X could displace Steam via library ports and Grok Bot modding
The author argues X can unseat Steam by letting players port their libraries, cutting publisher fees, and extending Grok Bot into custom modding, eventually toward games generated as you play.
STEAM VS. X: My most psychotic gaming take. @spacexai (read: X) will unseat @Steam as the primary source for gaming and Steam will go the way of the Yellow Pages because it's the exact same business model, but worse. Steam is functionally a directory that takes a 30% cut and X could replace that easily. SI could just as easily make it so you don't have to. But how does X get people to migrate over? Easy. By allowing players to port over their Steam library. Tell publishers/developers "we will forgo a cut on any future sales of this game for 10 years," or pay the publisher a sale price directly if that makes more sense financially. When enough publishers agree, go to market. Most "big games" with a large enough following will be "ported over" to the new X library, and X can even read your existing achievements and port those too. X then tells developers going forward that they'll only charge a 10% cut if those developers pass half those savings on to customers (i.e. if a game is priced at $50 on Steam it'd be priced at $45 on X, and the developer themselves makes more money). But where it gets REAL fun is with modding. Because X could turn around and offer "GrokModding" as an extension of Grok Bot, which would let X customers just tell Grok Bot what kind of mods they'd like and have them built from scratch, made just for them. But what do I mean by SI could make it so you don't have to? It's because soon we won't have to worry about "Bespoke Modding" in games, because SI will make it possible to have "Bespoke Games." As in you could ask for "Contra by way of Cyberpunk 2077, but I also want to make decisions like I'm the mayor of the city and build it out like SimCity." And the SI will just make the game for you as you play it, complete with in-game voiced AIs and characters that exist in a world as perpetual as you want to make it. Cheaper games, bespoke games, easier access, endless on demand modding, all on one site. That also wants you to stream there. See my point?