I just hope Steam can be broken up
Make the workshop and community their own company
This is literally the most popular opinion.
Oh, I dunno. Everyone seems to bitch about Apple not wanting to give any leeway to Epic on the App Store. Personally I find Epic ridiculously hypocritical, so I say let them eat dirt.
Everyone likes to shit on Epic so it’s probably not a very unpopular opinion ether but there is a big difference between the App and Play store and Steam, only one of them doesn’t use anti-competiive practices and the other two also force their payment provider which is rather shitty!
This is also the most popular opinion.
Then why are must of the comments arguing against it?
This post has more upvotes than most of the posts on this server.
Yeah. Dusk is an amazing game and the creator is talented as fuck but this is “I like oxygen” levels of unpopular opinion lol
Wait, this is unpopular? Well shit, I’m right there with you. I was already not liking Epic for many reasons, but the Satisfactory exclusivity deal seared them to a cinder for me. At least Valve is not publicly traded and the owner never has any intent on doing so. He is able to base his decisions on what he wants and is able to treat employees, customers, and content creators more fairly, even if it hurts his bottom line. Honestly, that is all I need to know about the man. He could go public and make billions, but he doesn’t. He wants the control and wants the closed company. In the modern world it is rare and, to me, laudable.
I get it. Steam doesn’t seem to do exclusivity deals with 3rd party titles. So you could still sell your game on gog and humble without issue.
They control prices though, can’t sell for less on another platform.
Of course you can, just not steam keys.
If it was only about Steam keys, there wouldn’t have been a lawsuit.
They don’t though? Devs set the price. Steam just says that you need the same base price there as elsewhere.
Yeah because if you don’t, they delist your game. That’s the literal definition of anti-competitiveness. They could never get away with that if they weren’t a monopoly.
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This is a great opportunity to mention 15th Anniversary of GOG.
If only they supported Linux better, or really like at all… I know you can grab the files and install without DRM. But, the whole lack of a client makes it a nuisance to use. I used to buy everything on GOG when possible. Since I got a Steam Deck that’s changed. I shouldn’t have to use Heroic Launcher IMO…
Why shouldn’t you have to use heroic launcher or lutris? The whole point of drm free is that you don’t need a specific launcher connected to Internet.
Because consumers are lazy and don’t care about ownership.
Because they should be able to make a launcher that works. The Windows GOG launcher (GOG Galaxy) is a joke. They want to make one launcher to rule them all but it struggles with almost every one. I have a Windows computer for games that require it (Valorant mostly for me) and even on PC I use Heroic. I don’t want crazy features. I just want an officially supported GOG client that works well on Linux and Windows.
Galaxy works fine on windows. It’s far more stable than steam btw.
In the meantime heroic or lutris work very well. So why is there even a need for something else? I’d argue it’s better if a company don’t hold your game hostage for you to play them.
“It’s far more stable than steam btw.”
I’ll admit I’ve only used Linux for the past 5-6 years, but I think the last time steam crashed for me was almost a decade ago or something? Is it not stable on windows anymore?
It is stable.
It does crash regularly, or it stops working and you need to restart it, and it always did this kind of thing. The obnoxious “I need to update before you’re allowed to play” is hardly a selling feature. The videos and the adds are both obnoxious and intensive on resources.
Galaxy has its ups and downs, but overall I feel its lighter and much more responsive. The interface is much less cluttered, much more logical and clear. And it’s not a fucking drm.
I thank vavle for what did for Linux gaming. Proton is brilliant and incredibly useful and valuable. But I also despise them for steam being litteraly a DRM. So I will forgive cdpr if they need time to develop galaxy on Linux and I’ll use lutris and heroic game launcher in the meantime.
It is trivial to disable all the video content (and some more) on steam if you happen to be on low-end hardware that needs that (or just if you don’t like it, really)
It does crash regularly, or it stops working and you need to restart it, and it always did this kind of thing.
Then you use it wrong. No idea how that’s possible but I run Steam on Windows, macOS, and Linux and except very early in the life cycle of the Steam Deck, I can’t remember Steam ever crashing on me in the last 10 or so years.
I have the exact opposite experience as you. I have never once seen steam crash. My steam account is now 9 years old. I was absolutely stoked when I saw GOG Galaxy was trying to handle not only GOG games but games from other platforms as well. But my experience with that has been so bad. It’s fine for GOG games, but I’d much rather just add all my games into steam at this point. So as for stability, I don’t see any way that GOG Galaxy could ever beat Steam.
For Linux support, Steam is a DRM which is a detractor. But with all they’ve done with proton, steam input, steam deck OS… I’d say that Steam is definitely doing more for the Linux ecosystem than GOG.
Steam has been working on the steam deck for how long now? 5? 10 years? Gog has that much time to catch up.
And as I said, I don’t deny the role steam played and is still playing for Linux gaming. But it’s still a drm. And that’s something I simply cannot ignore.
I do use steam mind you. But I’ll use and support gog everytime I can. If steam did the most for Linux, gog did and still do the most for players.
Yet, ease of access is what appeals to the average consumer which leads to preferring steam for Linux for the same reason people get hardware restricted consoles. If a company wants to appeal and expand their market making themselves more accessible is how they do it. Otherwise alternative is to be an overlooked option.
Not directly related but this Gabe quote still seems somewhat fitting: “Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem”
Yeah, had Valve tried to push Linux again without trying to make it accessible for the average user it would have flopped like the Steam machine. Or at the very least users would have tossed Linux for Windows. Accessibility is very important, and technical users should not be looked to as guides on what is acceptable for the masses.
Is Steam really a monopoly when Valve doesn’t try to stifle competition and no other company could be bothered (besides maybe GOG) to make a half decent store?
Even if they are considered a ‘monolopy’ it seems like people haven’t thought that we are the ones that have thrown our money at Valve and it is the ONLY reason why they are in the position they’re in now. They offer a fantastic service to the gaming community and Valve is supposed to apologise for that? I’m not aware of any abuses within their own company that has contributed to their success or any anti-competitive behaviour?
Well, what makes a monopoly is the position in the market, without the obligation to infinite growth that doesn’t have to involve anti-competitive prectices.
No, it’s not a monopoly. They aren’t even a gatekeeper as defined recently by the EU.
The most successful PC games (Minecraft, Fortnite, Roblox) aren’t even on Steam.
That doesn’t mean anything. Jesus Christ these arguments that valve isn’t a monopoly are just so incredibly weak. They’ve created a fucking cult.
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Wrong, the US has antritrust laws and you can bet your bottom dollar that epic would have sued them already if they had any ground to do so.
Except it means everything. The EU, not really friendly towards US companies, declared that Valve is not a gatekeeper of digital markets. That means they don’t have a monopoly on PC gaming.
