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…?
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.