Did you know that Steam wasn’t just for games? For the past few years you’ve also been able to watch short films and documentaries on the service, but since you probably didn’t know that and nobody watched them, Valve is getting rid of the Video section in the store.
I share this not for the news itself, which is meaningless in the grand scheme of things, but for the wording of Valve’s announcement, which is refreshingly brutal in an era of couched words and vague statements:
For the past few years, we have worked on expanding Steam beyond games and software by building a video platform that supports paid and free video content. In reviewing what Steam users actually watch, it became clear we should focus our effort on offering content that is either directly related to gaming or, is accessory content for games or software sold on Steam.
“We tried a thing, nobody cared, ah well”.
Gaming-related films will still be made available via the game’s actual store page, while “non-gaming videos will be retired and will no longer be available for purchase”, though any you might have picked up previously will still be available to re-download.
Comments
9 responses to “Nobody Watched Movies On Steam, So The Video Section Is Going Away”
Maybe don’t half ass it next time Valve?
I’ve picked up the odd cult classic movie that’s been hard to find elsewhere on Steam
It’s almost like there wasn’t any effort made to advertise. I mean a splash screen advertising a new film on startup like they do games might have helped them and yet…
Or a separate easy to find section on their home page…. or any form of advertisement on any new movies that went up there… or an actual movie library? I honestly don’t know what they had available… but if they put any level of effort or marketing behind it, it could have worked.
Wait, what? That can’t be right. What do you mean people didn’t want to spend DVD box prices on film school student projects that had to be streamed through Steam’s video client that performs worse than windows media player with even fewer features?
That makes no sense at all! This is an unforseeable surprise.
END SARCASM
Steam took every single possible measure by which you could judge a video disribution platform and chose the worst possible possible way to do it. From tech to advertising/sharing the platform with games, to library to price, everything they did was fucking awful.
@camm mentioned half-assing it, but that’s being entirely too generous in my opinion. Valve didn’t even bother wiping their ass on this.
The only good thing to come out of Steam’s video offering was Wakfu, and a year later that turned up on fucking Netflix.
That and for some reason Crunchyroll started releasing their content on it as well.
That’s cool. I can still buy movies and anime at EBGames… oh wait…
Although I have actually noticed the local EB sometimes has movies on the shelf. I don’t know if they’re the long forgotten remnants of ages past or whether they actually do still sell movies for some reason…
steam had movies? i honestly had no idea.
If they used the same technology they use for game trailers in the client, then we’ve missed out on nothing I guess.