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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.
Yeah, that’s going too far, but I understand the reaction to fanning over Valve.
There are a bazillion historical examples of why one should use, not trust, big businesses. They are entities to make transaction with, not people, and they will tighten the screws even if it takes decades.
This is doubly true in the software business.
And if the Valve superfans look at the world in 2026 and somehow don’t see that, I honestly don’t know what to tell them. They’re in such a completely different world than me I don’t know where to start.
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.
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.
I mean, Spotify’s model is the industry standard, and it still suck big time and doesn’t give a shit about artists.
Anyway if I’ve learn anything over the past 10 years, it’s that it would probably be easier to convince a room full of maga to vote for Hillary Clinton than the average gamer to admit that steam sucks. So keep kissing this billionaire’s ass because he really does care about you, and remember Ubisoft and Epic (12% cut) bad.
The “30% is the industry standard” claim is not even true anymore. Epic currently takes 0% to expand its catalog, though from what I remember, it estimated that it needs to take 7% or so to be profitable. Microsoft takes 12%. Itch allows to adjust. GOG’s fee varies from deal to deal. Ubisoft (and EA) no longer sell third-party games, so they’re out of scope here.
The only way I’ve seen people try to counter this is by referring to the mobile and console store fees, but going by the Epic v. Google trial where the jury was asked to define the market and defined it as Android, there’s just no way that argument would hold water. Still, console manufacturers produce at a loss, so they need to make up for that. In the mobile market, Google is already changing its fee to be 20% or less.
Edit: lawsuit->trial
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.
Do You have any idea what the hosting infrastructure, steam works, and traffic costs?
Yeah, not 30% of all PC games. It’s how they turn out absurd profit.
Never said that. But what is better for the dev? Using those services or run their own?
And I am fine with Valve making absurd profits, after all, they have put at least 500.000.000 USD into open source (Around 100-200 external oss devs on payroll for projects like Mesa, SDL,…).
Will I leave steam and call valve out if they get toxic? Yes! Are they evil or the enemy right now? To the contrary.
Using those services or run their own?
If they could have still images and text on the Steam store and a link to their external site for everything else, it’d by far be running their own.
It’s the exposure that Steam has an effective monopoly on.
Not everything has to be black and white. I appreciate Steam, but 30% is absurd. They’re absolutely raising the price of games and taking money away from developers.
GOG takes 30%, most publishers take 30 to 50%, apple app store takes 30%, as does Google.
Is this to high? Maybe, I don’t publish games. But at least it is not absurd in means of industry standards :(
GOG’s fee is flexible, as are publisher contracts, which have no relevance to the discussion, as it’s in addition to store fees and involves major investments. Google is changing its fee to 20%. Epic’s is currently 0%. Microsoft Store’s is 12%, itch’s is adjustable. In the PC market, Valve is pretty much the main outlier at this point.
While the actual monopolies actively making the world a significantly worse place keep getting away.
We ever going to do something about Visa? Because that shit is getting spooky.
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.
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?
glad i’m not the only one who caught that
It’s probably my favorite depiction of god in any media. Obviously if you think about it the whole premise falls apart and he’s a huge dick but in the context of the episode it’s pretty cool beans
haha yeah, he/it was kind of a dick
Bender: You know, I was God once.
God: Yes, I saw. You were doing well until everyone died.
That assumes God exists to serve us.
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.
it doesn’t just do nothing,
Valve is a for profit company, one of their main goals is to make money and they work daily to do that. There are people at Valve who work 8h a day on how to boost profits.
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)
I think you are confusing lootboxes with the items market which was there mainly to compensate the free to play model. If you were there i hope you remember too no DRMs and no third party software launchers to run games.
This is why they have steam OS
They have steam OS because microsoft become one of their competitors
“They have steam OS because microsoft become one of their competitors” Lmfao riiigght like Microsoft just got into the video game selling business, jfc.
Valve makes steamOS because windows fucking sucks and there needs to be an alternative OS for running game without a bunch of garbage like Windows or a completely locked down OS like Macs that they could use on their hardware.
