On the other hand, Microsoft's new 20-30% cut doesn't sound like very low-margin distribution infrastructure either...
Does "low-margin" for software really make sense? These aren't physical goods that have a inherent value. The "cost" of any given piece of software is the price you are willing to pay the people building it.
MARGINS.
If Microsoft takes that away, they'll bail in the biggest possible way. Good luck getting Adobe to retail through your app store. They'll probably make a Linux port as a big fuck you to Ballmer.
He's clearly not just talking about the app store cutting into margins. Why else would OEMs exit the market if not because of usability issues/market collapse?
At least, in the case of Android, they can add value, or extra revenue streams. In the case of linux, the open nature, would provide a competitive edge.
Why would any OEM be interested in selling win8 devices? If microsoft is going the way of the console ( like apple and amazon are doing ), shouldnt microsoft be paying them instead of the other way around?
But he is allowed to be a bit upset: Steam is effectively not allowed on Metro.
And there was loyalty between Valve and Microsoft. In general, he dislikes the verticalisation in the market; how consumer devices will all be (media,game,app) consoles. But to see Microsoft make this move, just hurst more, when your company has invested so much in the windows ecosystem. And lets not forget that without Steam, pc gaming would have died completely 5 years ago.
Personally, i dont like it either. I think its anticompeteive in nature, and bad for innovation. Appearantly operating system vendors are becoming the new cable companies, charging for access to consumers.
But unless one of them (apple, google, microsoft, amazon) has a monopoly, its not illegal to operate in this manner.
Your sentence is like saying that without Internet Explorer, we would still be paying for internet browsers. It's praising Microsoft for what it did and mysteriously assuming that in absence of it, no one else would bring the cost of browsers down.
This is my nitpick with "what if X didn't exist" scenarios: people imply that nothing would fill the vacuum.
Another example I just made up: "If Linux didn't exist, we wouldn't have a free, open source OS". I'm pretty sure FreeBSD or something like that would grow like Linux instead. Not saying it would be better or worse, because, frankly, I don't know.
If anything he risks footing a lot of the effort to get developers onto Linux (see: Valve openly talking about working with GPU manufacturers to improve the quality of Linux drivers) only to have it benefit people that choose to distribute outside of Steam.
No, because it's DRM-less.
That said, Valve appears to be going for a play based on being a cross-platform app store (Windows, OS X, Linux). It's not obvious to me that they can add much value that way (after you've gone to the work to implement support for three platforms, submitting to three app stores is not a lot of overhead) but we'll see.
I see no reason to infer that Newell's comments are limited specifically to app platforms. I also wouldn't be surprised if there's more to this than just a Steam-for-Linux download; they could be working on something like the old Phantom project to really bridge the gap between console and PC, and take advantage of Windows 8's almost inevitable initial poor reception to gain marketshare.
