While the actual monopolies actively making the world a significantly worse place keep getting away.
These comments…
Some day, Steam is going to enshittify, eat game devs for breakfast, and all these Steam fans will wonder how anyone could have possibly seen this coming.
Kind of like a certain online bookstore named after a river.
Not that I don’t enjoy Steam. But I trust them as much as any corporation: not at all.
Hearing those arguments for how many years now? Right …
The day Gabe is bo longer there things may get ugly, may.
But, Valve is not publicly traded, or has to cater to shareholders in any way. That is the reason they are still who they are.
They run a good service platform and aren’t as greedy as they could be, but they’re still not safe.
Use them, but no fangirling. They’re a business.
I’d be completely in agreement of what you are saying if it wasn’t for the fact that there are so many people acting like Steam is the worst platform in existence every time they get brought up. People are awfully quick to suck Tim Sweeney off for only charging 12% and fill up the comments with whatever the opposite of “fangirling” is.
They already take 30% on each game. It’s huge, considering they didn’t spent a dime on these games. That means they will take most of the profit margin on a game, if any, while a studio has to pay for dozens or hundreds of employees, tons of hardware, workspaces, etc.
Those studios are paying Valve how much for tailored marketing throughout the game’s lifespan?
30% of all their revenue throughout their entire lifespan.
Do You have any idea what the hosting infrastructure, steam works, and traffic costs?
Also, valve is giving massive contributions to open source from those 30%
Valve is one of the most profitable company in the world.
I mean, just look at this thread and see how much free propaganda they get from gamers. That’s a lot of free labour just to defend a billionaire that profits from gambling for kids.
30% is the industry standard though, and Valve’s contributions of distribution and discovery infrastructure, its audience, and expanding hardware initiatives are not nothing. If you’re not pricing a game to give yourself a healthy margin within the 70% or your development model doesn’t make that viable, that’s really on you.
Industry standard doesn’t mean reasonable. It’s renter class bullshit, profiting off of other’s labor. Pretending creating a distribution and discovery platform is seriously deserving of 30% of the value of the hard work of game devs is not reasonable. If it was reasonable, gabe wouldn’t be a billionaire.
What maintains Steam’s dominant market position is user lock in, not any policy they enforce or any monopoly laws they violate. The only thing that would break user lock in would be allowing migration of licenses for games between platforms, and making friend/multiplayer/mod-management systems interoperable across platforms.
Valve has made no effort to implement these kinds of systems. BUT NETHER HAS ANYONE ELSE. (Well except gog and DRM free games, but that’s only part of the issue.)
The fact that one privately owned company has such huge control of the industry is a huge risk, undeniably. But breaking up valve wouldn’t solve the problem, it would just let someone else take their place.
monopoly laws they violate
A monopoly is holding a large marketshare. It is a label determined by courts. That the marketshare is from consumers picking the product is irrelevant to being declared a monopoly.
In the late 90’s Windows was the overwhelming market leader for OS’s because the alternatives weren’t good. Linux didn’t have good consumer focused distros and was therefore used on servers. MacOS at the time was still cooperatively multitasked like Windows 1.0 from almost 20 years earlier. So Microsoft was declared a monopoly and had restrictions placed on what it could do despite all other competitors already doing what Microsoft did (like including a web browser). That’s why years later Apple was able to make Safari the ONLY web browser (all “alternatives” were just reskins of Safari) whereas Microsoft was forced to include support so that you could switch the default web browser.
Microsoft was not declared a monopolist because of their dominant market position in operating system space.
They were declared a monopolist because they used that market position to actively disincentive the use of competitor’s browsers, beyond “just including a browser”, but actively doing things to make other browsers difficult to download and use on their operating system.
Apple is not declared a monopolist because they do not own and control chrome, the really dominant market player derived from WebKit, and apple are not using some dominant market position to enforce that.
If you see things differently and think the same logic as these cases could be applied to steam, go ahead and contact epic’s legal department.
but actively doing things to make other browsers difficult to download and use on their operating system.