They are a monopoly because they…provide the best most fair platform. Also why would linux users support ubisoft or epic.
Most fair? 🤔 Epic’s cut on the sale is lower than Valve’s…
As a user and not a developer, idgaf. Steam gives me features, EGS doesn’t.
Which of these features do you actually use and why wouldn’t you want the devs to make more money so they can produce more games that you, as a user, can play?
Which of these features do you actually use and why wouldn’t you want the devs to make more money so they can produce more games that you, as a user, can play?
In case the question wasn’t targeted at them specifically: Play games on Linux and making sure the actual monopoly of Windows gets broken. Parts of Valve’s revenue goes into open source development, meaning that in the end more developers get paid: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Valve-Upstream-Everything-OSS
If game developers think the cut is too high, I’d be thrilled to see them distribute their games directly through Flathub: https://docs.flathub.org/docs/for-app-authors/submission/
Steam Input for use with my steam controller and playstation controller for gyro controls. Particularly love the dual touchpads for movement and camera controls and extra click inputs over a single joystick click. I can’t deal with default control schemes anymore when it comes to controllers after becoming reliant on the amount of customization Steam Input provides, since it goes beyond a simple remapping with layers, modeshifts, chords, touch menus, action sets, etc.
Linux support that reduces need to fiddle around with settings and mess with lutris type tools and more devs putting in the time to try to be Steam Deck certified. Even when it doesn’t run well on the Deck for more demanding titles there is still benefit for more powerful systems and future Steam Deck follow up.
Existence of Steam forums and guides has come in useful for help and has popped up on search results that I wasn’t able to find on pcgamingwiki, so reddit isn’t the main place I need to rely on. Been a way to also try to reach devs without having to use reddit or twitter.
Steam workshop. I do use nexusmods, moddb, etc. But, sometimes just having it integrated into Steam makes it convenient.
Other launchers are more like comparing a dumbphone versus a smartphone where if all someone wants to do is make calls and text that is fine, but for those that have become accustomed to Steam launcher features beyond launching games there needs to be more done by competitors. Having to use stuff like GLOSSI to try and utilize Steam Input when using third party launchers, or have to fall back to syncthing to try and sync saves from other launchers when using Steam Deck just makes the lack of Linux and custom controller support apparent.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
dual touchpads for movement and camera controls and extra click inputs over a single joystick click
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
What does your preference have to do with whether or not Valve is fair?
Developers are people too, do their opinion not count or something?
Only because EGS is trying to take market share, not because of the goodness of their own hearts.
Until we have proof that they increase their share of the profit when they reach a certain market share then that’s pure speculation on your part.
So what? That’s also the only reason valve supports Linux.
And thereby fighting the Windows monopoly.
Which they don’t do out of the goodness of their own hearts either.
And yet they charge the same amount…
Seems they use that as a way to get developers to join them, then guilt consumers into using their less useful platform.
Ironically this is actually an example of Valve using its dominant marketshare to suppress rivals - Steam’s ToS require devs to have equivalent pricing across all storefronts if they want to sell on Steam at all, so making it harder for cheaper storefront cuts to translate to lower prices to consumers, who might otherwise move to a different storefront.
Devs aren’t going to drop Steam as a store, so they’re stuck.
Do you have a source for that claim that doesn’t reference the sale of Steam keys specifically?
Steam’s “price parity rule” is a policy that ensures that Steam keys cannot be sold on other sites unless the product is also available for purchase on Steam at no higher a price than is offered on any other service or website.
Ars Technica tries to spin it in favour of Steam, but if you read between the lines it is there:
Thanks for sharing that!
Steam’s “price parity rule” is a policy that ensures that Steam keys cannot be sold on other sites unless the product is also available for purchase on Steam at no higher a price than is offered on any other service or website.
IMO, it’s reasonable to say “If you want to sell Steam keys off Steam, you need to follow our pricing rules,” but it is not reasonable to say “If you want to sell your game, sans keys, off Steam, you have to follow our pricing rules to keep selling on Steam.” You’re talking about the former here, right? Or does that mean that the following situation is prohibited:
- Your game is listed at $50 on Steam
- You sell keys from your own site for $50
- You sell your game directly from your site for $40
and if so, that the mitigation is to either stop selling Steam keys entirely or to raise the price on your own site to $50?
That’s somewhere in between the two but I dislike it. I suspect it’s more legally murky, too, like tied selling.
The article briefly talks about the latter (emphasis mine):
Wolfire’s David Rosen expanded on that accusation in a recent blog post, saying that Valve threatened to “remove [Wolfire’s game] Overgrowth from Steam if I allowed it to be sold at a lower price anywhere, even from my own website, without Steam keys and without Steam’s DRM.”
However, it also says “Sources close to Valve suggested to Ars that this ‘parity’ rule only applies to the ‘free’ Steam keys publishers can sell on other storefronts and not to Steam-free versions of those games sold on competing platforms. Valve hasn’t responded to a request for comment on this story.” I wonder if the lack of comment was because of Wolfire’s lawsuit?
I’m also now curious if the reason for Steam saying that was related to the in-between situation I talked about above.
@[email protected] shared this ArsTechnica article from 2022 that covers an update on that lawsuit - I haven’t seen anything more recent. In it, Wolfire makes the same claim, in court, that they’d already made in their blog post, which was sufficient to convince the judge to re-open their case.
The ruling [to re-open the case] makes particular note of “a Steam account manager [who] informed Plaintiff Wolfire that ‘it would delist any games available for sale at a lower price elsewhere, whether or not using Steam keys [emphasis in original complaint].’” The amended suit also alleges that “this experience is not unique to Wolfire,” which could factor into the developer’s proposed class-action complaint.
Hopefully we’ll hear more about that soon.
It’s not ideal, but I’d say the reason they require equivalent pricing is, so that people don’t just use Steam as a marketing platform, while diverting all sales to their personal website where they sell the game for $X cheaper.
Plus, it only applies to base price, not sale price. If a platform states “you can have your game on sale 100% of the time”, and a game undercuts Steam that way, Steam wouldn’t do anything about it. Well, they wouldn’t have to anyways, it’s illegal to have goods on sale 100% of the time, but the point is there.
It’s a perfect example of them abusing their position in the market. But since you’re a valve cultist, you make up a bunch of weak excuses for it. If epic or ms did the same thing you’d blow a gasket.
Epic exclusives prove that developers are happy skipping Steam entirely.
Yeah I do understand the reasoning and honestly can’t fault them for it - they are a for-profit company after all.
Doesn’t mean that it’s not a good example of them throwing their weight around (which is admittedly rare).
