Steam Should Sell Apps on Android

[ラチェットマイルズ]

I would really think Steam could benefit at least a little if you made an app store of sorts for Android. What I mean is, there are games that are on both PC and Android. What if you allow developers to sell games for Android through a Steam app? This could be beneficial because there's an increasing interest in mobile gaming, and phones are becoming increasingly capable of light gaming. Some developers may not be interested in making games on Android having to pay a separate fee to publish on the Play Store, so you could help cut the middle man.

Here's an example of how this could work.
GRID is on the Play Store and on Steam, so I know it can be played on both platforms. What if I bought GRID on Steam, then downloaded the Steam store for Android? theoretically, if the developer supports it, I can carry over my save data from PC to continue on my phone without streaming. When I get home, I can continue from where I left off on my phone while out. This could also allow for carrying over potential DLC and such as well.

[cinedine]

Originally posted by Ratchet Miles:

Originally posted by Crashed:

Also the developer tools are available for free with no registration for Android.

Yes! And because games -can- be made for Android straight from Unity and Unreal, there's some potential to encourage developers to -maybe- shuffle around some code and make some optimizations for games to be ported to Android.

Problem is that it isn't as easy for every game.
It's not just toggling a switch and compile for platform X. You need to adapt for mobile quite a lot. New UI and control scheme, different balancing, network architecture, and different graphical fidelity. And not every game uses Unreal and Unity. Big publishers use their own in-house engines like Anvil, Frostbite, RAGE, Creation, ... and they are often deeply optimized for PC and consoles. For the later often even to a hardware level.
GRID on Android has little to do with the core GRID. It's a game made from ground up to be on mobile.

There is no increasing interest in mobile gaming. It's half of the market for quite some time now. But it's also a different market. People are less willing to spend money upfront - especially gaming prices - and people don't play for hours in one session.
Studios are very well aware of it and Steam entering into this market won't change anything.

[ラチェットマイルズ]

Originally posted by Cathulhu:

It's not that easy. You have to design a mobile friendly interface, a render path that does not use DirectX and so on.

It's not like you just check a few boxes and you're done.

Additionally, Valve did not port Half Life 2 or Portal to Android.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nvidia.valvesoftware.halflife2
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nvidia.valvesoftware.portal
That is not a port, it's just nVidia streaming the game onto your mobile device through nVidia Shield technology. It does not run the game on your phone.

I'm certain it is running natively on Android. It's not hard to run, particularly on a Tegra.

[ラチェットマイルズ]

Originally posted by cinedine:

Originally posted by Ratchet Miles:

Yes! And because games -can- be made for Android straight from Unity and Unreal, there's some potential to encourage developers to -maybe- shuffle around some code and make some optimizations for games to be ported to Android.

Problem is that it isn't as easy for every game.
It's not just toggling a switch and compile for platform X. You need to adapt for mobile quite a lot. New UI and control scheme, different balancing, network architecture, and different graphical fidelity. And not every game uses Unreal and Unity. Big publishers use their own in-house engines like Anvil, Frostbite, RAGE, Creation, ... and they are often deeply optimized for PC and consoles. For the later often even to a hardware level.
GRID on Android has little to do with the core GRID. It's a game made from ground up to be on mobile.

There is no increasing interest in mobile gaming. It's half of the market for quite some time now. But it's also a different market. People are less willing to spend money upfront - especially gaming prices - and people don't play for hours in one session.
Studios are very well aware of it and Steam entering into this market won't change anything.

Objection your honor, but if mobile gaming wasn't on the rise, the Switch wouldn't have hit over 60 million sales. I could see potential for mobile gaming to be competitive to the Switch, considering people already got a Switch emulator somewhat working on Android. And also, consider CoD Mobile, Fortnite, PUBG and Genshin Impact are all "intense" games for a casual market as you're implying, and they're all topped charts a few times.

[cinedine]

Originally posted by Ratchet Miles:

Originally posted by cinedine:

Problem is that it isn't as easy for every game.
It's not just toggling a switch and compile for platform X. You need to adapt for mobile quite a lot. New UI and control scheme, different balancing, network architecture, and different graphical fidelity. And not every game uses Unreal and Unity. Big publishers use their own in-house engines like Anvil, Frostbite, RAGE, Creation, ... and they are often deeply optimized for PC and consoles. For the later often even to a hardware level.
GRID on Android has little to do with the core GRID. It's a game made from ground up to be on mobile.