That is absolutely not true. I was President of a mid sized ISP at the time. We shipped both IE and Netscape on CD for consumers to pick which they wanted to install.
The bundling was a problem because of their already pre existing dominant market position.
Apple is not declared a monopolist because they do not own and control chrome
Microsoft did not own and control Netscape’s rendering engine which was the really dominant market player. Apple uses their market position to make Safari the majority web browser in the US. (phones outnumber home pc’s and Apple has over 50% marketshare.)
go ahead and contact epic’s legal department.
I don’t give a fuck about Epic. Steam is Walmart and Epic is Kmart.
I see 2 main points against steam in this comment section.
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Steam is doing price fixing for games: False, this accusation came from Epic Games CEO, but the actual steam policy only blocks the selling of steam keys for a lower price, not the game itself.
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Steam is a monopoly and monopolies are bad: I agree that monopolies are bad, but in my opinion only if they take action to harm the user and the market. From my knowledge steam is pretty known as being pro customer and haven’t taken any monopolistic actions to block other stores from growing.
The reason why the games are not usually cheaper on other platforms is because publishers practice standard prices, so the game publishers take the extra profits from a lower store cut.
I am not trying to be a fanboy, I am just trying to look objectively at the facts, if someone can prove me wrong, I am willing to change my mind.
Yeah, the price parity thing seems to be a big misconception here especially. The price parity guideline comes from Valve’s page for Steam keys. Valve gets a 0% cut when keys are sold on third-party sites, yet they still use Valve’s infrastructure, so it makes sense for Valve to not want you to price them to have all your key sales go third-party.
As far as I can tell, Valve has zero interest in how you sell copies of a game that don’t use Steam keys.
Also something I noticed per their guidelines:
It’s OK to run a discount for Steam Keys on different stores at different times as long as you plan to give a comparable offer to Steam customers within a reasonable amount of time.
As a frequent user of IsThereAnyDeal, I can tell you it’s more common than not for a game’s historical low price to not be on Steam, so Valve is definitely not strictly enforcing this. With this and the lack of legalese on the page and letting developers/publishers determine what “similar” and “comparable” are on their own terms, I’m not seeing anything Valve should be doing differently here.
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Leave the multi billion dollar corporation alone
Jesus fucking Christ in blue skirt, y’all have your nose full of Gabe’s juice gagging him so much.
I truly enjoy all of you morons cicle jerking “eat the rich” but bending over Valve and paying for the lube.
“But think of how much he did for Linux gnagnagna”. Fuck that shit. Wake the fuck up. Torvalds does not own a 500 millions yacht.
Lemmy is truly going full retard and speedrunning Reddit clusterfuck as fast as possible.
God I hate steam fanboys so fucking much. There is no such thing as a corporation which cares about you. Every single action is done to keep profits up.
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Being a simp for a multi billion dollar company is never a good thing. It’s not good for you as a consumer and, frankly, is just incredibly cringe.
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No, it’s not, the main point of the lawsuit is that Steam does not let game Devs sell their game for cheaper on any other platform.
So if you don’t like that Steam takes a massive 30% cut of your sales so that Gabe can buy his 27th mega-yatch, and you decide to also put your game on another platform that takes a fairer, smaller cut, then chose to pass on those savings to the consumer, then valve will kick you off the platform and you’ll lose access to by far the biggest market in PC gaming.
Fuck valve and fuck you brain dead fanboys simping for a billionaire and making everything worse for the rest of us because your entire worldview comes from memes.
Wrong topic but I feel the same about online age verification. All my friends and family and everyone I know say it’s good for the children and I’m here like wtf
You’re just simping for a different billionaire out here regurgitating Tim Sweeney’s talking points verbatim…
Supporting consumer rights is basically the exact opposite of simping for billionaires actually.
True, which is why it is so easy to tell which one you are doing. :)
So you genuinely, seriously think the only reason I support this is because I have some random obsession with the person running the lawsuit, and nothing to do with wanting better right for consumers?
