Gabe is helping, sure, but he isn’t holding up gaming. People were gaming on Linux before Proton even existed, myself included. Also, even if Valve went away completely, Proton is open-source and there are people like GloriousEggroll who work on Proton entirely as a community member. Proton will live on, specifically because it is open-source. All the progress made on Proton won’t suddenly disappear, all the games that were previously playable on Proton will still be playable on Proton.
It’s a somewhat reasonable fear but it’s not a realistic fear. Proton isn’t going anywhere.
Additionally, if Steam would start to morph into what is posted here, it would simply be integrated into Heroic and / or lutris just as Epic is right now. There would be no need to actually launch steam anymore but just use it as a background service to pipe your games into something else.
Proton will live on, specifically because it is open-source.
Don’t just thank open source; thank copyleft for the fact that Valve couldn’t make a closed-source fork of it even if it wanted to.
Even if they want to open-source it, an issue is the amount of work of organizing the repository, making sure it’s properly organized and doesn’t have any files they don’t want to distribute, and then maintaining that with future versions.
What? Proton (i.e., WINE) has been LGPL Free Software since before Valve even touched it.
Sorry, what I mean is, if Valve wasn’t forced to keep it opensource, I think a big factor against would be the extra work
Steam, my Steam library and Proton could disappear. But at least it will have supported a big traction in the ecosystem : Wine, DXVK, Lutris, Heroic Launcher, Bazzite, etc… are all open source projects (so they can’t really disappear) that have never moved as fast as they are today.
I already have enough games to last a lifetime, stored to my storage
Yeah hate to say it but by the time this golden age ends with valve I’ll prob either not be gaming as much anyway or to your point have enough that I won’t really care about the newer games.
I mean, I’m not even bummed! Life has gotten very busy, but I have about 10 old standbys in multiple genres. When time allows, I can get tons of enjoyment out of them.
I look forward to playing them years into the future and don’t feel limited. It’s rare that a new game piques my interest and rarer that it hits my “list”
The life expectancy of 75 is an average (of the US population i assume), billionaires are likely to live longer
Fit billionaires do. What happens to gaben’s heart and arteries are anyone’s guess. He is getting healthier but you can’t undo damage completely.
Gaben is not exactly an inspiring portrait of health…
The latest pictures of him look good, though. The man has definitely lost some weight.
75 years of nation-wide life expectancy is also likely to include early deaths due to accidents, cancer and such. People who die of “old age” typically do later than 75.
Yep, and that was true even going all the way back through history. People weren’t routinely dying in their 30s or whatever before modern medicine; it’s just that a lot more of them were dying in infancy/early childhood and that brought down the average. (That’s the situation anti-vaxxers are trying to go back to, BTW.)
When people talks about life expectancy 99.99% of the time they mean life expectancy at birth, at every year the life expectancy change. Using this life table someone with 61 years, have a life expectancy of 19.7 years, that means he’s expected to live until he’s 80.
I would say it’s appropriate to loop cancer deaths into the “old age” bucket – DNA getting old and making mistakes replicating seems relevant.
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Plus Gaben has been doing some serious work on his health recently so the fat part no longer applies.
I think Gabe has been getting healthy lately. Last picture I saw of him he was looking like he lost a lot of weight. Maybe repost this in 10 years and then we can panic.
A billionaire who is 61 is very likely to outlive 75, even if they’re fat.
He actually lost a bunch of weight recently
Aside from valve probably having a hit by bus plan, I’m pretty sure ownership of valve is actually split pretty evenly so it will likely fall to another senior dev who understands what to do.
And that one “old fat guy” is constantly under attack from degenerates because “sTeAm mOnoPoLy”.
Steam/Valve is pretty much one of the only companies I actually am perfectly willing to let be a monopoly as they currently stand. Especially since they have come a long ways towards making gaming so much more accessible to Linux users, like me, who don’t know how to take full advantage of wine.
Dehumanizing people who recognize the power of overwhelming market share is a lot worse than pointing out the power of overwhelming market share.
Folks will shit on Alan Wake II for only releasing on EGS, like that’s obviously the only reason it’s not selling well… and then refuse to consider the implications of that claim. I have led people by the nose through what it means when there’s only one store that really matters, and developers are generally screwed if they can’t or won’t sell through that one store.
I don’t understand this mentality. If we oppose monopolistic sales platforms when it’s Amazon, Google Play, or the Apple store why should we turn a blind eye when suddenly we like a particular company.
I’m not contesting that Steam offers the best user experience by a mile (it truly beats Epic and Gog by miles), but that doesn’t erase the downsides of having a single entity with a grip on the entire market.
Steam isn’t a monopoly, I can get my games elsewhere (epic, gog, humble store, origin etc). But Steam is dominating the market because it does it better. It offers value and features that others don’t, and it generally hasn’t abused its dominant market position to squeeze the consumer or crush their competitors. The closest thing to enshittification we’ve seen from Steam was them allowing third party DRM and launchers, which isn’t something they wanted, it’s them backing down from a stand-off.
I want competition, but there’s good competition and bad competition. Good competition is what we see from Steam and gog, where they stand out by being good at what they do and giving customers what they want.
For an example of bad competition, just look at streaming sites. We went from everything being on Netflix to everything being divided among dozens of shitty platforms, each of which costs more, and the prices keep going up, especially if you don’t want ads. Nothing was improved for the consumer when Netflix lost its defacto monopoly. Which isn’t to say that Netflix is great, only that the competition for marketshare has only made things worse for the consumer.