The reason it’s the same price on Steam and Epic is that Steam prevents the sale on their platform if the game is sold for cheaper on other platforms…
I would also gladly increase the developer’s profit instead of the platform’s profit if the price is the same on both as I don’t use all the extra crap that Steam comes with…
Do you have a source for that claim that doesn’t reference the sale of Steam keys specifically?
Your best sources are a tweet by a competitor and a 2.5 year old lawsuit filed because of that tweet? Excuse me for maintaining my skepticism.
Games that are Epic exclusive aren’t cheaper either. This is a nonsense argument.
Oh if you’re talking about exclusives then pricing is all over the place because they have exclusive in all categories (AAA to indie)…
There’s also more than them in the balance to determine the price at which games sell, 2K games won’t sell the new Borderlands for 60$ while other AAA titles are selling for 70$, they still need to maximise profit and if the market has determined that 70$ is a fair price then so be it.
Anyway I don’t understand why you wouldn’t want the devs to make more money so they’re able to produce more games instead of the launcher company making more money so they can develop “trading cards” as a way to make even more money.
One aspect through which one could argue that they might stifle competition is their price parity rule, for which it seems they are being sued. See here (not sure if there is any new development.
Hard to compete with steam if you cant at least do it through lower pricing. Although this article suggests that at least for epic exclusives publisher seem to prefer to just pocket the difference, rather than pass on those savings.
No it means that if the game is for sale on Steam then it can be sold elsewhere (GOG, EPIC…) but it’s in the contract with Steam that it can’t be sold for a lower price elsewhere, it’s not about Steam keys sold by third party vendors.
Isn’t that just saying you can’t sell access to a game on steam (through a steam key) for a lower price than what’s on Steam? It’s not like they can’t just offer a lower price… just that they can’t offer it for a lower price bundled with Steam access.
So they can offer a lower price, just not as a third party through Steam itself.
I think you are right, the first article I linked was a bit ambiguous about it, but rereading the second one it seems that I misunderstood it and you are right.
If it was only about Steam Keys, there wouldn’t have been a lawsuit.
If that’s the case, why do people use sites like humble bundle when they could individually buy the games from steam?
I believe it means base price and not sale prices. It’s fine for a game to go on sale for lower than Steam, but the base price can’t be $60 Steam $50 Epic as an example.
That is also allowed, but not if Epic purchase allows you to play the game on steam too
Humble Bundle has a special relationship with Valve iirc, because of the charity work they do.
Doesn’t explain all the other games sold for cheaper than steam when you take a look at isthereanydeals. Or the bundles fanatical offers with no charity involved.
Could be secondhand key resellers who have no deals with Steam regarding sales.
I believe it means base price and not sale prices
It is a monopoly - they just don’t abuse it as much against their audience.
For developers it’s either take their 30% deal or just don’t sell your game because a lot of people only use steam.
Not even Cyberpunk or the Witcher could sell more on gog than on steam even though you knew that there the developers got 100% of the money spent. Gwent standalone flopped so hard on GOG that it had to be rereleased with limited features on steam and sold more there
People are just fundamentally lazy so it totally is a problem that you have one store with such a massive market share even if it’s very convenient for the end-user they can completely exploit their position against publishers.
Sure EPICs way of making games exclusive to their store is not elegant but without that no-one would choose that store over steam
This is partially on these companies for failing to provide an equal experience to Steam on their platform. I bought Witcher III in GoG to support the devs, and my reward was a lost save by the time the DLCs came out, because their client didn’t have cloud saves. So guess where I bought their stuff from there on? Sure, they added these features later but for some people the damage is already done.
Sure EPICs way of making games exclusive to their store is not elegant but without that no-one would choose that store over steam
Personally Epic doing this is one of the reasons I still refuse to give epic my card details
Not even Cyberpunk or the Witcher could sell more on gog than on steam even though you knew that there the developers got 100% of the money spent.
Most gamers don’t know and/or don’t care, so they will take the least resistance path, which is Steam.
Steam has a “most favoured nation clause” which prevents companies from actually selling for cheaper on other platform. This is how steam maintains its monopoly. If it were possible for CD Projekt Red to sell it cheaper outside of steam it would force steam to actually charge developers less.Edit: see below, it’s actually not that clear.
They could sell for cheaper, they just can’t sell Steam Keys specifically for cheaper than what’s on Steam itself. Which makes sense honestly, you’re literally using their service for both presence and distribution.
Looking at steam’s own policies, this is true for steam keys, but there is an an going lawsuit that claims steam also makes this apply to non steam-enabled games: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/07/valve-issues-scathing-reply-over-the-facts-behind-a-steam-antitrust-case/
But looking mosre closely than I did previously this is based on:
- An contract that is apparently not public
- A 1 time example that Valve denies
So I don’t really know, but if what valve says is true (which looks like it is), then I don’t see any monopoly abuse indeed.
They do have a monopoly, but it’s in large part for providing a better service. As a Linux user, I prefer Valve 100% over Epic that buys Rocket league and discontinues linux support. I do prefer Itch and GOG for the possibility of no-DRM games, but I’ve got to say it’s overall a worse experience (no auto updates, no social features etc…)
I made my initial comment after watching: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOEG5qmMQas which suggested that Steam applied the MFN for non steam - enabled games too, but was done prior to Valve’s response.
For the price parity thing, there’s the game Tales of Maj’Eyal that is $6.99 USD on Steam but is free on their website te4.org. Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead is an open source project, but is on Steam for $19.99 USD. Caves of Qud is actually on sale now on GOG, but the Itch.io and Steam version aren’t. Sure, these may just be because traditional roguelikes don’t garner that much attention, but they are cases nonetheless that show otherwise.
The lack of auto-updates can sometimes be good. StarSector updated relatively recently and if they actually updated automatically (even if they offered an option to disable it, they update so infrequently, I’d probably have neglected it), my save and all my mods for it would just break, or worse break silentl until it was too late.
Thinking about it there are also multiple FLOSS games that are free on GitHub/Linux repos but paid on Steam. For example Mindustry and Pixel dungeon.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOEG5qmMQas
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
This is still easily verifiably untrue in practice. Go to isthereanydeal and you’ll see verified, approved Steam key retailers running sales for under the Steam price on hundreds of games literally every day. Humble offers a global discount on all keys in their store if you’re s subscriber, undercutting virtually every Steam page. That’s not to mention the bundles they sell which regularly cut hundreds of dollars of keys down to a few bucks.
The steam documentation mentions for keys that while it is OK to run sales on different platforms at different times, the steam store must have similar sales within a reasonable time period, and he base price must not be higher on steam.
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Done
It’s a monopoly, but it’s one that a big company like EA or Epic Games can defeat. But, they have to actually put in the work and effort to present an experience that isn’t an enshittified version of Steam.