What “better right for consumers” are you advocating for? The false claim that Steam bars anyone on their platform from selling cheaper is easily proven false by looking at any of the numerous websites that track prices of games from various storefronts and is the key point used by Epic’s legal team to try to garner support to break up steam in order to gain market share themselves and make the industry markedly worse.
Your post is thinly veiled “Valve bad, give money to Epic instead”, whether you realize it or not. So what is your plan to make the industry actually better?
I literally never even mentioned epic???
I think you’re caught up in some weird fanboy shit I didnt even realise existed.
If it’s not true then let the courts decide that. If you’re right great, but if the lawsuit goes through, then it’s better for consumers.
Also steam being broken up isn’t at all on the cards here so idk why you’re even bringing it up? It’s a UK court, they don’t have the power to do that to an American company. Nor is it even in the scope of the suit.
2 is false. It only applies to steam keys.
It only applies to steam keys.
A steam key is the receipt that you paid for the game. It is ridiculous that companies get to skirt laws by saying, “It’s on a computer.”
Imagine you buy a car. Years later you go to resell it for less and the manufacture claims you can’t because the sales receipt that proves you are the legitimate owner is a “Steam Cars Inc key” and therefore all existing laws do not apply.
Yeah that’s not what they’re preventing. It’s to stop someone with rights to generate keys, i.e. the developer, from generating a lot of Steam keys and then selling them on their own site at a discount, which is basically leeching off of the Steam infrastructure & ecosystem while sidestepping the storefront. Which is fine as long as they don’t undercut.
The EULA for any software you’ve ever paid for is what forbids resale.
It’s to stop someone with rights to generate keys
If it was only about developers then consumers could have the right to resell their game at whatever price they wanted.
EU countries wouldn’t have to sue Steam for consumer rights:
https://blog.igv.com/steam-freedom-equality-and-game-resale-steam-vs-france/
Again that is a separate issue from the no undercutting clause. Prohibition of resale is ubiquitous in the software world because for decades the ploy has been to sell you a license, not an actual product.
Of course I’d love that to change but it’s a core precept of how digital ownership works and has worked for most of it’s existence. Steam is not the main force behind that.
Steam is not the main force behind that.
Steam started it! You must be too young to remember the uproar in the gaming community about HL2 being the first Steam game and requiring Internet authentication to play with the ridiculous restriction of not being allowed to resell the game you bought at the store. It was years later before they eased selling restrictions but still never to the amount that consumers enjoyed before Steam existed. Gabe was the original techbro: “Hey I know it’s illegal but what if we do it anyway. Then we use the profits to pay the lawyers to make it legal.” It’s why France sued Valve to require them to follow the laws that exist for everything else. https://www.videogameseurope.eu/news/video-games-europe-welcomes-french-supreme-court-decision-on-the-resale-of-digital-video-games/
Steam was like Walmart moving into a new territory- with the added consumer hostility of adding restrictions to purchases that consumers used to enjoy. It was because of Steam’s success that other businesses realized that consumers would take abuse if it meant they could get their entertainment conveniently.
You’re conflating DRM with software licensing. DRM is digital enforcement of license terms. Steam was by no means the first form of DRM, but it is a DRM platform (though there are some DRM-free titles).
I am not too young to remember Steam being a highly controversial topic because it was basically launched as the DRM for Half-Life 2. The backlash against the normalization of DRM led to the creation of Good Old Games, still the premiere DRM-free vendor on the market.
However, software licenses have been in use since the 70s. The practice of selling actual copies of code as opposed to licenses to use the code was already rare by the 90s. If you bought a CD or floppy disks in a store, you were buying a license to use the code on the disks, but you were explicitly denied the rights to resell or copy it, at least for most commercial products. Most people just never read the very long terms of usage.
This is a very narrow viewpoint that is borderline disingenuous.
You blame OP for being a simp, BECAUSE OF A MEME, then argue the plaintiff’s narrative without any critical breakdown or context.
You are not any better.
There is a lot of nuance here that you just ignore.
Valve is not using their resources to prevent/undermine competition.
Valve’s percentage is absolutely worthy of debate, but does not make them a monopoly.