I think it’s easy to look at all the bullshit EA and Ubisoft and the like pull now, and imagine that same pattern from streaming playing out in gaming.
For an example of bad competition, just look at streaming sites. We went from everything being on Netflix to everything being divided among dozens of shitty platforms, each of which costs more, and the prices keep going up, especially if you don’t want ads. Nothing was improved for the consumer when Netflix lost its defacto monopoly. Which isn’t to say that Netflix is great, only that the competition for marketshare has only made things worse for the consumer.
Not to sound like a ancap idiot or whatever, but I’d imagine that has to do with the fact that streaming services don’t actually compete with one another. Exclusivity deals mean they don’t actually compete in terms of user experience, features, ease of use, higher video or audio quality than their competition, improved bitrate, whatever. Instead, they just compete based on who can snap up what IPs for the cheapest, which is just a game of whoever has the most money, whoever can outbid their competitors. Then, you’re not going to netflix or hulu or disney+ because of the features of the platform, you’re going to them because they have some IP that the other platforms just straight up don’t, and if you want to watch both IPs you gotta pay for both. So, it’s not really competition, in the conventional sense.
See my other comment
Everybody would love 2 or 3 more good healthy alternative to even the playing field. Because having the future of fun hang by the tread of a single not-corrupt-to-the-core company is fucking stressfull. But dunking on valve is not the way to a healthy gaming marketplace.
I will continue dunking on Valve as long as they remain the reason good, healthy alternatives can’t exist. I will not re-hash the whole arguments here, please see my other replies in this thread.
I have read your arguments, I just fundamentaly disagree. I do not want to lower the ceiling until valve is as crappy as the rest. I want the floor to rise. Basically valve do not stop other companies from competing. Nothing is stopping EGS from including and contributing to proton. allowing and even helping developers to have their games on multiple marketplaces. Building awesome services to provide to developers.
Basically valve do not stop other companies from competing
So is there something you didn’t understand that I can clarify, or are we in agreement that Valve needs to discard the PMFN policy?
Is it a shitty businiss practice? Absolutly. Should valve as the only company allow others to under cut them? No that would be insane. Should it be regulated as illegal businiss practices for everyone - yes absolutly.
Okay, fair enough.
It’s not their fault epic sucks
I think the whole “monopoly bad” notion is a bit off. You start opposing monopolies, but then people realized that duopolies are also bad, and next thing you know we talk about triopolies and centiopolies and whatnot.
So I think the actual number is not the thing that matters, and instead the thing we should be worrying about is cartels.
The defining feature of a cartel is the ruthless action it takes to kill competition. The monopolies everyone are so mad about are cartels of single companies, but the bad thing about them is their cartellic behavior - not the fact they are along in the market.
Steam is not a cartel.
That’s like being okay with a dictator because they’re a benevolent dictator. Even if things are good in that moment, you’re bound for enshittification when that person is no longer in power, a la the fears of the OP.
More like a democracy with no term limits and a leader with 90+% popularity rate.
Sure, steam looks powerful, as if they can do whatever they want. But you have to look at why steam is so powerful, it’s because people like steam. If steam uses that power for anticompetitive behavior, people will stop liking steam and it will lose a lot of power.
Just like if the leader does something that the people don’t like, suddenly the approval rating is no longer at 90+% and he loses the next election.
Oh so its ok because they haven’t exercised their power in a way you don’t like yet. Makes perfect sense.
Yes. The subtle distinction between having physically fit legs capable of kicking babies and actually kicking babies.
This would be a good metaphor if there was a massive financial incentive to kick babies.
Maybe not financial, but intrusive thoughts are a thing…
See my other comment in this thread. Steam does exhibit what you call “cartellic behavior”.
Attack from that angle then, not from something that strongly correlates with it.
I’m confused what you mean.
Sorry. Terrible wording on my part.
My argument is that instead of attacking Valve for being big, you should attack them for doing bad things. Your “other comment in this thread” (I assume https://lemmy.world/comment/10668748 ?) describes an aggressive practice done by Valve. Why not lead with that? The problem is not the size of these companies per se, but the way they’ve reached that size and the way they weaponize it against competitors. Focusing on attacking the size and the monopoly status of the companies is just saying “it’s not okay to be successful”.
A nice word choice.
I’m going to use it this way next time.
Because it isn’t a monopoly, shut up already.
Tbf monopolies are sometimes unavoidable. Like the water company or the energy company (at least the ones that actually own the cables). Usually natural monopolies are nationalized though.
Even if steam is not a natural Monopoly, competition is possible, we allow it to be a monopoly because we like it, not the other way around. There are plenty of digital stores, you can at any time buy almost any game from an alternative, I’m not aware of steam having any exclusivity agreement with any game (except the ones that valve made).
Valve also doesn’t use shopping platform monopoly methods such as artificially making process low by selling at a loss, which is the main problem with other monopolies like Amazon.
It also doesn’t bundle 100 unnecessary services to the subscription. It doesn’t even have a subscription.
Sure, you can’t move your steam games to another platform, but you can get new ones. It’s not much of a problem having games from different platforms anyway, GoG for example even let’s you launch steam games from the GoG launcher. And you can always go back to good old shortcuts on a folder.
The moment steam starts enshittifing, it will be very easy to switch to another platform. Compared with other platforms, like any social media or YouTube.
Valve also doesn’t use shopping platform monopoly methods such as artificially making process low by selling at a loss, which is the main problem with other monopolies like Amazon.
