As I mentioned elsewhere, better to release a product that has the necessary features to start having an income and then add extra features vs releasing a product full of extra features at a much later date and have to troubleshoot everything at once.
Heck, how many Steam users actually care about cards, achievements, reviews and so on? To me it’s Steam that’s full of useless stuff that’s only there to keep people addicted to the platform and to suck money from whales, there’s a reason why they now have the list of suggestions to get you to add games to your wishlist, they can create a profile and adjust the front page to your taste so you spend more money! Super ethical isn’t it?
MVP in this market doesn’t mean “make an interface that can sell games” because plenty of those existed alongside Steam and they all died: Discord’s store, Direct2Play, etc… Even now many publishers who left Steam are coming back because the shift to their own launchers went very poorly. Why? Because no one wants to have 6+ launchers.
You need to either be more than just a storefront and launcher, or offer something Steam doesn’t. GoG did the second by selling old games Steam just doesn’t have. To do the first, you’d have to build an integration with other services… like GoG Galaxy. Huh imagine that, Steam’s only competition that has lasted is actually trying to do more than just be a store.
Steam pretty much invented online gaming retail.
Any competitor can and should learn from that instead of starting over from scratch.
As I mentioned elsewhere, better to release a product that has the necessary features to start having an income and then add extra features vs releasing a product full of extra features at a much later date and have to troubleshoot everything at once.
Heck, how many Steam users actually care about cards, achievements, reviews and so on? To me it’s Steam that’s full of useless stuff that’s only there to keep people addicted to the platform and to suck money from whales, there’s a reason why they now have the list of suggestions to get you to add games to your wishlist, they can create a profile and adjust the front page to your taste so you spend more money! Super ethical isn’t it?
MVP in this market doesn’t mean “make an interface that can sell games” because plenty of those existed alongside Steam and they all died: Discord’s store, Direct2Play, etc… Even now many publishers who left Steam are coming back because the shift to their own launchers went very poorly. Why? Because no one wants to have 6+ launchers.
You need to either be more than just a storefront and launcher, or offer something Steam doesn’t. GoG did the second by selling old games Steam just doesn’t have. To do the first, you’d have to build an integration with other services… like GoG Galaxy. Huh imagine that, Steam’s only competition that has lasted is actually trying to do more than just be a store.