I will state that I support Valve when it comes to the big releases, but definitely wish they tiered their fees to support smaller developers.
I get why they do it, but I wish they were a bit friendlier to the smaller developers
If the other companies used a platform that was even remotely close to the ease of use as Steam, I might feel differently, but they don’t
I have lost access to several titles because of these companies’ “competing” platforms.
Valve provides a service that is critical and beneficial. And in a way that these other companies seem incapable or unwilling to provide.
They are not preventing them from doing it in any way.
They just don’t want to get undercut on products that use their service. That is a valid argument.
Maybe if other companies didn’t create such bloated, underperforming crapware, they wouldn’t feel forced to use Steam.
And smaller developers aside, these companies already suck so much money out of the user/buyer as they can and are not passing that revenue to the actual software developer, while Valve does share its revenue with its employees, despite your claim that Gabe is buying his “27th yacht”.
The argument that valve has a monopoly because their platform is just so amazing and all the others is trash is exactly the simping behaviour I’m talking about.
If steam wasn’t already considered the default and valve didn’t have this insane cult of personality around Gabe Newell, steam would be considered mostly on par with other providers.
We as consumers let valve get away with so much bullshit because of “omg lord gaben and his summer sales! My wallet isn’t ready XD” types.
Like valve had to be sued into have a returns policy, they popularised predatory loot box mechanics and pushed an entire gambling based economy on children and made ludicrous amounts of money from it, popularised early access and asset flip slop, caved to the whole MasterCard censorship campaign
So my experience accounts for nothing?
So even though I’ve lost access to multiple titles because other software companies can’t get their shit together and were a terrible experience, I’m not allowed to use that as an example of why Valve has become the standard?
But any argument against your opinion is “simping”.
Do you even hear yourself?
What you are doing is a form of manipulation and gaslighting.
Those things Valve was sued over were also industry standard practices.
Your argument is awash with emotional outbursts which tells the real story here.
You’ve picked a side for one reason or another and just make bad arguments, trying to support it.
Show me a single game company, of that size, that HASN’T been sued. Since that seems to be your metric of what makes a company so evil.
So my experience accounts for nothing?
No, hence why I never said that.
So even though I’ve lost access to multiple titles because other software companies can’t get their shit together and were a terrible experience, I’m not allowed to use that as an example of why Valve has become the standard?
I’ve lost access to titles on steam.
But any argument against your opinion is “simping”.
Again not what I said. I’m saying that people ignoring all the negative shit valve has done and continues to do out of pure fanboyism, are simps.
What you are doing is a form of manipulation and gaslighting.
You are both hilariously overdramatic and just deranged.
Those things Valve was sued over were also industry standard practices.
Nope. And this is what I was talking about, you can’t even say “yeah that was a shitty thing valve did” you instead have to fervently defend every shitty practice anyway you can to protect your favourite multi billion dollar company.
Your argument is awash with emotional outbursts which tells the real story here.
Projecting in 4k. Or is yelling that I’m “”“gaslighting”“” you by saying Valve isn’t a good company just pure cold logic, lol.
Show me a single game company, of that size, that HASN’T been sued. Since that seems to be your metric of what makes a company so evil.
My guy. Are you honestly illiterate? Or are you so hopped up on fanboyism that it’s altering your basic perceptions of reality?
Either way I’m done wasting my time listening you do this.
If I wanted to spend my time interacting with people like you, wanting to argue over disrespecting your lord Gaben, I would have gone to Reddit.
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People constantly dooming steam are punching themselves in the face instead of pushing for anything better. If they wanted a more competitive market do two things. Buy games on other storefronts. They exist. There have been digital storefronts since before Steam. Second is direct your complaining to competitors to improve their services. Like go complain on every EGS press release for Linux support and a gamepad friendly interface. Something equivalent to Steam input and remote play that isn’t using third party software like Sunshine/Moonlight. Something like steam curators and other social features. User reviews. The complainers of Steam are pretty much campaigning for Steam to be worse so others can compete without having to improve as much
If Steam is accused of abusing their position, then it’s not the same, like them being accused of enforcing price parity, while they take a higher cut than EGS, so that those same games, sold on EGS, can’t be sold for cheaper
They don’t mandate price parity on other platforms. They mandate that people selling steam keys on different storefronts match price with the steam store. Which is to say, they allow people to distribute through steam’s infrastructure, without paying steam’s vendor fee, but not for a lower price.