That isn’t the only method. There is also the “[Platform] Most Favored Nation” clause, which eliminates the ability to undercut the platform elsewhere. This allows the platform to leverage it’s market share and benefits to maintain dominance, raising the price floor of the market so nobody can compete on cost. Being the dominant platform, with better economies of scale and consumer intertia, this gives them an advantage in that competing platforms have a difficult time being the better choice.
Valve uses a PMFN clause. See my other comments for links to relevant court cases.
The moment steam starts enshittifing, it will be very easy to switch to another platform. Compared with other platforms, like any social media or YouTube.
Being familiar with “enshitify”, you should go read more of Cory Doctorow’s (who coined the term) writing over on pluralistic.net. He writes frequently about monopolies (his writing on Amazon’s monopolistic practices (skip to the part about high fees and raising prices) are applicable to Valve’s PMFN clause). He also has explicitly given social media platforms as examples of platforms prone to enshitification because of the high network effects.
I don’t think it’s quite as simple as “let’s crack down on steam like other monopolies” as what do you crack down on?
They do little to no anti competitive behaviour, clutching at straws would be that they require you to keep price parity on steam keys (except on sales).
All these other monopolies do lots of shady stuff to get and maintain their monopoly, so you generally want to stop them doing those things. Steam doesn’t do anything shady to maintain it’s monopoly it just carries on improving it’s platform and ironically improving the users experience and other platforms outside of their own.
Like what do you do to stop steam being so popular outside of just arbitrarily making them shitter to make the other store fronts seem ok by comparison?
The 30% cut is often something cited and maybe that could be dropped slightly, but I’m happy for them to keep taking that cut if they continue to invest some of it back into the eco system.
Look at other platforms like Sony, MS who take 30% to sell on their stores, THEN charge you like £5 a month if you want multiplayer and cloud saves etc. Steam just gives you all this as part of the same 30%.
Epic literally does anti competitive things like exclusivity and taking games they have some stake in off other store fronts or crippling their functionality.
Steam has improved how I play games, it has cloud saves, virtual controllers, streaming, game sharing, remote play together, VR support, Mod support and this is all part of their 30%, the other platforms take same and do less, or take less but barely function as a platform.
Anti monopoly is great when a company is abusing it’s position, but I don’t feel Valve is, they are just genuinely good for pc gaming and have single handily made PC gaming a mainstream platform.
They do little to no anti competitive behaviour, clutching at straws would be that they require you to keep price parity on steam keys (except on sales).
It is very much not clutching at straws to claim that. That policy is a major element of the Wolfire v. Valve case. You can also look at how despite charging a 12% platform fee, Epic Games Store does not sell games 18% cheaper.
It’s an abuse of Steam’s established market share and consumer habits to coerce publishers into not offering consumers a fair price on other platforms. It very literally stops EGS from competing on price, which is pretty much the only area where Epic can beat out Steam, since Steam otherwise is much more convenient, provides more functionality, and has more community-generated content (i.e. workshop material).
It’s hard to say that isn’t anti-competitive, especially because such a policy is only effective due to Steam’s existing market share.
Epic literally does anti competitive things like exclusivity and taking games they have some stake in off other store fronts or crippling their functionality.
This is a fair complaint against Epic, I agree.
Other people are making good counter arguments, so I’m just going to address one bit:
You can also look at how despite charging a 12% platform fee, Epic Games Store does not sell games 18% cheaper.
Epic hasn’t been running their game store for very long, and they’ve been operating it at a loss to secure market share. They lose hundreds of millions of dollars a year on their store. This is mostly due to them buying exclusive rights to games, but my point is that the EGS is not a successful, self sustaining business. Epic taking a 12% cut doesn’t mean that 12% is enough money, because their whole business model is about losing money to attract users.
You also have to remember that the storefront cut is an upfront cost with an unclear long-term cost. Valve is promising to always host the game and cover the bandwidth for every future download and update, no matter how many updates or how many times someone downloads it. Not to mention that they also will host mods, provide matchmaking, video streaming, and many other benefits.
It’s also not about whether 30% is the right number or not. It’s about how Valve has made it impossible to choose a different number at all.
The argument has little to nothing to do with Epic’s business strategy—it’s 12%, along with the 30% of Steam, is merely a feature of the landscape in which publishers operate. Whether 12% is sustainable for the platform long-term or not, Valve is coercing the market so that publishers cannot take advantage of it.
Sure, let’s look at that lawsuit.
Steam Key Price Parity Provision. Valve nominally allows game publishers to make some limited third-party sales of Steam-enabled games through its “Steam Keys” program. Steam Keys are alphanumeric codes that can be submitted to the Steam Gaming Platform by gamers to access a digital copy of the purchased game within the Steam Gaming Platform, even when the game is not purchased through the Steam Store. Steam Keys can be sold by rival distributors including the Humble Store, Amazon, GameStop, and Green Man Gaming.
But Valve has rigged the Steam Keys program so that it serves as a tool to maintain Valve’s dominance. Among other things, Valve imposes a price parity rule (the “Steam Key PriceParity Provision”) on anyone wanting to sell Steam Keys through an alternative distributor. Put explicitly by Valve, “We want to avoid a situation where customers get a worse offer on the Steam store.” But that is equivalent to preventing gamers from obtaining a better offer from a competing distributor. The effect of this rule is to stifle price competition.
Because of this rule, Valve can stop competing game stores from offering consumers a lower price on Steam-enabled games in order to shift volume from the Steam Store to their storefronts. Even if a rival game store were to charge game publishers a lower commission than Valve’s high 30% fee, the distributor would not gain more sales because the game publishers could not charge a lower price in its store. Game publishers and consumers suffer because this rule keeps Valve’s high 30% commission from being subject to competitive pressure.
