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I have negative interest in this. (Not to mention, if I really wanted to I can use the Steam music player for this)
Why do you think anyone would have interest in steam becoming Audible? What could Valve do better than people already selling books?
Why would Steam pay licensing fees for a product other platforms already specialize in?
...and in this market, there are a lot of exclusivity deals. It is becoming a problem as the big services are basically forcing authors to use them exclusively.
If they want sales, they HAVE to use the big names because people are no longer willing to go to individual websites and the like to then download files and so on.
I just don't really see this as being something worth it compared to the Steam Deck.
Valve tried selling/renting movies on Steam which have FAR more people interested in them.... and now they don't because they could not sell enough, I think mainly due to the prices being so high and the fact you needed to have Steam running to watch them and the quality of the video wasn't great for the prices you were paying.
Selling books and audiobooks would have far less interest in them. Its a dead subject on steam already.
Go buy digital books or audio books at the places that are dedicated to them and have far better prices.
It sounds like you want a "metaverse" kind of thing, with VR to go in rooms... go do that on facebook. You can already have "rooms" (groups) on steam and have book chat rooms and you can even make them private.
And no this would not cause Valves "revenue" to go up, if anything it would cost them money, just like when they tried to sell movies.
I personally would never buy movies or music or books from Steam. I would not go into chat rooms to talk about books I have read, with others and stuff like that. Steam is for game related stuff which when it comes to books is VERY limited.
If I want to buy digital books (which I don't as reading them a monitor is annoying, and the thought of reading them on a super tiny screen such as the Steam Deck would be even more annoying) I will go to Amazon or the actual Barnes and Noble and buy them there. But I actually prefer physical books that I can pick up and read. I have a whole book case filled with books.
If was going to get into digital books, I'd get a tablet which I could sit back and relax with on the couch or somewhere to read it.
Ahhh, I remember that little stint Steam had of having movies available for purchase now, but I had totally forgotten about it until reading your post. Goes to show how unsuccessful it was.
That being said, I'm not really sure Valve is the company to take that on, if it can even realistically be done at this point. People come to Valve largely for games, so the expectation is they're working on improving the platform and experience centered around said gaming. Not off making something (like being able to stream movies) that's outside what most people are here for. I think to be successful in another industry they'd have to spin it off into it's own subsidiary and even then that's quite risky.
It takes time to go to the library, for example, especially if mom says she's busy working maybe some other time. And while visiting Amazon is fast, its blighted hellscape is frustrating and unimmersive.
Immersion is one of those things 'gamers' are constantly in pursuit of, so it makes sense for any offering to gamers be strongly immersive, and running at least 90fps to avoid motion sickness. Digital/vr chat or social programs have been around a long time, so having sandbox book club rooms isn't a major, unworkable departure -- you just need to make them immersive and reasonably priced.
Online food ordering and delivery kind of get this, but they haven't integrated well with games so far. I suggest that you should be able to order food through this cyberspace, and that the order appear 'in game', as it were. So not only do you get a 'real life' delivery, but a virtual one, too. It should be just like 'reality': fifteen minutes late and one item missing that customer service refuses to refund.
Food can't just be icons, but proper objects you can interact with in various ways, based mostly on physics. One idea is you could use webcam and AI technologies to update the 'digital' food based on how much of the 'real' food you've eaten. While you're using AI, you could not only try to recommend books in the store, but also implement popular health and wellness programs. Some of the AI advice to the user eating might include:
"That's a rather large portion, honey. Don't you think you should save some for tomorrow?"
"You've been moving that around your plate for ten minutes. Is something wrong?"
"Make sure you chew every bite well. Otherwise you might choke!" (If you do choke, it could refuse to get help until you admit it was right. That's immersion.)
"That was 3600 Calories! You might want to spend more time at the gym -- the Pokemon gym!" (I added some product placement, that how extensible this idea is!)
