They cost money to make, but the only one of those that costs them a significant chunk to maintain is cloud saves. As far as I can tell their streaming solution is strictly peer-to-peer, in the vein of Moonlight or Parsec.
And all of those are definitely profitable for Steam via… well, look at this thread. Their technological advantage on the client feature set is worth billions to them. They are in the process of spinning it off into a separate hardware platform and OS. That’s Microsoft money they stand to make, on top of all the Microsoft money they are already making.
I mean, those are cool, don’t get me wrong, they have by far the best feature set in the PC market, and arguably in all of gaming… but it’s not a gift, it’s either feature parity with competitors or investment in their market position.
They cost money to make, but the only one of those that costs them a significant chunk to maintain is cloud saves. As far as I can tell their streaming solution is strictly peer-to-peer, in the vein of Moonlight or Parsec.
And all of those are definitely profitable for Steam via… well, look at this thread. Their technological advantage on the client feature set is worth billions to them. They are in the process of spinning it off into a separate hardware platform and OS. That’s Microsoft money they stand to make, on top of all the Microsoft money they are already making.
I mean, those are cool, don’t get me wrong, they have by far the best feature set in the PC market, and arguably in all of gaming… but it’s not a gift, it’s either feature parity with competitors or investment in their market position.