This Price Parity Provision is one of the reasons why Valve has been able to continue to charge an inflated 30% commission for many years, even as that commission is plainly above the levels that would prevail in a competitive market. Competition would normally force such an inflated commission to come down to competitive levels—but Valve’s restraints prevent those competitive forces from operating as they would in a free market.
Because of Valve’s restraint, publishers cannot utilize alternative distributors to avoid the 30% tax that Valve has set for the market. Thus, they reluctantly market their games primarily through the dominant Steam Store where Valve takes its 30% fee. While several distributors have tried to compete with Valve by charging lower commissions on Steam Keys, those efforts have largely failed to make a dent in the Steam Store’s market share because publishers using those distributors had to charge the same inflated prices they set on the Steam Store.
Moreover, even if a game publisher wanted to scale up its use of Steam Keys to promote competition, Valve has made it clear that it would shut down such efforts. When Valve recognizes that a game publisher is selling a significant volume of Steam Keys relative to its Steam Store sales, Valve can, at its own discretion, threaten the game publisher and refuse to provide more Steam Keys. Thus, Valve uses the Steam Key program as another tool to ensure that the vast majority of sales take place on the Steam Store, where Valve gets its 30% commission on nearly every sale.
So if you want to sell steam keys, you need to offer a similar deal on steam as you would wherever you’re selling those steam keys. This doesn’t apply to other storefronts like GOG, Epic, the Ubisoft store, the EA store or the Windows store, this is only about selling steam keys. So if you want to avoid giving Valve a cut of the sale while still using their platform to distribute your game, Valve is going to get upset and take action to prevent you from doing that.
There is also a section about
Price Veto Provision. Valve also requires game publishers to agree to give Valve veto power over their pricing in the Steam Store and across the market generally (the “Price Veto Provision”). Valve selectively enforces this provision to review pricing by game publishers on PC Desktop Games that have nothing to do with the Steam Gaming Platform at all. Through this conduct, prices set in the Steam Store serve as a benchmark that leads to inflated prices for virtually all PC Desktop Games.
which I think was the focus of a different lawsuit that mostly talked about a Most Favored Nation clause. This one is a little more complicated, but this lawsuit ended up getting dismissed. I’m not even close to being a lawyer so I don’t know why exactly, but this video seems to make a pretty good argument for why this isn’t a good legal argument. To summarize: there isn’t actually any proof that this kind of clause is actually anti-competitive and violates anti-trust laws. There’s also no telling whether or not other storefronts have similar conditions in place, because apparently these kind of Most Favored Nation clauses are fairly standard in some industries.
Also being realistic if Valve were to drop their cut to 20% game prices wouldn’t change, the publishers would just pocket the difference, as we have seen with Epic.
You can’t point to current publisher behavior on EGS, because their behavior at present is influenced by Valve’s price policy (called the “Platform Most Favored Nation” or “PMFN” clause in the court filing) which is the foundation of the anti-competitive case against Valve.
Looking at your other comment, I can say that Ubisoft tried ditching steam, but their prices didn’t really change even though they were paying a lower commission to epic than they would have to valve. So they would have had the ability change their prices to whatever they wanted on the epic store without fear of valve vetoing the price, because those games weren’t being sold on steam.
Steam clearly wins on features, the only metric to beat them on is price. Epic is trying to do so, but publishers are not actually lowering the cost on their platform because of Valve’s policies—policies which are only effective because a publisher cannot afford to be delisted from Steam due its large market share.
Is there any actual proof of this? Epic is well known for giving games away for free, the best price customers can hope for. Yet they still can’t seem to retain a loyal customer base. Maybe the price isn’t the most important factor for a digital distribution platform.
So if you want to sell steam keys…
Yeah, to be honest that portion of the Wolfire case is pretty weak in my opinion. The Wolfire case isn’t only about steam keys, though, it also alleges that the PMFN clause applies to all game listings outside of Steam.
I’m not even close to being a lawyer so I don’t know why exactly, but this video seems to make a pretty good argument for why this isn’t a good legal argument.
I watch the timestamp provided. The video appears to me to suggest that it is a well-founded legal complaint given you can establish the MFN is the cause of the lack of differentiated pricing. The commentator seems to dismiss the idea that such an effect is evident in the information provided, and seems wishy-washy on a lot of his claims about economic principles. I’ll take his word on the legal front, but for the economic side I will turn to the plethora of academic and legal publications on the effects of MFN clauses (which support the anti-competitive effects alleged by the filing).
Also it looks like the Colvin wasn’t dismissed, it was consolidated into the Wolfire class-action.
There’s also no telling whether or not other storefronts have similar conditions in place, because apparently these kind of Most Favored Nation clauses are fairly standard in some industries.
Yep, and the MFN is also a point in the monopoly proceedings against Amazon.
Looking at your other comment, I can say that Ubisoft tried ditching steam, but their prices didn’t really change even though they were paying a lower commission to epic than they would have to valve. So they would have had the ability change their prices to whatever they wanted on the epic store without fear of valve vetoing the price, because those games weren’t being sold on steam.
This is interesting, I was unaware. I’ll have to look into it.
Not to be nitpicky (because this might be solid counter-evidence), but do we know that in a universe without the Steam MFN policy Ubisoft wouldn’t have listed the games concurrently on Steam for 18% higher?
Is there any actual proof of this? Epic is well known for giving games away for free, the best price customers can hope for. Yet they still can’t seem to retain a loyal customer base. Maybe the price isn’t the most important factor for a digital distribution platform.