Heck, once you've got food physics in, you can enhance everything with exciting RNG activities. Maybe a famous author shows up for a book signing and can be grabbed by the user and thrown up onto high bookshelves where the pathfinding breaks and they can't get down, or your digital coffee accidentally spills all over a table of books and you have to pay for new ones. Old fashioned strategy guides and 'joke' user guides could be available for purchase, and with digital books, blind book bundles of the month (no refunds when opened; 1 in 1000000 chance of getting a signed ebook) would bring book of the month services into the digital age without the shipping costs.
All I'm saying is there's a lot of room to grow this into something revolutionary and rogue-like when you get banned from the store.
In certain games where it enhances the experience, yes. And you don't need VR to be immersive. But the idea that gamers are as a whole or even generally speaking, in pursuit of immersion in all aspects of digital life (or that they are even in search of digital life for anything and everything) is a mistaken notion.
No, it makes sense to offer quality, cheap, and convenience. Immersion doesn't really come into play.
Yes they have been around for a long time, and remain niche products for a reason. This may come as a shock to VR fanbois, but not everyone wants to live in a digital world. Most of us are just fine with reality as it is, and actually prefer a real life sandbox, as it were, to a digital one.
Nothing says immersion breaking more than a pop-up for my meat lovers pizza delivery in the middle of an RPG dungeon delve.
Nothing says exciting and fun to me more than getting nagged in the digital space! Boy, I thought I played games to escape that kind of stuff in the real world. Wow, I just can't wait to toss on 5 pound goggles to get heckled by a bot!
A SWTOR lead designer some years back talked about RNG being fun and exciting. He didn't remain in that position for much longer after that. I can recall hundreds of forum hate fests against RNG. Can't remember one that was in praise of it.
Second Life has been doing the digital space for about 20 years now. Maybe you should check it out.
I love immersion in my games. But everything you've described has absolutely zero interest to me as a gamer, because it's not really about games. I'm not looking for a VR real life simulator and contrary to what you feel "gamers" might want, I'll put money that I'm not alone, especially within my age demographic.
There is always going to be people with different wants. Some gamers are obviously going to find this whole idea complete trash, but same can be said about certain actual games. But there will be some gamers who are avid book reader who would love this idea to have a digital library where you can go and read your books and even meet up with friends for a few minutes rather then trying to get everyone to meet in a physical location 5,10, or 20 miles away from home when you have school, work, kids, and other responsibilities taking your time up. Isn't that what all this is about gaming, discord, steam, vr its all a way to make things more convenient
Full immersion in games, sure love that idea.
Going to a book store or anything like that in VR.... no. I don't want to have to put on a headset to do everything. Why walk in a virtual store when you can find the item you are looking for faster in a browser window, or by calling and ordering it that way.
Anything beyond gaming for VR is not interesting to me.
Then you have the fact that most people, and yes I would say 99% or more gamers and PC owners do not own any kind of VR setup. Biggest reason, costs of not just the VR headset but also the system to be able to run VR.
If you want Metaverse stuff.... go to facebook I'm sure they have life like VR immersion. Oh right, they don't. They have poured 36 billion into what you want and look how well its going for them. They are laying off over 10,000 people. And they were making money right up to the point where facebook finally released some pictures and videos of the metaverse. Thats when everyone bailed on what they are doing cause their "full immersion" looks bad and basically no one was using it. They even had to put out company wide memos begging people who work for facebook and specially working on meta to use the metaverse.
https://www.businessinsider.com/meta-lost-30-billion-on-metaverse-rivals-spent-far-less-2022-10
What you want and expect is whats going on in Ready Player One. But its not going to be like that and Valve is certainly never going to be able to produce something like that.
At best whats in Ready Player One is 50 or 100 years away, at worst its never going to happen... hopefully it never happens.
You mean like Discord?
Their main goal is to sell games and gaming related hardware. Not to be a digital book library. Steam doesn't need to be an "Everything" app as it would have too many things to focus on overall. Different stores & services exist to provide what someone is looking for.
Too many people want stores they like to branch into things they have never been about. It's ok to think about convenience, but often companies want to continue being in a general product or service with some range, not a huge amount of range with various products or services.
Could they? Likely easily, if they wanted to. Do they want to? Probably not.
Many businesses are very content doing what they are good at, with related experiments. Unrelated things tend to cause a lot of issues.