Steam:
Steam is a great example of how a privately held company can out compete publicly traded and venture capital funded corps.
It can take greater risks and can fund initiatives that won’t pay out within the current quarter. The steam deck is a great example of that. A device that no other corporation thought that we wanted and that required like a decade of working with open source linux projects to make happen, that isn’t something that EA would have been able to manage.
Seriously, we need more companies doing nothing and taking 30% fee, becoming super rich corporations making more money than any other company per employee, while devs wonder if they’ll break even
“doing nothing”
Global distribution of exabytes of data, handling the entire e-commerce side and offering great toolings with steamworks while requiring onyl 100 dollars upfront is now considered “nothing”. Yeah, we should definitely go back to a time when steam wasn’t a thing and indie devs were required to have a publisher to even get their games into stores, and those publishers often took 80% of the entire profits. I’m sure indies had a much better time back then when they didn’t have to pay steam!
You missed my point. I’ll repeat it.
30% cut was fine when infrastructure was just not there yet, but 64GB HDD no longer costs 100€ and internet is not metered in megabytes. Like I said, they’re making more money per employee than other corporations. If you genuinely think Valve and Gabe’s fleet of Yachts is not monopolistic squeezing/pricing, then keep on defending corpos.
If they’d have an ounce of fear against competition, they would be lowering that cut to Epic’s levels (which is also not a shining beacon, but you get my point, they clearly enjoy their status and everyone is paying for it)
30% cut was fine when infrastructure was just not there yet, but 64GB HDD no longer costs 100€ and internet is not metered in megabytes.
Steam isn’t just storing stuff and letting people download it. They’re an entire distribution network. There’s not just the tech (which is already expensive in itself), but also the entire legal stuff. Invoicing, legal compliance, fraud prevention, chargeback processing, the customer support (which actually got fairly helpful in the last 2 years) etc.
If you genuinely think Valve and Gabe’s fleet of Yachts is not monopolistic squeezing/pricing
It’s not. Valve has not adjusted their pricing once, at least not upwards. They have reduced the pricing for extremely high-grossing games, but other than that, the price has stuck at 30%. How is that squeezing? Wouldn’t that make them INCREASE the percentage point instead of leaving it where it is?
Also, it’s funny that you talk about “monopolistic”, because epic has probably engaged in more monopolistic behavior with the EGS than steam ever has. And if we compare the features of the EGS (which didn’t even have a shopping cart for the first year of it’s existence) with the feature set of steam, I can absolutely see that a 30% cut is fine.
Now, could they lower it? Probably. But 30% is still worth it for any indie dev and significantly less than any other entity with the size and reach of steam would take for all their services.
Also, it’s funny that you talk about “monopolistic”, because epic has probably engaged in more monopolistic behavior with the EGS than steam ever has
This is stupid. Valve telling developers “you can’t sell your game cheaper on other platforms than on steam” is taking the cake away alone. Textbook anti-trust lawsuit (which might be already happening?)
You somehow keep ignoring the fact that valve makes more money than any other corporation per employee. They are clearly over-charging and you cannot argue against this. Stop defending megacorporations. Or just close your eyes and go gamble on valve games
This is stupid. Valve telling developers “you can’t sell your game cheaper on other platforms than on steam” is taking the cake away alone.
First of all, that’s not entirely true - valve is demanding price parity, meaning long-term undercutting steam is not allowed (something absolutely normal in almost any larger e-commerce scenario btw), but they have no problem if you have sales or value-added offers on other platforms. Now, you can think about price parity what you think, I’m not the biggest fan of it either, but it’s a very common practice, not exclusive to steam and has nothing to do with anti-trust.
You somehow keep ignoring the fact that valve makes more money than any other corporation per employee. They are clearly over-charging and you cannot argue against this
I ignored it because it’s a retarded metric. Yeah, guess what, if you automate a lot, you’re going to need less employees. I have no clue how that has any relevance in if a product is worth it or not. I’m pretty sure the v-servers I’m renting from hetzner involve nobody, it’s all automated, from purchase to setup - should I get it for free now? Would it be fine to have a 30% cut if valve employed like 1000 more people or what is the logic here?