Strikes me as a little beside the point. A randomly rolled free game once a week is almost nothing compared to the sea of purchases in the game industry. If I want to buy game XYZ, the free weekly does me no good—at most, it gets me to install Epic (which is what they want). But it isn’t going to change the fact that Steam gives more bang for the buck, all else equal.
The fact remains, that Steam is preventing games from being listed for less on Epic. So if price isn’t the most important factor, why does Steam feel the need to impose such a policy?
Not to be nitpicky (because this might be solid counter-evidence), but do we know that in a universe without the Steam MFN policy Ubisoft wouldn’t have listed the games concurrently on Steam for 18% higher?
We can go back and look at the historical prices for The Division 2 and see that Ubisoft didn’t have a lower baseline price on their own store compared to the epic store. So either Epic has an MFN policy as well, or Ubisoft would most likely want to keep their prices consistent across platforms and stores.
Strikes me as a little beside the point. A randomly rolled free game once a week isn’t going to change anyone’s purchasing habits or change the landscape of the marketplace. If I want to buy game XYZ, the free weekly does me no good—at most, it gets me to install Epic (which is what they want). But it isn’t going to change the fact that Steam gives more bang for the buck, all else equal.
That’s the thing: you’re being given a random game every week and that’s still not enough to get people to stick around. The games they’re giving away are often pretty good too, and yet it’s not enough to convince people that the Epic Games Store is worth using. And looking at the store now, it seems they’re just giving back 5% of the money you spend, meaning if you opt into their ecosystem, all their games actually are cheaper. At some point you need to admit that people won’t abandon steam just because prices are lower somewhere else. Because the alternative would mean that piracy would be everyone’s preferred method of getting games.
The fact remains, that Steam is preventing games from being listed for less on Epic. So if price isn’t the most important factor, why does Steam feel the need to impose such a policy?
We also don’t really know that they do. The source saying that the MFN policy exists at all is the CEO of Epic Games saying so on twitter. And I’m pretty sure the lawsuit says that it’s “selectively enforced”, so there aren’t any actual examples of Valve vetoing a game’s price based on the price in another store.
We can go back and look at the historical prices for The Division 2 and see that Ubisoft didn’t have a lower baseline price on their own store compared to the epic store. So either Epic has an MFN policy as well, or Ubisoft would most likely want to keep their prices consistent across platforms and stores.
Thanks for digging that up, interesting to note. Epic might have an MFN, or maybe Ubisoft’s internal publishing overhead is roughly 12%.
That’s the thing: you’re being given a random game every week and that’s still not enough to get people to stick around
I don’t know what you envision when you say “stick around”. Do people uninstall Steam when they install Epic? No, they don’t. You just have both installed. The free game gimmic is for you to download the platform; that’s the first hurdle, but it does little to change your preference between platforms when it comes time to make a purchase.
And looking at the store now, it seems they’re just giving back 5% of the money you spend, meaning if you opt into their ecosystem, all their games actually are cheaper.
Interesting point on the 5%, I was unaware of that.
We also don’t really know that they do. The source saying that the MFN policy exists at all is the CEO of Epic Games saying so on twitter. And I’m pretty sure the lawsuit says that it’s “selectively enforced”, so there aren’t any actual examples of Valve vetoing a game’s price based on the price in another store.
What evidence would be needed to convince you?
Clearly, there is a business case for listing a game for less on Epic (or a publisher’s own site!). We can trust the MFN policy most likely exists. What other explanation for the observed behavior can be put forth?
“Selectively enforced” is the wording used by Valve’s own employee. That could mean anything from “only big, noteable games” to “only enforced when we noticed it” to “actually enforced consistently”. Regardless, it can have a chilling effect that causes everyone to step in line.
The fact remains, that Steam is preventing games from being listed for less on Epic.
For that fact to “remain,” it would need to have been established in the first place. At best it’s been alleged.
Wolfire v valve was thrown out right? So they didn’t successfully prove valve were doing anything anti competition.
To my knowledge the price parity is only on steam keys sold elsewhere not for you selling a game on another storefront, happy to be shown evidence that isn’t the case.
In terms of what is a “fair deal” we could quibble about the 30% but that’s literally the only thing up for discussion right? And at the moment that’s an “industry standard” so by all means lower it if they can, I’m all for savings as a consumer, but not at the expense of the service they provide.
For example if Valve personally came to me and said “you can either have games 10% cheaper but we would have to retire X features” I would happily keep the features and forgo the discount.
Also being realistic if Valve were to drop their cut to 20% game prices wouldn’t change, the publishers would just pocket the difference, as we have seen with Epic.
Again most other mainstream platforms take 30% and while I do think they could ALL trim that down a bit, I don’t see why Valve should be the first one to cut back when they offer the most bang for buck, get Sony and MS to reduce their cut and start offering more basic features, then once the competition is ACTUALLY competing we can turn our eyes to Valve.
I think that sums up my perspective here, most storefronts are not trying to compete, they are just offering the bare minimum for same cut and then wondering why everyone wants to use the more feature rich store front… Why wouldnt you?
Oh wow, lots to unpack here. Bear with me.
Wolfire v valve was thrown out right? So they didn’t successfully prove valve were doing anything anti competition.
AFAIK still ongoing, looks like most recent filings were on 06/12.
To my knowledge the price parity is only on steam keys sold elsewhere not for you selling a game on another storefront, happy to be shown evidence that isn’t the case.