So far, none of them are willing to put in the time, so they don’t get the prize.
If you’re so sure Steam is a monopoly, can you please provide any evidence for that? To be clear, being very successful does not make someone a monopolist.
If Valve were a monopolist, they’d be listed here: https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/commission-designates-six-gatekeepers-under-digital-markets-act-2023-09-06_en
One can have a monopoly without directly trying for it. Especially when it comes to services with a lot infrastructure involved. Once you make those investments, it’s hard for anyone to compete against them.
A monopoly just means you control a significant amount of the market. I think, technically, they would fall under oligopoly. Where a few businesses have control of the market instead of just a single business. But the point is they have a far larger share of the market than most others. This is mostly because they create a product that people want to use, instead of making a service that unfairly captures the market through things like game exclusivity or hostile takeovers.
But when the EU recently announced service gatekeepers, Valve was not among them. Microsoft is.
*Because they don’t meat the minimum financial and monthly user criterias to be taken into consideration when analyzing the monopoly status of their platform
You forgot to add that part 👍
Because they don’t meat the minimum financial and monthly user criterias to be taken into consideration when analyzing the monopoly status of their platform
So Steam does not meet / meat🥩 the financial and monthly user numbers to count as a monopoly? So Steam is not a monopoly then. Great.
No, the PC videogame market is too small for the European Union to analyse it.
If the local hardware store is the only one selling screws for 100km around and it doesn’t show up on their list, does it means they don’t have a monopoly or it simply means that they don’t bother checking that because the hardware store doesn’t:
Make 6.5B a year/doesn’t have a market capitalization of 65B
Doesn’t have 45m monthly users in the union AND 10k business users in the union
Meets those criterias three years in a row
Because these are the criterias required for the EU to take the time to analyze a companies’ position in their market.
Yeah, to say a successful business is a monopoly because it is far reaching is absurd.
Call me when Good-Old-Epic-Steam launches.
The fact that there are tons of games only available on steam should tell you it’s a monopoly.
It’s fucking shocking to me that so many people here actually believe that Valve isn’t a monopoly. You must have your head way up your ass.
How many games are actually steam exclusive on PC though, not counting 50 cent shovelware crap? A good chunk of the best selling PC games ever (minecraft for example) are not even available on steam.
I just went through the top 10 on steam and other than counter strike, which is literally made by valve, all of them are available elsewhere.
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They account for about 75% of game sales on PC from what I’m finding, it’s a “virtual monopoly”, i.e. they have enough reach to control the market even if they have competitors.
Nintendo accounts for 100% of games on the Switch. Microsoft with the Xbox. Heck, even Sony. And people making games for PC don’t have to ask Valve’s permission.
Shit. Bestselling PC game of all time. Minecraft. Not available on Steam.
Nintendo is compared to other console manufacturers.
Microsoft is considered to be in a position of monopoly in the OS market, yet they’re not the ones building the PC itself.
Holy fuck did I just enter a freaking asylum or something?
75% of the units sold or 75% of the overall revemue. Given that the most successful PC games aren’t even on Steam, the latter seems unlikely to me. Roblox alone is a sustained revenue stream in insanely high numbers.
Do they block the competition in any way? They aren’t the stewards of Windows. Epic buys exclusive rights to games. Does Valve do the same? On Steam Deck, there’s even an entire independent app store (Discover with Flathub) enabled right out of the box. That’s how the community made Minecraft and Heroic Game Launcher available. Official EGS, GamePass, and GOG launchers could be made available via Flathub but MS etc. choose not to.
They have their own unethical business practice they’re getting sued for (preventing sales at a lower price on competing platforms) and just because you agree with what they do now doesn’t mean it’s not a risk to have such a behemoth in the market, Gaben is nice now, it just needs him changing his mind or retiring/dying and shit could hit the fan real quick.
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Frivolous? The judge has accepted new evidence and the lawsuit has been allowed to proceed.
It’s not about Valve or Newell being nice or not, it’s about whether Valve has a monopoly and the EU just recently looked at digital markets closely and determined that Valve is not a gatekeeper.
Because of the way they act at the moment, it doesn’t mean that they’re not in a monopoly position.Turns out it’s simply because the EU didn’t even study their case because the PC gaming market is too small to bother 🤡
I am not sure if it’s just people being lazy. Steam legitimately is a good gaming platform. It just has so many features that really bring the PC platform to the level of consoles in terms of UX. Social features, discussion boards, reviews, matchmaking, chat, broadcasting, remote streaming, all this alongside a kickass store. That’s why Valve could roll out something like Steam OS and not have it feel woefully inadequate compared to what consoles offer.
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Don’t forget notes for games, steam workshop, and for those of us open source enthusiasts, making easy/reliable gaming on Linux. It has never been so good being a Linux gamer.
Many years ago I bought some old DOS game where Linux runtimes using the original files exists on GOG. What I expected was a disk image or a zip containing the files - what I got was some exe containing the files. Why would I ever try to buy something from someone fucking up something that simple again?
I might buy some indie games from a developer directly - but with a middleman steam is the only option.
That’s not a steam issue, that’s a developer/publisher issue Plenty of old Scumm based games work by just pointing scummvm at the game directory
Ah, seems I missed a “on GOG” in the reply.
Tell me a game store that supports Linux out of the box (not messing with wine stuff or lutris)
Yes. Nothing you said doesn’t change the fact it’s a monopoly. Sure, it might not be a Microsoft-level-evil monopoly, and as far as monopolies go, this is probably the best one, but it’s still a monopoly.
Monopsony - a monopoly but instead of controlling production, you control the marketplace, like Amazon
Steam is almost at that level, but they at least do it by tempting people with features and don’t try to lock you in… Trouble with exchanges is that fragmentation really sucks for everyone
As I said, I agree that Steam is great. But a monopoly (or monopsony - never heard the word before) is always bad. Yes, Steam is great, but the ownership will change one day. And as it seems everyone wants to take every company public, I’m pretty sure that Steam will be taken public eventually. And the whole wheel of shit will start rolling.
True, but steam is about as good as it gets. They aren’t actually a monoposody, they’re just the biggest marketplace.
They don’t do exclusives, don’t restrict you from selling elsewhere, they’ll integrate with any piece of software (including things you’ve installed externally or will install other launchers for you - even if they contain competing storefronts)
They do have competition, except they did the one thing companies hate to do most at this stage - they compete. They’re the only real option because they limit nothing from their customers and offer better features. Epic offers free games, Microsoft comes pre-installed on most gaming computers, Amazon has everyone’s payment details already, and despite it all these alternatives steam is still the best option in every regard
Yes, it’s almost guaranteed to go to shit eventually, but what better system is there? There’s no one more trustworthy to run the primary gaming marketplace… They’ve even built their company structure and policies to resist the pull of enshittification.
