What is Steam? Well, sure, the obvious answer is that it's an online store where you can buy and download digital games, but that doesn't explain why players are so thoroughly devoted to it above other platforms like the Epic Games Store. Apparently, Gabe Newell has a much broader vision for the platform. Steam is, really, an MMO.
That's according to former Valve writer Chet Faliszek, speaking in a YouTube video about Epic's latest updates to its own platform. Faliszek doesn't really see a clear "North Star" when it comes to the design of the Epic Game Store, and he believes that's a big part of what's holding the platform back.
"So what is Valve's North Star with Steam?" he asks. "Gabe's talked about this a bunch. It's an MMO. It's that simple. Think about Steam. There's a whole bunch of places for you to express yourself inside of there, and you can do that by leveling up. You level up your account. You get things for playing games."
Trading cards, profile page decorations, and the like are all tools for self-expression. "There's all of these elements that let you express who you are as a person as well as then MMO-ing the entire experience and leveling up," he says. "Then you have things that you can give to other people, and awards, and all of that."
Faliszek admits that Valve's community moderation leaves something to be desired, and "there's valid things that Steam should be doing to help monitor and control some of what's happening there." But those community features "give the player a place in that world," he argues.
"They give the player actual agency and import and power inside of that ecosystem, much like if you were playing an MMO and you're fighting monsters and you're pulling from dungeons or whatever. You can do all of that, but inside the game experience. So players aren't just consuming, they're also expressing themselves, but in very passive ways."
Meanwhile, Epic is happy to give users tools for self expression, but those come in the form of UEFN and broader Unreal Engine tools, which Faliszek argues require a level of effort that the vast majority of players will simply never engage with. Certainly, there's nothing on Epic to compare with the quick dopamine hit of selling a trading card for three cents on the Steam marketplace.
Faliszek was also very much not impressed by Epic boss Tim Sweeney's latest dig at Gabe Newell, or the company's bulletproof plan to outdo steam by vibe coding its launcher. These sorts of things, he argues, do nothing to sell the platform to players, nor does the promise of faster loading times when the platform has hardly any features to load in the first place. After all, it's not like long load times ever dissuaded an MMO fan from logging on.
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