The actual terms of the Steam Distribution Agreement are behind an NDA so we can’t publicly know for sure, but Wolfire alleges that it applies to non-key sales (see points 204, 205, 207 of the Wolfire v. Valve filing)
In terms of what is a “fair deal” we could quibble about the 30% but that’s literally the only thing up for discussion right? And at the moment that’s an “industry standard” …
Bit of a chicken and egg situation. Is Steam charging 30% because that’s standard, or is the 30% standard because Steam charges it? Epic’s attempt at 12% at the very least indicates the “industry standard” is much higher than it has to be, which is a good indicator of non-competitive behavior.
There is some slop in this argument because obviously the quality of platforms could influence this; but that is a bit moot due to the price policy preventing competitive pricing (see below).
… so by all means lower it if they can, I’m all for savings as a consumer, but not at the expense of the service they provide.
For example if Valve personally came to me and said “you can either have games 10% cheaper but we would have to retire X features” I would happily keep the features and forgo the discount.
That’s great for you, but I’m sure we could find plenty of consumers who would make that trade. The choice should be available to them.
Also being realistic if Valve were to drop their cut to 20% game prices wouldn’t change, the publishers would just pocket the difference, as we have seen with Epic.
You can’t point to current publisher behavior on EGS, because their behavior at present is influenced by Valve’s price policy (called the “Platform Most Favored Nation” or “PMFN” clause in the court filing) which is the foundation of the anti-competitive case against Valve.
Re: concerns about publishers eating the difference. An ideal greedy publisher would drop the price on Epic by some amount in the middle—cheap enough to convince consumers to buy on Epic instead of Steam (since it yields more revenue to them) without making it too cheap that the difference in profit between a sale on Epic and a sale on Steam goes to 0.
This is how competition between platforms should work. It drives down the cost by some amount, but the publisher isn’t going to pass up the chance to profit where they can.
Again most other mainstream platforms take 30% and while I do think they could ALL trim that down a bit, I don’t see why Valve should be the first one to cut back when they offer the most bang for buck, get Sony and MS to reduce their cut and start offering more basic features, then once the competition is ACTUALLY competing we can turn our eyes to Valve.
I think that sums up my perspective here, most storefronts are not trying to compete, they are just offering the bare minimum for same cut and then wondering why everyone wants to use the more feature rich store front… Why wouldnt you?
I’m confused by your response here since this is addressed in my prior comment. Is there something not quite clear enough?
Steam clearly wins on features, the only metric to beat them on is price. Epic is trying to do so, but publishers are not actually lowering the cost on their platform because of Valve’s policies—policies which are only effective because a publisher cannot afford to be delisted from Steam due its large market share.
There is too much to respond to all, will be interesting to see how the wolfire case continues then.
I just wanted to chime in on the last bit.
So as you say steam wins on features, and Epic and MS have both chosen not to compete on features. It’s not that they can’t, they both have the means and money to do so, they just don’t want to invest the money on the infrastructure incase it’s a big flop I guess.
Either way you are making out like the only valid perspective here is focusing on the game price, but as I said to me the feature set is VERY important. Literally the only reason I use steam over other platforms is the features, being able to use any controller and remap it to however I want. Knowing my saves can be transfered to any computer, streaming to the TV so the kids can play games on it etc.
I appreciate not everyone else uses these features, but some of us do, and this is why steam is the better platform. If MS let me stream games to my TV and use controllers properly etc I would happily get game pass, but their platform is rubbish, same for EGS.
This whole thing is just crap platforms complaining they can’t compete when they havent even tried, they just want the free publicity in the hope they can get more users “in the door”.
It is funny that people think Valve would sell out instead of becoming the big evil.
As Valve continues developing an OS agnostic platform, they start building into various tools that require a Steam account to play games in order to defend their app store. Maybe they buy Unity and make it a Steam exclusive, maybe they make their own engine that can be played on Windows or Linux.
Integrate Chromecast technology to make a console like multimedia device to compete against XBox and PlayStation. Then, start selling video and integrating streaming access.
Push the Steam Store to become bigger. Sure, you aren’t forced to use the Steam Store on most Valve developed hardware, but it is default.
Then, like Google did with Android, pull the tech stack from the open source tools to become wholely integrated with Steam Services.
Most of this already exists and they haven’t taken that tack, though. SteamOS is just Arch and KDE, with access to anything Arch has access to. If you don’t like that, Valve made it trivial to put another OS on the Deck, like Bazzite.
Steam Play is already a streaming technology, which works great and is free to use and has been for like at least a decade.
Steam Store is already gigantic, despite having some well funded competition who has to resort to exclusives and free game giveaways to entice users. It’s already the de facto default game store for PC, and provides lots of extra features beyond just game delivery.
Most of the technology Steam uses (like Proton or GameScope or Arch) are open-source. We can (and do) fork their work for our own purposes regularly.
I don’t think Valve is perfect, but I do think they value their open approach to technology. I think as long as the company is never publicly traded, I would imagine anyone who currently works at Valve would share that attitude with GabeN, otherwise I imagine they wouldn’t work there long.
If they go public and have to report to shareholders, then I completely agree that the enshittification will be swift and merciless. I hope Gabe makes Valve an employee-owned co-op or something when he decides to retire. I can only imagine he has strong plans for the transition of power.
I’m commenting more on how Valve could become evil while maintaining and expanding its markets. Part of that is using open source as a way to reduce development costs while still controlling and monetizing key parts of the tech stack.
You know, as long as their management structure stays relatively similar to what it is, I think I’d be more fine with them being the big evil, compared to basically anyone else.