Publishers can absolutely choose to sell for cheaper on EGS(or any other distribution platform for that matter), that they generally don’t is not due to some valve policy.
It wasn’t what the accusation was about. The accusation was about price parity on other platforms. The steam keys thing is something else.
Digital markets are naturally monopolistic. If there are no other barriers in a market, a single solution will rise to the top. Once it has gained enough market share, the “network effect” and incumbancy are often enough to keep it in power, even if the product degrades. Leaving steam is difficult, even when a better solution exists ( like gog) due to separated game libraries and friend groups.
See the following examples: Amazon, facebook, youtube, google, instagram, X
Amazon has many examples of enshitification. Higher prices, worse search, paid promotion of products etc.
Facebook adds, social experimentation and propaganda machine.
Youtube removes the dislike button, more advertisements and recommendation algorithm pushing conspiracy theories.
Hell. Here we are, a small group of people who left reddit because of their anti consumer policies. But lemmy is still no competition, and getting smaller by the day.
Markets are not the solution to monopoly, they are the creator. Its the natural end state of competition.
Gog isn’t a better solution to steam though, the feature set isn’t comparable
Sorry, you are correct. I didnt mean to say gog is straight up better than steam, though it does sound like thats what i meant. Writing a thoughtful rant on the toilet is difficult.
But in some ways, gog is better. Not all ways. Also the competition in this space has forced steam to do better. The retun policy was really only implemented due to competition for example.
When I think of monopolies, I think more of telecomms, of Wal-Mart and their selling at a lose to kill off competition, Microsoft purposely hindering the ability for competing software, and other examples. Unless I’m missing something, Steam didn’t do that, they were just first in the game and built a better product than the others did. Offering a better service that attracted customers. Now do I think it’s too large and would welcome competition, absolutely. But monopolies typically aren’t though just having larger market share with a better product.
If Steam did something like oh, pay developers/publishers to be exclusive to their platform, then yeah you’d have a good argument there.
Microsoft purposely hindering the ability for competing software,
Nope. MS was declared a monopoly because of marketshare and therefore had to add support for competing software.
Offering a better service that attracted customers.
Monopoly is from marketshare. How it is obtained doesn’t matter. Once you are the biggest company you need to have restrictions placed on you so that smaller companies have a chance to compete.
Nope on Microsoft. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v./_Microsoft_Corp. It was restricting the web browser market.
Point two, it’s if they also hamper competition or capabilities to compete. Steam, as shown in this thread and how it operates, hasn’t done that. Now you can give a good thumb of the nose at Epic for their paid exclusives, but that didn’t get them anywhere toward dominating a market. Also, competition exists in various forms as well. It’s not monopolized.
I hate monopolies and no friend of big companies, but come at them with the right cudgel, not made up dross.
It was restricting the web browser market.
If bundling a web browser is an uncompetitive act that requires government intervention then Apple, Google (Android), and commercial Linux distros would also be sued by the government. Microsoft was sued, not for the action in isolation but because of their monopoly position. They didn’t get their monopoly from bunding a web browser. They already had a monopoly. People overwhelmingly chose Windows because it was the best. At the time Linux didn’t have consumer friendly distros and MacOS was still cooperatively multitasked like Windows 1.0 from 1982.
Steam’s monopoly destroyed ownership of games. You used to buy a game at Egghead, and when you were done playing, you could sell it for whatever the free market said it was worth.
Steam’s monopoly also means you can’t open a small game store- they wiped out those businesses just like Walmart. Vendors deal with Walmart because a tiny profit of being in every Walmart is better than a large profit from a few stores exactly like vendors sell on Steam.
