An Ubisoft insider alleges that the company is not happy with Valve and Steam for revealing concurrent player counts for its various games including Star Wars Outlaws.Fandom Pulse is a reader-supported publication.
Hm. I wonder who is “unhappy”, exactly. The industry is super reliant on Steam data across the board, I can’t imagine Ubi’s own people would love to lose the ability to track competitors, even if they also buy estimates from other sources.
I can see how they’d be annoyed that their more console-focused games and games that have a chunk of players on non-Steam platforms, like Outlaws look worse when the only info people see is from Steam. I don’t know that the answer is to get Valve to close API access as a matter of policy. I personally would love to get similar info from Sony or Epic, which I bet would make Ubi look at least a bit better right now.
Of course, from Valve’s perspective there is no downside here. Right now I bet they have a rep telling Ubi “hey, you want to look good for investors? Prioritize Steam sales to look better on public data”, which is exactly the kind of mildly abusive crowdsourcing techbro stuff Valve loves to do.
I mean, is “do better if you want a better public image” really that “tech bro” an answer to this problem? It feels like you’re putting “don’t fuck over the customer” into the “bad” category here…
I think you’re misrepresenting the point. Valve’s hypothetical point, which would be “do DISPROPORTIONATELY better IN MY PLATFORM if you want a better public image”, but also my point. Valve has a looong history of moving key parts of their platform to either automated or crowdsourced solutions, with very mixed results. The greenlight process, the review process, the curator system, the controller mapping library… The techbro approach isn’t about “don’t fuck over the customer”, it’s about “use gig economy processes to run the service and its features with a skeleton crew”.
That’s a thing. You can like their approach to customer support practices and still acknowledge that is a trend.
Hm. I wonder who is “unhappy”, exactly. The industry is super reliant on Steam data across the board, I can’t imagine Ubi’s own people would love to lose the ability to track competitors, even if they also buy estimates from other sources.
I can see how they’d be annoyed that their more console-focused games and games that have a chunk of players on non-Steam platforms, like Outlaws look worse when the only info people see is from Steam. I don’t know that the answer is to get Valve to close API access as a matter of policy. I personally would love to get similar info from Sony or Epic, which I bet would make Ubi look at least a bit better right now.
Of course, from Valve’s perspective there is no downside here. Right now I bet they have a rep telling Ubi “hey, you want to look good for investors? Prioritize Steam sales to look better on public data”, which is exactly the kind of mildly abusive crowdsourcing techbro stuff Valve loves to do.
I mean, is “do better if you want a better public image” really that “tech bro” an answer to this problem? It feels like you’re putting “don’t fuck over the customer” into the “bad” category here…
I think you’re misrepresenting the point. Valve’s hypothetical point, which would be “do DISPROPORTIONATELY better IN MY PLATFORM if you want a better public image”, but also my point. Valve has a looong history of moving key parts of their platform to either automated or crowdsourced solutions, with very mixed results. The greenlight process, the review process, the curator system, the controller mapping library… The techbro approach isn’t about “don’t fuck over the customer”, it’s about “use gig economy processes to run the service and its features with a skeleton crew”.
That’s a thing. You can like their approach to customer support practices and still acknowledge that is a trend.