Digital Rights Management was the beast under every gamer’s bed in the mid-2000s, an invisible bit of software baked into game discs that dictated and tracked player behavior under the guise of preventing piracy. DRM software, like SecuROM, limited the times a game could be downloaded and forced players to regularly connect to the internet for authentication checks, at a time when less than half of American adults had reliable broadband connections. DRM features soured the releases ofunplayable.
The widespread adoption of anti-piracy software marked an era in video games where players felt like they didn’t really own the products they were buying. And then, this practice became normal. Broadband saturation continued to climb, the market for physical media dissolved into pixelated dust and streaming entertainment media found its foothold. Today, Xbox, PlayStation, Nintendo, Epic Games and most major publishers have their own digital stores with proprietary DRM features.
Steam popularized the 70/30 revenue split, giving developers on the platform 70 percent of the money their games generate and pocketing the rest. Apple and Google copied this formula with their mobile app stores. When it debuted in 2018, the Epic Games Store shaped itsaround taking on Steam and dismantling its rev-share ratio, claiming it was exploitative and unfair, especially to indies.
Today, Steam is a self-sustained game-distributing machine with more than 100,000 titles and counting. Getting on Steam no longer equates instant success for any developer, but it’s a necessary aspect of most release plans.
Meanwhile, many of the writers who helped create Valve’s most iconic franchises left the studio around 2017, after years of inactivity. In 2018, Valve hired all 12 developers atSteam’s unwavering success has helped turn Valve into a senior resort community for computer science nerds, where game developers go to live out their final years surrounded by fantastic amenities, tinkering and unsupervised. It’s a lovely scenario, really. It’s just not particularly productive.in 2023.