Purposely making code and behind the door deals to exclude any browser development or success for years does, yes.
Steam didn’t destroy ownership of games, scuzzy business practices in the entire industry did. It also affects non-gaming software, movies, most media actually. It wasn’t Valve going “Let’s remove ownership!” In fact it has crept into the physical realm with right to repair and subscription services in cars.
So is Netflix a monopoly then because it wiped out video rental stores? It wasn’t Valve alone again, it was a collusion in the video game industry to go all digital to maximize profit and not have to make concessions to retailers. That’s why they also tried their own platforms.
Edit: You are again mistaking a successful business in a capitalist society with monopoly. Monopoly is again, the manipulation of market forces and regulatory control. Not I just do business better.
Purposely making code and behind the door deals to exclude any browser development or success for years does, yes.
There was no code to exclude other browsers. Netscape at the time was the monopoly web browser. Netscape failed because Netscape 4 was a disaster. JWZ wrote about it extensively. I personally experienced Netscape’s failure. Netscape 4 had a bug in their dialer that couldn’t handle area codes. When I called to tell them, despite having already paid tens of thousands to Netscape in licensing fees, they wanted $80k to look at the problem. I called my friends who ran other ISP’s to ask them what they were doing because Netscape 4 was broken. They said they weren’t even trying- they were shipping only IE 4 on their CD’s. I wanted my customers to have the choice so I spent the development time to work around Netscape’s bugs and had my tech support field the calls.
Netscape ran themselves off a cliff. The Netscape coders themselves said so. It is utterly ridiculous to claim that MS sabotaged them somehow with “code and deals”.
So is Netflix a monopoly then because it wiped out video rental stores?
As I already said, monopoly is a label given to businesses that have dominant marketshare. It doesn’t matter how it is obtained. Once you own the market, you have restrictions placed on you that smaller companies don’t have to keep the free market working.
Monopoly is again, the manipulation of market forces and regulatory control.
That’s not the definition used by the government. You are declared a monopoly and after that restrictions are placed on your actions.
Mandatory preface to prevent angry fanboys stinking up the replies: I like Steam. I use Steam. And just to be sure, democrats and republicans are not the same.
Some folks in this thread are using American case law to argue that Steam is not a monopoly, or that Steam is a good (??@#!?!?) monopoly. They look at other cases, like Microsoft, and point out how far Microsoft had to go before it was considered a monopoly by American judges, and then point out that Steam is not as bad. There are two problems with that line of reasoning.
The first is that monopoly law has been absolutely gutted by Reagan, and worsened by every administration (dem and rep alike) up until Biden. In the Biden admin, Lina Khan has made some very small steps to tighten up monopoly laws a bit, but obviously Trump happened (although Harris was pretty much the same as the dems before Biden, so not much hope there either). The bar for being a monopoly is unreasonably high, and American monopoly law is an absolute joke.
Secondly, this line of thinking conflates legality with morality, or being good (enough) for society. I hope I don’t need to convince you that this idea is false. Slavery was legal.
The argument here is not that Steam is, in the current flawed legal American sense, a monopoly, but that it is a monopoly in the sense that it has cornered enough of the gaming market that it could do very serious harm.
Note that “they’re not currently doing harm” is not a great counterargument here. When my neighbor buys a bazooka, I won’t be satisfied by “don’t worry I’m not currently using it”.
Let me ask you this. What are steam doing to try to be a monopoly?
Because the way I see it, Nintendo at one time took distinctive actions to ENSURE they remained a monopoly. Then Sega threatened that.
Then Sega a few years later shot themselves in the foot with confusing console stratagy. 32X, and the SegaCD were absolute failures because everyone knew the Saturn was around the corner. Then they shot themselves in the foot AGAIN by just dumping the Saturn on retailers doorsteps, in some cases at 3AM when nobody was even at the stores, with no prior warning. Just dump it at their door and hope for the best. Well, CONSUMERS didn’t even know they were in stores. And even people with preorders didn’t know. This was just in the early days of the internet, and long before social media. So it’s not like if this happened today, everyone would know when they check their social media. Nope. It was said that some customers just didn’t know for months, simply because if you weren’t physically in the store, you didn’t know. Some stores took phone numbers for the preorders, the majority did not. A lot of pre-orders were cancelled over this.
