Edge-Online did a 6 page article heralding The Age of Steam which got picked up everywhere.  I responded with Why ‘The Age of Steam’ may not last.

Some in the media turned it into a Steam vs. Impulse argument. But it’s not.  It’s not even a Steam vs. Anything argument.

The issue is that at this stage in PC gaming, digital distribution is just beginning. By Valve’s own statistics, only around half a million or so users are using Steam to play a game each day – half of whom are playing Counterstrike.

In other words, no one including Steam has remotely reached critical mass.

Proclaiming Steam as the winner in digital distribution at this stage would have been like proclaiming Friendster as the winner in social networking. That would seem quaint now in the “age of Facebook”.

I’ve seen it argued that the above analogy doesn’t work because when you buy your games with Steam, it’s harder to switch because you become invested in their platform.  They say a better argument would be iTunes and its dominance.

The problem with the iTunes analogy is that iTunes wasn’t first. It wasn’t even close to being first. If we’re going to use digital music as our analogy then we should think about protected .WMA files which came out long before iTunes did. Early adopters bought their music from BuyMusic.com and other services that sold protected .WMA files.  They were similarly invested. But it didn’t matter because there weren’t enough of them to affect where the market ultimately went.

iTunes came out much later. It didn’t need anyone to convert over from BuyMusic to become dominant because it captured the millions and millions of new users who were just getting into digital music. PC game digital distribution is presently at that .WMA level where it’s just starting out.

Nobody knows what the future will bring. Who knows, maybe Blizzard will come out with an all-encompassing digital distribution service and absolutely crush everyone. Or something completely different might happen.

What I do know is that when all these digital services combined are getting less than a million people actually using them to play games per day, that we’re not even remotely close to being in an “age” of anything.