Steam revenue estimated 2024: $10.8B
Google Play Store gaming revenue 2024: ~$31B
Why doesn’t Valve want a part of that? I mean they already have an Android app. Several, actually. I realize there’s some amount of investment but surely the payoff is worth it, and they have the necessary funds and skills? I mean if F-Droid can do it with nothing but volunteers and grants…?
Certainly plenty of games won’t lend themselves well to the mobile experience but also plenty of them do.
From a personal perspective: I don’t really care a whole lot for mobile games but I do like Balatro and want to play it on my phone, but if I want to do that I have to buy another license, which I can’t even do because I don’t run Google Play Services.
Epic got in on this already. Where’s Valve?
Edit: my reflections on this conversation:
Valve could distribute their own app like Epic but they’d also probably have to remove it from the Play Store because now a cross-platform game would give them an Android version, thus breaking Google’s ToS. So would doing such a thing outweigh lost sales from the Google version, and would it impact customer satisfaction? I wonder how many people are actually purchasing PC games in the Steam Android app…?
Valve didn’t expand Steam into Linux to gain market share in a new market, Valve did it because it is a hedge in case Windows becomes toxic to Steam. There is now a fallback position if Steam is locked out of Windows, and I expect Valve to continue to build in this position.
As for Android, there isn’t a successful second app store that isn’t tied to hardware; even Amazon quit Android. I don’t think Valve sees Android expansion as commercialy viable.
(A few days ago I skimmed a super cool post about Steam’s relationship with Linux that says what you’re saying and now I want to give it a thorough read but I can’t find it
. If anyone remembers and has a link to it I’d be super happy 
)
Do you mean this article? https://thelibre.news/on-the-history-of-valve-and-linux/
Yes yes that’s it! I’m happy now ~ thanks!
F-Droid?
F-Droid’s market share is a rounding error compared to Google’s. Just because another app store exists doesn’t mean there is significant competition between app stores.
That’s not what you said though. You said there is no successful second app store and that’s demonstrably untrue. Just because it isn’t widely used doesn’t mean it can’t be.
For a company like Valve, they are going to need greater adoption than what F-Droid has to be viable.
And I didn’t say that a successful app store was impossible, just improbable enough that it doesn’t justify investing in Android and that previous failures show how hard this is. Valve is still a for profit company and will make decisions to make money.
They really don’t. Valve is a private company and doesn’t need all of the money. Just 30%
An android app store is going to cost more than $0 to make.
That’s also not what they said. They said there’s no successful second app store that isn’t tied to hardware, which is true. F-Droid exists, but by no metric would it be considered seriously by anyone as a successful competitor to Google. And if there is somebody who thinks that, then you should give me their number, I have this investment idea that is guaranteed to give double or even triple returns, all I need is a seed investment of, say, $20k.
So, it’s not successful, but it could be. So they were in fact correct that it’s not successful.
I use fdroid, so I know exactly how badly administered it is compared to Play. There are apps that haven’t gotten updated in months or years, despite the app on Play or Github being much newer. There are typo-squatting apps, and apps uploaded by people who do not own or manage those programs. It’s a wild west experience, and the average android phone user isn’t going to know enough to sort the wheat from the chaff.
Valve would be better off doing their own android offshoot OS.
…I didn’t say anything about Linux?
That doesn’t mean there couldn’t be.
Well everything I’ve read about Amazon indicates that it was atrocious for everyone so that’s unsurprising.
Bro why are you being so argumentative? Person gave you a well thought out response, wasn’t even a tone to him but you fire back like he just insulted a core belief
What are you talking about? Do you expect me to just reply to everyone who provides a response “Yes, you’re correct” and move on? Am I not allowed to participate in the discussion I started?
If that is what you’re intending then it is not coming off that way.
I’m sorry you feel that way, I don’t know what to do about that.