Edit: and also as long as they stay a private company, that would also be a big concern, but I guess that’s maybe the same as saying their management structure stays the same
I wrote about this a few months ago: https://www.spacebar.news/steam-time-bomb/
Piracy is a service problem. They’ll reap what they sow if they change course. I’m not afraid to hoist my sails again when I need to. ;)
I kind of hope gaben has set up something smart for his death. Eg Valve is owned by a trust.
I think your fear is justified. Gaben needs a personal trainer
Valve is a whole company of people like Gaben.
Also, the big tech bastards haven’t managed to kill off emulation, so that’s encouraging.
Doesn’t really matter if none of those people have authority on the direction of the company, which they don’t.
Yeah the scenario we’re being asked to consider is what if someone else gets control of the company, so whatever power employees nominally have now, they won’t if he dies without deeding the company to a collective.
Realistically, it’s only a matter of time until Steam becomes as enshittificated as any other services. There is profit to be made from Steam selling advertising space and customer data. They can either choose to capitalize on the profits that are in front of them, or allow another company to and take that capital from them. For a business it’s not a matter of what’s right and wrong anymore but consume or be consumed. If Steam isn’t willing to do that someone else will be willing to play the long game and do it. Then it’ll be only a matter of time until Steam gets acquired by another company and then it’s game over.
This doesn’t make any sense. The reason Valve hasn’t been acquired is because it’s privately owned and not up for sale, not because it doesn’t have “enough profit”. In fact it’s extremely profitable, for all we know.
Sure, another company could come along and build a competitor. It’s happened already multiple times, and Steam is doing just fine despite some major titles these days being exclusive to other platforms. Unless Steam drops the ball on something big time, it’s unlikely that people will move to another platform en masse, especially one that is less focussed on consumer interests. No-one can just come in and “take capital away” from Steam, whatever that means, by building a competitor that sells advertising space and “monetizes user data” — they need users first.
… And then there’s the fact that Steam is already “selling advertiser space” today. Games don’t just get featured on their storefront because Gabe likes them. They make deals with publishers for this.
The idea is less that someone makes a competitor and then they actually compete. The idea is that a competitor service is able to lock away one or several big titles, like, say, overwatch, league, fortnite, or whatever else, behind exterior launchers that are maybe more free to do data harvesting. Then, that competitor theoretically eats away more and more of the largest market share, and tries to drive those users from just using their platform for a single game, to maybe using multiple games, maybe with something like a games pass or with free weekend deals or whatever. Once they have that market share, they can give developers better margins, since they’ll be selling customer data at a profit and steam won’t be, maybe with some sort of exclusivity contract baked in, purposely undercutting steam. Then, steam’s been put on the back foot, and the rest is just kind of what has happened to streaming services.
It’s a market, markets trend towards short term gains strategies over long term gains strategies because having faster short term gains means you can more easily crush your competition. It’s like age of empires 2, the first couple minutes of the game is the part that matters the most. That being said, steam has been around for quite some time, and has a good amount of brand loyalty and goodwill built up, and that doesn’t seem to be slowing down anytime soon as they keep one-upping their competition with actual improvements to their platform, like family sharing, screencasting, big picture mode, increased controller support and reassigning, and a full standalone version of linux, that basically all their competitors seem incapable of. So maybe steam has enough of a headstart that, even with a long term gains strategy, even with a, basically, non-evil mentality, they can stay afloat. Who can say.
You’re of course right with the exclusivity argument — that’s a very real possibility, and yet Microsoft has tried it with Call of Duty, one of the most popular franchises ever, and saw very little success with it, resulting in them putting it back on Steam years later. If I were to guess why attempts like this have failed in the past, I would say that Steam is so dominant over the PC gaming market today that not even large franchises going exclusive attract enough of a user base to offset the loss of customers that aren’t buying games only because they’re not on Steam. Add to this the additional overhead of developing and maintaining a competing store front, and the cost-benefit analysis leans clearly towards just being on Steam and accepting their cut of sales. The exclusivity tactic clearly failed even for big titles like CoD, so it definitely won’t work for smaller ones. And we’re not even talking about cutting into the indie game market, which would require making very attractive exclusivity offers to many smaller studios, all for acquiring exclusivity on titles in the hope that they’ll be the next big hit — a very high risk strategy that likely results in a lot of sunken cost short-term.
Once they have that market share, they can give developers better margins, since they’ll be selling customer data at a profit
When we talk about “selling customer data”, I think we need to look in more detail into what this would actually mean in practice. It’s very unlikely that any online storefront could legally literally “sell your personal data” like address etc. that you would enter presumably as part of the payment process to third parties. That’s just illegal almost everywhere in the world, and certainly in the largest PC gaming markets. It wouldn’t lead to significant revenue either, because raw data like that just isn’t very valuable. Instead, I suppose what people mean when they say this (in the context of companies like Google or Facebook) is just the practice of selling advertising services that use the data they have on people to advertisers, who can then target their ads at highly specific segments, improving their return on ad spend. The actual private data though stays with the entity that collected it — because it’s what actually gives them the edge on the market; it allows them to offer better ad targeting than competitors.
How would this apply to Steam or a potential competing storefront? Barely. I assume no-one is arguing that a steam competitor could launch a generic advertising network that could stand against Google or Facebook, so we’re probably talking about advertising within the storefront itself. Steam today already collects information on your interests and customizes the store based on that, plus presumably your location, age group etc. — so they’re pretty much already using your “personal information” to the extent possible in this context. How else could a competitor realistically monetize personal information?
It’s a market, markets trend towards short term gains strategies over long term gains strategies because having faster short term gains means you can more easily crush your competition.
