditional retailers; they can refuse to stock these titles. Publishers are hesitant, but retail must put pressure on them.”
Industry experts estimate that Steam controls more than 80% of the online games distribution market.
griff713
I made the mistake of buying COD Black ops, before I realized Steam was part of it… now I can’t play the game without Steam. I paid $50 for a fancy paperweight. I don’t need some other company putting software I DIDN’T want on my system so I can play a game I PURCHASED! If they want to start giving away memory and new CPU’s so that their mem/cpu hogging software in no way affects me, fine…. but I don’t see them lining up to do so. Steam is another way to sell hardware, that’s all.