Steam Community Won’t Charge You for Features

Anyone who has had the pleasure of playing games through Steam certainly knows what a nice setup Steam Community is. It covers all the basics and gives you some nice features like being able to have groups to spam your site/make humorous observations/whatever else. It’s so nice, that at this point I don’t think anyone could argue that GFW Live – Microsoft’s version of Xbox Live for computers, basically – is superior to Steam Community. And while GFW Live doesn’t charge you to play online, it does have a Gold level that gives extra benefits to subscribers. Valve, on the other hand, has no intention of charging for Steam Community.

“We will not charge for The Steam Community and its features. Never even entered our mind. Part of it is to address the fact that when folks first bought Half-Life 2, Steam didn’t offer many reasons to stick around. It didn’t do enough for customers, and it didn’t justify itself. So I suppose we’re paying off a debt now,” said Valve Project Manager/Engineer Erik Johnson.

Johnson doesn’t think GFW Live has had much of an effect on Steam Community.

“Honestly, I don’t think it’s influenced us a whole lot. We knew nothing about Games for Windows when we did the original design work on The Steam Community. We’re pretty capable of shipping things as late as possible.”

It’s becoming a saturated market between Xfire, Steam Community and GFW Live. Whereas competition between games and game consoles is generally a good thing, the positives with this are negated by the fact that certain games will only support Steam or only support Live. It’s going to be interesting to see how Microsoft moves forward with GFW Live now that it has even more competition in Steam Community.