A new company isn’t a good answer, a distributed system wouldn’t work well for this application, and even nonprofits struggle to resist enshittification as well as valve has done
What can we do except keep watch and push back if valve goes out of bounds?
I think it’s better to reframe the question as “Are there downsides to Valve’s PC market dominance?” or “How is Steam’s 30% cut different from Xbox or Playstation?”
For the latter: it’s worth noting that Microsoft and Sony sell their hardware at a loss, and make up the difference through software, so there are obvious developer benefits to the 70-30 split. For Steam, the equivalent value-add for developers is only the platform itself, and I would wager for many of those developers the biggest reason for selling on Steam is not the feature set - though obviously useful - but because that’s where the users are.
So, users get a feature-rich distribution platform, and developers (and by extension users) pay a tax to access those users. So the question is, how fair is that tax, and what effect does that tax have on the games that get made? Your view on that is going to depend on what you want from Steam, but more relevant I think is how much Steam costs to operate. How much of that 30% cut feeds back into Steam? My guess is not much; though I could be wrong.
But anyway, let’s imagine you took away half the 30% cut. Where does that money go? Well, one of two places: either your pocket, or the developers (or publishers) pocket (depending on how the change affects pricing). The benefits to your pocket are obvious, but what if developers just charge the same price? Well, as far as I’m aware, a lot of games are just not profitable - I read somewhere that for every 10 games, 7 fail, 2 break even, and 1 is a huge success - so my personal view is that this is an industry where developers need all the help they can get. If that extra 15% helps them stay afloat long enough to put out the next thing without selling their soul to Microsoft or Sony or whoever is buying up companies these days, and Steam isn’t severely negatively impacted, I’d call that a win.
But of course, that won’t happen, because Steam has no reason to change. That’s where the users are, and they are fine with the status quo.
I think you undersell how feature rich steam is for both users and developers.
They offer community forums, reviews, mods through workshop, cloud saves, automatic controller support, openish vr ecosystem (epic cant even do vr, if you buy a vr game you likely need to use steamvr anyway), broad payment and currency options, regional pricing and guidelines, remote play, and more I’m sure.
This is much more feature rich than even console platforms, so I think the 30% fee is justified.
And they do this all without really locking down their ecosystem.
Why would developers care about steams “features”? That’s Valve’s problem, not theirs. 30% is fucking highway robbery for a distributor. The only reason they get away with it is because they’re a monopoly and devs have no choice but to publish games there. It’s crazy that you can’t see that.
Developers care about steamworks, making cloud saves, multi-player, matchmaking, voice chat, anti cheat, drm, microtransactions, user authentication, and more significantly easier than doing it yourself, it’s also basically free to use where many alternatives only support some features for significant fees.
30% is fucking highway robbery for a distributor. The only reason they get away with it is because they’re a monopoly and devs have no choice but to publish games there.
*googles “epic games exclusives”*
“no choice”… huh…
I don’t dispute they provide value, but why 30%? Why not 35? Or 25? or 80? or 3? or 29? I don’t know.
I’m curious, how much of that 30% do you think feeds back into making Steam better and keeping it running?
Probably more than a public company, that has to pay dividends and prove worth every quarter.
but why 30%, why not
To which the response is: I don’t care. I would have paid the same amount of money for games no matter which of the stupid funny numbers you picked out.
The beginning and end of how much one should care is “are the devs happy with it? Is that the standard for digital stores as well?”. And the answer to both is Yes, so the concerns are abated.
If it opens them to driven out of the market by a more generous competitor: Cool. But that alone doesn’t impact me, the costumer. The generous competitor needs to do more. And you know, they know that. That’s why Tim gave me so many free games.
No you wouldn’t.
Immortals of Aveum cost 70 monetary-whatevers and killed its studio and no one commented on it. It would have cost 60 whatevers two years ago and still would have killed its studio. But if they did 70, they would have torpedoed that price point in the news circles as a death sentence. They only had the gall because literally no one dared release a game for 70 till Activision did it and others like Sony and Nintendo followed along.
Steams share has zero impact on my wallet. The market is dictated by things way more arbitrary. Everyone with brain knows this.
“are the devs happy with it? Is that the standard for digital stores as well?”. And the answer to both is Yes
I fully disagree. On the first point, do developers accept it? Sure. That does not at all mean they are happy about it. Money is tight for games, and I guarantee you every developer would much prefer to take a bigger piece of the pie.
To your second point, it is the standard but it is not universal. Epic Games Store takes 12%. Itch.io defaults to 10%. Google Play Store takes 15% on the first $1 million in revenue.
But that alone doesn’t impact me, the consumer.
I don’t believe this is entirely true. The more cash flow developers have, the more stable they are as companies, and the more able they are to put out good games. You are indirectly impacted because a larger tax on developers means fewer, or lower quality, games that get released.
Steams share has zero impact on my wallet.
Disagree, unless you exclusively play AAA.Edit: Actually I’ve changed my mind on this. I mostly agree the percentage cut doesn’t affect the optimal price point.
Don’t forget how far they’ve advanced Linux gaming and hardware
So, users get a feature-rich distribution platform, and developers (and by extension users) pay a tax to access those users. So the question is, how fair is that tax, and what effect does that tax have on the games that get made? Your view on that is going to depend on what you want from Steam, but more relevant I think is how much Steam costs to operate. How much of that 30% cut feeds back into Steam? My guess is not much; though I could be wrong.
But anyway, let’s imagine you took away half the 30% cut. Where does that money go? Well, one of two places: either your pocket, or the developers (or publishers) pocket (depending on how the change affects pricing). The benefits to your pocket are obvious, but what if developers just charge the same price? Well, as far as I’m aware, a lot of games are just not profitable - I read somewhere that for every 10 games, 7 fail, 2 break even, and 1 is a huge success - so my personal view is that this is an industry where developers need all the help they can get. If that extra 15% helps them stay afloat long enough to put out the next thing without selling their soul to Microsoft or Sony or whoever is buying up companies these days, and Steam isn’t severely negatively impacted, I’d call that a win.
Would you claim that devs who also port their game to console are guilty as the consoles also take 30% cut? The entire console scene is basically what Valve is doing, except valve decides to compete on an open platform instead of a walled garden.
The consoles justify the amount they take more because they are selling hardware at a loss to bring in users, so as a developer, you are seeing direct, tangible, and ongoing benefits to giving the manufacturers a cut. Every console cycle, there is renewed investment in the ecosystem to keep users interested.