Stop defending megacorporations.
I’m not defending megacorporations, I just don’t agree with you at all. Fundamentally, you are saying “making money bad” which is just a naive and highly uneducated argument to have.
You mean like those paid mods they were trying to introduce together with Bethesda?
Valve does not always win. Users are just more tolerant towards Valve than any other platform because of the cheap games they can buy during a sale. Nothing more.
They introduced a feature, the community didn’t like it, and they canceled it a few days later because of that feedback. What exactly is the problem? Making a mistake and rectifying it within days is not a bad thing at all.
Users are just more tolerant towards Valve than any other platform because of the cheap games they can buy during a sale
If that was the case, people would be extremely tolerant towards the epic game store which regularly throws out games for free, but they aren’t.
It’s funny that they tried to get indie devs paid for their contributions to these games (and therefore incentivizing more great mods) and gamers were like FUCK THAT SHIT! Typical, honestly. So now there’s no legal way to charge for mods and you get to do it only for fun asking people for coffee tips.
Imo this was Bethesda more than valve, anyways, and while it would make both of them too much money doing that it would have gotten regular people paid, too. Which they deserve, by the way.
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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Capitalism good when valve does it?
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Even if Valve’s offering sucked, I still have not seen anyone point out a business practice I would call anticompetitive. They are not buying up studios or publishers, or even paying for timed exclusivity. I have not seen any hint that they are colluding with competitors on prices or fees. I haven’t seen then accused of stealing IP or poaching personnel. They readily welcome Microsoft and Sony to release games on Steam, and they have released their own games on consoles including the Switch. They let you install Windows or whatever else on the Deck, if you want to for some reason.
Billionaires should not exist, and Gabe Newell is no exception. He should be taxed more. I don’t love one company having so much control of this space. But I also don’t want to have a dozen different crappy launchers from different companies to deal with. There are a lot of benefits to the user to having everything centralized in one place.
How do we tax Gabe that much without necessarily watering down his share in the company and ensuring that outside investors enshittify it in the process?
- Taxing those outside investors too
- Taxing Valve as a corporation more, making them less profitable and less attractive to said investors.
- I’m not even convinced this would be an issue at all really. Remember Valve is not publicly traded. I suspect Gabe would hold on to controlling ownership as long as it was profitable, and remember that taxes are usually on profits.
- Even if outside investors move in and enshittify, the moment they start doing anticompetitive you hit them with antitrust suits. Not to mention the industry can also be regulated even before all this: a lot of governments are cracking down on lootboxes already.
I don’t want to fucking tax them! Fuck that! Do you see who runs this government?!?! Fuck that shit!
Redistribute that fucking wealth right back to us immediately! Don’t let those greedy government pigs take it! I’d rather valve have it!
Leave the multi billion dollar corporation alone
I looked at the lawsuit details. Steam basically did what everyone else does. Apple, google, EA, everyone.
They charge 30% of the sale. They require that the steam price be the same as an external price.
It’s the most nothing of nothings.
To compare, what MS did when they got smacked with their monopoly lawsuit is bundle IE with the OS and they both made it hard to switch the default and they’d constantly try to switch you back to IE.
*steam price the same as external price only if the external sale is for steam keys. And you have some time to offer an equivalent sale on steam.
This is the point everyone tends to gloss over, especially with the case brought against Valve from the Overgrowth dev where it’s pretty relevant to their case. Glad to see someone has actually read the friggin’ Steam TOS.
The problem is that, allegedly, there are threatening emails from Valve to developers who tried to sell for lower prices on other platforms (NOT Steam keys). If this is true, then there is actual ammunition against Valve.
I’ll point out, when I went to sell my book on Apple Books, they had this in their TOS as well - I wasn’t allowed to sell the same digital book for less somewhere else. It is not a new or unique agreement.
The entirety of third party selling on Amazon is under this agreement. This is why i don’t think Steam will lose. Not because they shouldn’t, but because the money and power behind this are not valve at all.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