Nintendo shot themselves in the foot by partering up with Sony to create the Nintendo Play Station. (Two words). It was to use Sonys CD technology, and be a massive upgrade in storage. Well after reading the contract, Nintendo lawyers discovered that Sony could not only create their own games, but they could liscense the technology to other 3rd parties with zero control over who gets to release software for it. Worst of all, Sony, not Nintendo, would recieve all money from software sold on the Nintendo Play Station. So they backstabbed Sony, and tried again with Phillips. Phillips was to create a Super Nintendo addon. Sega had the SegaCD, and Nintendo felt left out. So they tried creating the Super Nintendo version of the SegaCD. It went very poorly. The end result of this ended up being the Phillips CD-i, which was less of a Nintendo console, and more of a Phillips console liscensing Nintendo characters. To this day, Nintendo has never reclaimed their monopoly, due to trying to kill Sega, they created Sony’s Playstation.
Sony created a monopoly by including a dvd player in the PS2 during a time nobody had a dvd player. It worked. But that was the only thing they did to create the monopoly. It’s not like Nintendo in the 80s, when they told 3rd parties they could either put a game on Atari, or they could put one on the NES. Sony lost their dominance with the PS3 by charging $700, at a time the Xbox360 was charging $400.
And Microsoft lost their dominance by just not having anything exclusive worth playing. Then they had the “everything is an xbox” campaign, which totally backfired.
But Steam? I don’t see them as doing anything to create a monopoly. I see them as a simple software store that sells all PC games. They’ve entered the console space in recent years with the steamdeck. But it’s nothing that creates a monopoly. Personally I find the steamdeck to be overpriced. The thing that gives them a monopoly is that they offer crazy deep sales, but publishers have to agree to those sales. Steam can’t mark Factorio down to $2.00 without the publishers consent (which in that case they do NOT consent to sales).
All I see Steam doing is offering quality products, at reasonable prices, without bullshit.
Epic games is FULL of bullshit in their customer service.
And GOG isn’t full of bullshit, but their library is limited, and always will be limited to publishers who consent to them selling drm-free games. For this reason alone, gog can never compete with steam.
So, yes, Steam HAS a monopoly, but I see it as a result of two things.
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Everybody else keeps shooting themselves in the foot.
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On consoles you keep the game for that console. When a new console comes out, MAYBE you get backwards compatibility for 1-2 generations. Usually 1 more. With Steam, you could have bought a game 20 years ago, and bought 20 new PC’s since then. Your purchases will still work.
In either event, I don’t see this as Valve being malicious at any point to create a monopoly. It can easily be taken away from them by someone else doing the same things they did. Offer a generous library, complete with modern releases, regular sales, and supurb customer service. It just so happens that everybody else is too greedy and/or stupid to attempt this.
So in your words, what is Valve doing wrong that makes you think they’re creating an unfair monopoly?
In practice having a game on Steam is even superior to having a DRM free copy. My DRM free copies of games are on some old hard drive in a drawer. My steam library is right there. Removing and installing games is super straightforward.
I like and use Steam. I agree that their dominance is mostly due to the lack of quality competition. They haven’t done anything super shady or anti-consumer.
But don’t expect that to last. It’s a story that’s been repeated countless times now. We know how this goes. One day something will change - probably ownership - and the enshittification will begin.
That’s what DRM free is about. You are in control of your DRM free games even after the developer, publisher, and the store you bought it from have all gone to hell. They also run better years from now when old DRM schemes no longer play nice with OS changes. DRM free is extra insurance that you’ll always have that game and be able to play it.
Too bad I don’t have the hard drive space to store my entire library. One day I’m going to be very sad right alongside everybody else.
I have lost like two dozen DRM free games because the hard drive they were archived on died. There are also some DVDs filled with DRM free games, that are somewhere in my closet. I don’t even have a DVD drive anymore.