For digital platforms, the continued investment in the platform itself is both less tangible, and I would wager less overall (though we can’t know this for Steam because we don’t have access to numbers like that). The longer Steam continues as a platform, the more true this is, unless you believe that Steam will continue to improve at the same rate. I don’t see my interaction with Steam being much different 5 years from now as it is today, so it is less obvious to me that such at steep rate is justified.
Like, imagine they “perfected” Steam. They made all the features users could ever want, and there becomes no reason to make any more changes. Should they keep charging the same rate? Or, maybe a better way to frame it, would be that rather than investing some of that 30% rate into improving the platform, they invest in developers themselves to make better products, because it’s the only place left to make the platform better than it was before. This would be equivalent to just lowering the rate across the board, in my opinion.
Not all consoles sell at a loss. Nintendo outright sells for profit, and the ones that didnt are the WiiU and thr Virtual Boy, and I don’t have to remind you how those sold.
And we are also at an age where even Valve is in the console space. They sell the steamdeck at a severely lower price point compared to its competion.
Look at the ROG Ally, Lenovo Legion Go, Aya Neos entire catelog, GPD Win 4, Ayn Loki and a bunch more.
The argument about consoles selling it at subsidized price is justifyable means your saying Valve is in the right to given they are now in that market.
This is an interesting perspective, and gave me something to think about!
I don’t think the Steam Deck is quite there in terms of adoption to justify an across the board tax. The order of operations is kind of reversed, where Steam is reinvesting money made from previous sales towards R&D and Hardware ambitions, rather than using the Steam Deck to bring in users. But if you’re developer that benefits from the Steam Deck’s existence, or saw a sales bump from Steam Deck sales, or some other benefit like that, I agree it’s a pretty good trade-off in that case.
Nintendo is a bit different because they sort of focus on their own thing and everyone else is secondary. Something like 80% of software sales for Nintendo platforms are first party, so it’s mostly a Nintendo machine. Frankly, I think they should take less of a cut. Indies do really well on Nintendo though. They have a kind of pseudo-monopoly of a younger casual gamer demographic, and they maintain that user base by putting out great software. It is an interesting counterpoint though.
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Is there a source for the $10 fee for digital releases? I’d love to read more about it, had trouble finding it.
A (private) monopoly or virtual monopoly is always bad for consumers.
It’s definitely not merely a matter of not bothering to make a decent store though. I mean, do you think Epic is held back by not being bothered? The way they pour money into their store, I’d it were easy, they’d have it. And having a decent store isn’t enough. It’s kinda like social media in that you need the crowd effect. People want all their games in one place with integrations like friends, mods, achievements, etc. AFAIK, there’s no open standard for most of these things, so you need a big market share to convince devs to make the change.
Steam’s de-facto monopoly is so strong, Epic can’t break it. Epic made four billion dollars per year on one game. Epic licenses the engine for like half of all noteworthy games. Epic has the only platform not seizing one-third of all revenue from developers, and that platform throws free shit at customers in constant desperation. And they still can’t move the needle.
Monopoly doesn’t mean there’s zero competition. It means the competition does not matter.
PC gamers have alternatives to Steam the way that Android users have alternatives to Google Play. Yes, there are dozens. And that’s how many users each one has.
A monopoly is a monopoly. Just because Steam is a good store today doesn’t mean they deserve to hold a monopoly over the pc gaming market. So what happens when Valve has crushed every competitor? Gamers and devs have nowhere to go if Steam turns to shit. Eventually there will be a change of guards at Valve’s C-suite when Gaben retires or is dead. There is a good chance that those new execs will hollow out Steam and extract all the value out of it for their own benefit by screwing over the customers and developers. And they can get away with that if there is no competition. Competition is what keeps Valve in check.
But they haven’t crushed any other competitor through any mechanism but having a dramatically better product.
They don’t force you to be exclusive to be on steam. They don’t force you to implement any of their Steam stuff. They are very permissive unless you do shit that potentially exposes them to liability down the road, like the NFT nonsense.
And they let you generate keys for literally free to sell on other stores.
All their stuff companies use is because it’s things customers value.
When they started, they did used to force you to use products edit: aside from their own games(fair cop), some 3rd party games like Lost Planet also required it.
Certain games, and not just valve games, you’d buy in a store and the disc would force you to install and create a steam account to play the single player offline game.
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They’re a distribution mechanism. If you buy a Steam game you need Steam. Allowing developers to require Steam to play their game is not anticompetitive or in any way unethical.
They didn’t force any developer who wanted to sell games on Steam to only sell games on Steam. That’s what would be anticompetitive and abusing their market position. Games choosing to only distribute through Steam because there’s no other storefront that wouldn’t be a worse value if it was free isn’t Steam doing something wrong.
My point is that they did initially to force usage. I’ll edit the post with the game name when I get home.
Edit: Lost Planet. It had a disc but required you to sign up for and use steam to play it.
Looks like it was a console exclusive before it released on Steam, if you’re talking about Lost Planet: Extreme Condition (which is the only one I can find by that name).
Do you have more information about the release? Or perhaps it’s a different game?
A publisher only distributing through Steam when it does things others don’t isn’t forcing usage.
Forcing usage is requiring developers to only distribute through Steam.
There is no scenario where the first is wrong, and there is no scenario where the second is OK.
The only thing Valve has done with Steam that apparently is anti-competitive, is actually having a decent product with good features and no one else is capable of actually delivering parity with it to be a viable competitor.
A natural monopoly is a far cry from one built through anti-competitive practices, and easily toppled by competent competitors.
Perhaps if Valve’s competition was competent, there would be better options.
True. But Google became the number one search engine by creating a better product and basically got a natural monopoly. And now look what kind of monster the company has become.
Just because Steam is a good store today doesn’t mean it will stay that way in the future. Therefore I rather not see Steam be the only game store left in the pc gaming space.
Then get mad at the weak-ass competition. Start a fire under their asses to make something that is actually just as good, if not better.
Punishing the one good product for being good is just gonna lead to there being no good products and only shitty ones just as much as your slippery-slope scenario. 🤦♂️
Well no. Google used to steal results from other search engines initially.v And then suppressed search results for competing products for at least the last 20 years.
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But Epic is a shitty store today. I’m not going to use it out of fear the Steam might become a shitty store tomorrow.
That’s fine, neither do I. Because as a customer we have a choice. But we only have that choice if devs make their games available on all stores.
Epic has in the past declined hosting games that don’t agree to exclusivity, so it’s not always the dev’s choice.
Ubisoft, Epic etc… have done nothing to make the market better or make it more healthy. Epic is even more anti competitive than it’s competition.
Doesn’t matter. It’s still competition. They motivate Valve to create a better store and keep it that way. Since that is Valve’s unique selling point and what distinguishes them from the competition. Therefore I believe devs should make their games available on every storefront. Not just the best one, to give customers a choice.