There is no increasing interest in mobile gaming. It's half of the market for quite some time now. But it's also a different market. People are less willing to spend money upfront - especially gaming prices - and people don't play for hours in one session.
Studios are very well aware of it and Steam entering into this market won't change anything.

Objection your honor, but if mobile gaming wasn't on the rise, the Switch wouldn't have hit over 60 million sales. I could see potential for mobile gaming to be competitive to the Switch, considering people already got a Switch emulator somewhat working on Android.

It's not on the rise. It sits on a 1/2 market share quite comfortably for years now. That's my point. It's nothing new. And it's not like publishers do ignore it. But it's simply a different market that has no place for the "core" games.
There is actually a very easy measure of a platform's viability for the core market: does it have Skyrim?
If porting a game to mobile was that easy, don't you think we'd already seen a full Skyrim port?

Originally posted by Ratchet Miles:

And also, consider CoD Mobile, Fortnite, PUBG and Genshin Impact are all "intense" games for a casual market as you're implying, and they're all topped charts a few times.

I am not implying anything. I say the market is different. All these games have one thing in common: short session times. You can play them in a waiting room or on your commute. But you are unlikely to play them *instead* of their core variant. You will not play for eigth hours straigth on a mobile device. Even in Japan.

[Washell]

Third party stores on android don't work. There are many failed attempts at that, and not by the smallest names either. Mass market don't want the hassle. Valve isn't going to bother, especially with the risk of Google booting steam link and steam client apps from the play store.

[Crashed]

Originally posted by Washell:

Third party stores on android don't work. There are many failed attempts at that, and not by the smallest names either. Mass market don't want the hassle. Valve isn't going to bother, especially with the risk of Google booting steam link and steam client apps from the play store.

Does Google Play have any rules against an app publisher publishing other apps outside their store?

[Tito Shivan]

Originally posted by Washell:

Third party stores on android don't work. There are many failed attempts at that, and not by the smallest names either.

Not like a giant like Amazon tried it before Steam, for example. I've actually rebought apps in the Google Play Store just to not have the nuisance of having to go through installing the Amazon App to get the apps I bought through them every time I change phones.

Originally posted by Crashed:

Does Google Play have any rules against an app publisher publishing other apps outside their store?

Not than I know about. I own many apps from third party markets that are also sold in the Appstore.

The problem would be Steam becoming its own appstore within Google's appstore.
No third party appstore I know about can be downloaded from the Google Play store. Steam would have to split functionality (Much like Amazon, you can have their Store app downloaded from Google Play but not their mobile appstore and you can't access the Amazon appstore from within the Amazon app...)

[kristina mraz`]

Originally posted by cSg|mc-Hotsauce:

Valve does have android apps.

But Valve can not sell games they don't own.

It is up to the game devs to enable cross saves for their games.

Ask the game devs/pubs to port and sell their games on the app stores.

:qr:

[76561199496784570]

the concept of steam providing a android based steam gaming app is a good one, with alot of android based games already on steams pc platform, it would be nice to see steam migrate some of its titles into android mode.

namely things like CSGO have already been 3rd party ported into android, but nothing offical by Valve, with Csgo2 releasing this summer, it would be great to see CSGO2 offered in a port to google and android based stores, it would really increase steams marketplace viability on the mobile apps, while its understandable this might take away from steams PC portable concept, i think it is better to offer users a way to use steam with other devices.

to over all promote larger group of potential steam customers.

[ラチェットマイルズ]

I think this post about mobile gaming rings even more true with the Steam Deck. I have it and I love mine. Like I said before, if Valve could put effort into a store for Android (and iOS if they ever get forced to allow 3rd party stores), I would be so happy. Like, thinking about how a lot of indie games that are on Android and Steam, that would be awesome, especially if Steam Cloud was used. Things like Stardew Valley for come to mind, and as Trilyan said, it could go the inverse and Android games could be brought to Steam for desktop, ESPECIALLY for something like the Steam Deck. The touch screen and controls would make for a great Android system.

[Brian9824]

It's already been answered, the most steam could do is create an android store that sells android versions of the games, then it would be up to developers if they wanted to sell their games via that store. They can't give you an android copy of a game you own on steam.

No real point to it as there isn't anything Steam could do that Google Play doesn't already do better, and google is already massively entrenched, so doesn't seem smart to try to fight with them and they hold such a massive advantage.

[cSg|mc-Hotsauce]

Google is just trying to catch up to GameLoop (Tencent's android emu) which has been established for years now (2018).

[John]

This thread was quite old before the recent post, so we're locking it to prevent confusion.