Paradox Interactive’s CEO Fred Wester has pledged his support to open platforms like Steam and the SteamOS. “We can’t have a platform holder who tells us what to do and what not to do,” he told the audience at this year’s Paradox Convention. “We need full freedom on how we connect to our gamers.”
“We want to do our games on open platforms,” Wester said. “Which means if we want to patch a game we can patch it. We decide when we patch it and how we patch it. We don’t need to be charged money to update a game as a service to our game. That’s very important to us.”
His language closely imitates that of Valve in their support for Linux. Back in 2012 Valve said that “Open platforms allowed Steam to exist.” The freedom it gave the studio to release updates and work with other developers allowed the service to flourish. “If we tried today it probably wouldn’t be possible,” Valve’s Drew Bliss said.
Earlier this year, Valve’s Gabe Newell cited open platforms as the reason the company’s business grew by 50%, saying “”I think in the last year our business has grown about 50 per cent on the back of the opportunities that have been created by having these open platforms.”
That’s why Wester is saying “We can’t have a platform holder who tells us what to do and what not to do. We need full freedom on how we connect to our gamers.” That’s why they will be supporting the Steam Machine’s and SteamOS platform when it releases later this year.