When Steam started getting popular, I resisted it for years. Instead getting DRM free Indie games and lots of Humble Bundles. At some point there was one game I could get on Steam, so I started using it.
My old Steam games are easy and fast to access, install, and play again. Far easier than rummaging through my own archive. I don’t need to configure or install Proton to play games on Linux either.
The lack of DRM on my older games hasn’t provided me any actual real life benefit. The fears pandered about by opponents of Steam haven’t materialized in more than a decade. If anything, the advantages of Steam have become more apparent.
I just fucking pirate in that case. That’s a simple fix. I’m not buying games from dev sites directly and I’m not putting up with bs. I’d rather never play a game again if it got that bad. It’s like YouTube, barely anything is worth the hassle. Make it worse and I’m done entirely.
There have been reports of Valve telling developers they can’t sell their game cheaper elsewhere (such as on a platform with a smaller cut than Steam’s 30%). But I think that was refuted.
Didn’t see it being refuted. I heard emails were leaked
Supposedly it was actually about someone wanting to sell Steam keys off Steam for cheaper, but I cba to find the proof right now so it could also be fake news.
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Valve does a lot of things pretty badly, it’s just that they and the fans control the narrative.
Apart from running gambling for children (pretty hefty thing to put aside, but still), what do you mean?
Quarter machines and Pokémon cards are gambling, too. Parents are shitty. Their kids shouldn’t even be on steam until older and then why do they have credit cards? Parents are crap.
Parents have nothing to do with a company that designed and implemented a gambling machine into your kid’s favourite game about killing people.
All launchers mustdie and devs need to go back to selling their games directly.
Nothing stops them and yet they mostly don’t. There is no good way for a dev to put a game before your eyes, so they have to have some kind of store to do it.
…yes there is - fucking socials. Make a cool trailer, that they do anyway, and use interns to spam it to gaming groups and just tag the hell out of it.
Shit like that could work 10 years ago, not anymore. Not that it worked reliably 10 years ago. You essentially want people to spend all the money and time making a game, and then gamble on the algorythm and that Zukerberg will allow anyone to see your shit. And if you lose the gamble, enjoy your 7 buyers and no shot to get anything in the future.
No wonder nobody actually does that, and people publish on Steam where there are oodles of mechanisms to connect people with money who want a game and people with a game who want money.Or pay MORE to Steam to promote your upcoming game? Please.
Yes, pay more to Steam to get people buying it and also enjoy other Steam perks. Or, pay (presumably) less and receive nothing and not get your money back.
One of the most accurate descriptions of this entire beef.
Steam does nothing and just keeps winning.
it doesn’t just do nothing, it sticks to its core idea : we can’t do as much as the community can when it comes to making games, how do we maximise the community’s possible output?
People love to shit on valve working on lootboxes, but I was there to see how it developed. It was there as part of a way of getting money back to the people making stuff, which is why a shitload of the TF2 hats came from the community and steam workshop. The system came from a left wing greek economist, before , you know, he BECAME Minister of Finance for greece (for half a year)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yanis_Varoufakis
This is why they have steam OS, steam greenlight, SFM, etc etc.
Valve doesn’t make games anymore, because they know hobbyists can make shitloads of more games than them, they need a platform to shove them into.
Also, the other goal is to improve and extend the PC gaming space, which is why they are working on SteamOS, the deck, and all the other shit they are working on. Because of the work they put into making steam work to make game distrobution better than piracy (LITERALLY said by Gabe), PC releases became synonymous with “Steam”, which is why whenever you have a game announcement, you get “New game : Available on (XboxLogo : PS5Logo : SteamLogo)”
Valve is doing stuff. Just not, you know, making HL3 or nothing.
I’m baffled that I didn’t already know that lootboxes were created by the husband of the woman that the Pulp hit Common People was most likely written about.
In a service business, if you do things right, people think you’re doing nothing.
This also applies to IT support.
“everything works fine, why do we pay you people?”
“everything is broken, why do we pay you people!”
God?
That assumes God exists to serve us.