Steam was great before epic and has been adding killer features since before egs came along. EGS tactics to win over steam users is to be anti competitive…
Ok but competition is always good for the customer even when the competitors are shit.
If that was true, then why complain about Valve’s “monopoly?” It has competition. The competition is just shit.
When their launcher is literal malware or they engage in anti-consumer practices like exclusives, no, they are not good for the customer.
(Not that any publicly traded company can be good for the customer, mind; by definition they can only be good for the shareholders; any benefit they might accidentally provide to the customer or to society is an inefficiency that will eventually be corrected through enshittification. The only reason Valve isn’t entirely harmful is that they aren’t publicly traded yet.)
Like Walmart coming into a town to compete with the stores already there and then putting them out of business? Then moving onto the next town to compete again?
competition is good when the rest of the competition is able or good. EGS is so shit it has to buy exclusives and give out free games and it still doesn’t work. There has to be some equality in quality to have any chance of making steam better otherwise they just exist to make anti competitive moves, what is steam supposed to do? Also pay for exclusives?
Ok, but as a consumer I’m fine with the shit competitor existing but I’m not going to use it.
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Tell that to Epic.
Imagine thinking that Valve has a monopoly.
Monopoly doesn’t mean “Largest market share”. It’s a real term with a real meaning.
Monopoly:
the exclusive possession or control of the supply of or trade in a commodity or service.
What, exactly, does Valve control? They don’t require exclusivity, they don’t require their DRM, they don’t require the use of their network system. Hell, they don’t even require you to to give them 30% if you sell your own key.
Valve is also not a publicly traded company, while this doesn’t mean you can fully trust them it does mean they aren’t required to seek profit at all costs. This allows then to do things like, support Linux, make their own hardware (twice after their first attempt was a failure), work on Proton, develope games that make them no money, etc.
Itch.io, GOG, EA, Epic, Windows Store, Game Pass, Humble Bundle, personal websites. These are all examples of places you can buy video games on computers.
Timmy Tencent’s propaganda is working on you if you think Valve is any sort of monopoly.
Competition sounds great, so long as it has all of the following:
- Something better than steam input and the steam controller.
- Something better than steam vr.
- Something better than steam workshop.
- something better than proton
- Something better than steams friends/chat/activity interface.
- Something better than the steam overlay.
- Something better than big picture.
- Absolutely no exclusives, and no deals forcing developers to use it.
- A nicer store interface than valve, with better community pages, curator pages, discussion pages, etc.
- An equivalent to steam fest with a strong demo scene.
- Something better than remote play together
This is of course also ignoring just how efficient, clean, customisable and ergonomic the steam interface is compared to all competition
Oh wait! That doesn’t exist. All we need is some way to guarantee valve doesn’t become public.
I’m one of the few who actually like the existence of Epic. Like, not necessarily Epic itself, but some serious competition is needed. I personally would’ve loved it if the competition was GOG, but it seems consumers don’t particularly care about ownership, so we have Epic.
The problem is that all the competition to steam is far far inferior to steam in technology and ideology and future prospects. Steam isn’t a publicly traded company, has features that are pro consumers, is supporting other OS’s and doesn’t have a CEO that is a prick like epic.
Epic launches my games, Steam is full of bloat that I never use… 🤷
That “bloat” is 99% of the reason people use it.
Lol. You think 99% of people give a shit about forums or Linux support?
Hey!
Linux has almost a 2% market share on Steam, I have you know!
So it is only 98% who don’t care.
I personally don’t include Linux support in the bloat, but forums, social profiles, trading cards, reviews, achievements… Yes, that’s bloat.
No, 99% of the reason they use it is that they were first to market, made it mandatory for their first party games that were extremely popular at the time (and even today) and became defacto mandatory for many third party games as it made it simpler to control piracy to just sell through them or include a key in the physical copy and force people to install Steam. The majority of Steam users are casuals that couldn’t care less about their forums, cards, social profiles and so on. It’s the same thing in everything, there’s enthusiasts that think everyone is as crazy as they are about their hobby, the majority are just casual users that will never know/use half of the possibilities available to them because they don’t care.
I feel Steam vs competitors is like how after 1st wave MCU, everyone was jumping on that bandwagon, but instead of putting in the groundwork just skipped ahead, or like the monsters one just abandoned it because of one bad movie.
Sure. But what if Gabe newel decided to sell tomorrow. Just wants to retire maybe he’s pretty old. What if Microsoft buys it and you’re left with a monopoly you don’t like. That’s the eventuality of every unhealthy industry.
Then we’d go back to sailing the high seas, until a better alternative shows up; as Gabe said, piracy is a service problem.
Well it will be a sad day and Ubisoft, Microsoft and Epic competition won’t fix anything if steam goes to shit. Steam is basically the unicorn and once it becomes extinct we won’t get anything half decent to replace it with. Publicly traded companies are the bedrock of unhealthy industries.
Competition in the marketplace is the only thing that has any chance of saving you when that day comes.
You are in lucky days today. Tomorrow won’t be so good, but you can choose to support an industry controlled by a monopoly, or you can support an industry with healthy competition.
I would hope that Gamers aren’t so near sighted, but I’ve been proven wrong over and over again.
“Supporting competition” is not a good enough reason to use a shitty service. If I start a service that charges twice as much as Steam and has none of the features would you use it in order to “support competition”?
If the only reason to purchase from Epic is “they exist” that’s not good enough.
I will happily avoid Epic’s attempts to be a monopoly now over worrying that Steam might be shitty in the future.
It’s super weird to me that you guys think epic is trying to be a monopoly. Epic had 0.00001% of the market. In their wildest dreams they might expect to get ten percent.
Just because they aren’t good at it doesn’t mean they aren’t trying very hard to do so, and will clearly be very shitty if they ever achieve it.
Epic had 0.00001% of the market.
The numbers for Fortnite, available on EGS but not Steam, tell otherwise.
That would be helpful if they actually tried to be competitive on the same level.
Unfortunately they’re only competing for profit, not as a service. Which is why they’re failing.
Competition bettering service only works if people want to compete to create a better service. That clearly isn’t the case.