I wouldn’t say that this is the case when we’re talking about trying to eat into the market share of a dominant entity like Steam. Sure, potential competitors can make short-term plays that cut away some market share, but such strategies are expensive, risky, and alone likely don’t lead towards a significantly improved position long-term (exhibit A, again: COD being exclusive to Battle.net).
For better or worse (usually worse), toppling a near-monopoly like Steam is extremely hard for players with big cash, and practically impossible for independent competitors. This is especially true for products that are inherently sticky, like Steam, where people have curated large libraries over decades. The only reason Steam’s dominant position is not hurting the consumer is because their product works well and is in many ways very pro-consumer.
I don’t have the article on hand, but there is a publication from a steam store employee explaining exactly how to get your game onto the front page. The gist of it is that you don’t have to pay Valve. It’s about community engagement (your publisher, I guess).
I’ve read that, IIRC. It was about getting featured organically though. Steam runs promotions for certain game series or even publisher catalogues frequently, with large custom graphics and usually a sale. Obviously I have no way to know for sure, but I can’t imagine that Valve doesn’t get itself paid for those.
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I’d drop Steam if that happened. There are other ways to get games and managers like Lutris make organizing them easy. I’m sure Valve knows this and with how long they’ve been successful, fucking with gamers would not make sense. Look how it’s working or for some of the bigger gaming companies recently.
Valve is a unique company with no traditional hierarchy. In business school, I read a very interesting Harvard Business Review article on the subject. Unfortunately it’s locked behind a paywall, but this is Google AI’s summary of the article which I confirm to be true from what I remember:
According to a Harvard Business Review article from 2013, Valve, the gaming company that created Half Life and Portal, has a unique organizational structure that includes a flat management system called “Flatland”. This structure eliminates traditional hierarchies and bosses, allowing employees to choose their own projects and have autonomy. Other features of Valve’s structure include:
- Self-allocated time: Employees have complete control over how they allocate their time
- No managers: There is no managerial oversight
- Fluid structure: Desks have wheels so employees can easily move between teams, or “cabals”
- Peer-based performance reviews: Employees evaluate each other’s performance and stack rank them
- Hiring: Valve has a unique hiring process that supports recruiting people with a variety of skills
Stack ranking is toxic and removes individuality from a given employees expectations in my opinion.
People should be qualified to give proper unbiased reviews. Just because someone is an excellent engineer does not mean they are good at understanding other people’s expectations and work outputs.
I worked at a company that had no ‘managers’ just the owner, and everyone else. I hated that I had no real way to settle disputes and every single disagreement has to ultimately be resolved by the literal one person who was in charge.
I think there is merit to flat structures, but I don’t think the extreme is always the way to go.
PeopleMakeGames has a two part series on Valve that’s pretty interesting. The second part (here) dives into the structure of the company. It does have a bit of an angle, fwiw, so if you’d prefer something more objective, it might not be a great watch. Personally I think the issues they bring up are valid, but figured I’d mention it.
This, and as long as the company is legally structured to prevent restructuring things will be fine.
A little unsure about the “peer based performance review”, sounds like bullying might somehow have to be kept in check. Otherwise this sounds awesome.
Lots of companies have peer based employee reviews, cliques have the capability to cause harm in these firms but normally the peers reviewing you are rotated each review period to minimalise that and any bad actors can normally seen by management’s review of the peer reviews.
But then remove the management oversight
I don’t believe Valves claim of perfectly flat structure, Gabe is the owner, he if no one else is management and has the power. I’m willing to bet there’s a second level of reviewers for peers, if nothing else then it’s a second separate set of peers reviewing the first set’s reviews to watch for this problem.
Fun fact: Former employees of Valve have said that is actually a huge problem in the organization and that its organizational structure seems to encourage bullying and high-school style “cliquishness” by design.
I mean it’s not as though that’s not a problem in normal companies. It’s just that normal companies can sort of use the guise of structure or professionalism to harangue whatever employees the clique ends up disliking. The cliques are baked in, in a normal company.
Exactly, in a normal structure the bullied employee would just be told they don’t fit the culture.
It can be a problem at other companies, but even worse than average at Valve by virtue of corporate structure. Both of these things can be true.
How does more boring tasks like accounting, legal or facilities work?
They just get ignored, like TF2.
Kinda sounds like how worker cooperatives work tbh, but with Gabe still technically being the owner.
I remember reading a news piece a while back about how the founder of a food company made sure to transfer ownership to the employees before leaving. While we’re talking about worst-case scenarios, let’s also hope for the best and hope that Gabe has a similar plan.
Him being a pretty smart guy overall surely has at least some sort of continuity planned.
It would be best to convert it to full employee ownership if it isn’t yet. As long as a steady stream of good employees keeps revolving in it should be a stable company that provides for its employees and customers.
Do you know everybody who works there and what their ambitions are?
Also, nothing is impossible when you can deploy thepower of acquisition lol i’m less worried about them internally polluting themselves and more about externally being destroyed. We’ve seen this over and over again.
Apparently 50%+ of the company belongs to Gabe himself, presumably he would pass it on to some very trusted. That makes a hostile takeover pretty unlikely.
I would hope he does something like the patagonia guy did.
He could just turn it into a nonprofit at some point with some specific rules in place about how certain things are handled within the company.
He could presumably just spilt his shares equally between all employees
I really hope he is secretly investing in cloning so we can get Gaben (2) joining Valve soon. Or atleast invest some money in uploading his consciousness into a giant metal head 🗿
We’ll never have a gaben (3) 😭
We will if he’s not around to stop us
Well, at least we’ve got global climate change and multiple other threats to the survival of humanity, we won’t have to worry for long.