When steam shuts down and we have Ubisoft and Epic to replace it with I’m just moving to itch.io and probably torrenting my steam library if it comes to the worst. Also I might actually stop playing games since steam is pushing proton development forward and without them I have no reason to play or buy anything new. Epic’s shitty CEO has made toxic remarks against linux before and Ubisoft just couldn’t care less. I’ll support a company that supports my interests, epic doesn’t so I don’t simple as.
i would love for steam to have some competition. i will gladly switch over to the first competitor that has
- a big picture / controller-friendly interface
- controller configurator that
- is more powerful than rewasd
- is editable in the overlay
- has import/exportable configs (incl. with the community)
- supports the best controller i’ve ever used, the steam controller
- cross-platform client
- cross-platform cloud saves
- workshop/modding support
- proper reviews system
- community page for each game
- etc.
and doesn’t
- buy exclusivity rights to games
- i don’t mind revenue deals for exclusivity, but buying existing games takes the biscuit
- actively worsen existing games
- e.g. removing the impeccable siapi support in rocket league, and making it run on the shitty epic servers so it disconnects all the time
particularly now that steam has switched over to electron, so the client runs like shit
i do sometimes use gog because i like their ideology, but they’re missing quite a few from this list. any gog or itch.io games i buy, i inevitably add to steam as a non-steam game. which adds a lot of these handy features, but not all
unfortunately, until a competitor brings along something new to the table, i’m quite happy to wait and pay more for a game on steam. it just has too many features i can’t give up
particularly now that steam has switched over to electron, so the client runs like shit
It uses CEF not Electron, which it has used for over 13 years. This isn’t something they just added. If it’s running slow for you you probably have an issue with hardware acceleration.
It uses CEF not Electron,
fine. i was simplifying. that wasn’t the main point of my comment. forgive me.
which it has used for over 13 years. This isn’t something they just added.
no…?
you mean that the store has been an embedded browser? in that case yes
but the whole steam client? has always been vgui, not
electroncef. just because there is reference to chromium in the commit log doesn’t mean the whole thing’s built in chromium, and just because a programme can render web content also doesn’t mean it’s built in chromium. when firefox switched from xul to html did you go “akshyually, it was always able to render html content so it hasn’t switched at all”If it’s running slow for you you probably have an issue with hardware acceleration.
it’s not just me who has performance issues. at one point it was everyone on linux with an nvidia gpu. which is supposedly fixed (and it’s definitely better) but it’s still unusably slow on both linux and windows. also, so what. “it works on my machine” isn’t a great excuse to ignore the biggest gaming gpu brand, and electron is notoriously non-performant (if my pc can handle playing a video in ffx whilst playing recent 3d games, i think it should also be able to display my list of owned games without stuttering). my point was that i never had issues with vgui, and now i do.
edit: ah, i’ve just looked through your comment history. i don’t believe anyone who’s not a troll has -10 karma and no negative comments (especially with some comments with >100 points), and i also suspect vote manipulation. i should never have engaged. sorry. i won’t engage any more.
but the whole steam client? has always been vgui, not
electroncef. just because there is reference to chromium in the commit log doesn’t mean the whole thing’s built in chromium.The “whole client” hasn’t been VGUI. Yes now every element is CEF but many, many pieces have been CEF for a very long time. “Switched over to Electron” implies it was entirely changed but it’s just using more of the thing it was already using. Those are two different things.
it’s not just me who has performance issues. at one point it was everyone on linux with an nvidia gpu
The issue you linked had nothing to do with Steam it was a bug with the Nvidia driver itself. Not sure what that’s supposed to prove.
my point was that i never had issues with vgui, and now i do.
And my point is that is not an inherent problem with Steam, that is something specific to your configuration. If it runs fine for other people it can run fine for you. I’m on Arch with an Nvidia GPU. I have zero issues with the performance.
How is a competitor ever supposed to compete with a feature list like that? It has to come out of the gate with all those things? This is why monopolies exist.
honestly? i kind of agree. but gog spent a lot of dev time revamping their client into "gog galaxy 2.0" just to make it less controller accessible; and the epic client is just unusable
i would have more sympathy if they were little indie companies. but the itch.io client is better than either. these companies are pouring money into breaking into a market, but not bothering to develop features
that comment was more an example of why the egs isn’t yet a real competitor than a criticism of any as yet nonexistent competitors
I personally would’ve loved it if the competition was GOG, but it seems consumers don’t particularly care about ownership
What the fuck are you saying? Of course consumers care about ownership, otherwise Stadia would be dominating the market, and we can see that it’s not.
Their point being that if true ownership was the priority for consumers then they would be exclusively using GoG, since it’s the only store that gives you your games to actually own.
If they cared only about true ownership yea. But GoG doesn’t have every game Steam has. If they had the same selection i could easily see more people switching. I and I’m sure many others use both.
It’s a self-reinforcing cycle, unfortunately. GOG doesn’t have the market share that Steam does, so publishers don’t release games on it, which leads to people continuing to use Steam and maintaining its dominant market share.
and itch.io which is far better than GOG but even more niche.
First time hearing of them, after browsing a bit I’m not sure I’d agree they’re better than GOG, but they seem to focus on indie games which is super neat.
Ownership is not why Stadia failed.
If you are trying to argue that ownership was not even a part of the multitude reasons Stadia failed and is off the table, you should seriously need to consider evaluating your critical thinking skills.
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It wasn’t, it works for Nvidia, people just don’t want to pay for their games twice and that broke Stadias neck…
Steam doesn’t have a monopoly, other platforms are just shit.
Missing features, badly made features, fucking spyware, some barely working at all (I am looking at you, ubisoft)
Perhaps if the other platforms tried a little bit, they would actually be a competition.
The position makes a monopoly, not the reason…
A monopoly is defined as a single seller or producer that excludes competition from providing the same product
By this definition, Epic games would be a monopoly with its exclusives.
That’s not at all what a monopoly is, it’s simply the absence of competition aka the market position. You don’t have to engage in anti-competitive practices to havw a monopoly, I don’t get why that’s so hard to understand for many here…
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Other games aren’t a competition for a platform like Steam, that’s a different market. Steam has a monopoly because they have a extremely dominant position without real competition in their sector, they don’t have to engage in anti-competitive practices against games outside of steam to have that…
And what sector are you claiming steam has a monopoly in if it isn’t game sales/distribution?
Fuck, this is so stupid it’s hard to even responde… Steam has a monopoly on game distribution but Minecraft isn’t a Steam competitor just like Fortnite isn’t a Play Store competitor! I am done with this thread, it’s frustrating to try and explain so many people such basic things if they don’t want to hear them!
The barriers to entry make them Monopoly. Steam does not enforce exclusivity, people are free to list their game on steam and any other platform with no penalties.
Steam may act as the de facto option, but it is not a monopoly. It is not excluding anybody from participating in the market
A monopoly refers to the market position, you don’t have to abuse your monopoly to have one…
Disagree. Monopoly, by the term mono, means only one. Exclusive.
Steam is large, steam is de facto, but steam is not exclusive. The fact that GOG, Ubisoft, epic game store, Xbox, all exist without penalties. Means it’s not an monopoly
The historical term has nothing to do with todays use, that’s just the roots of the damn word. According to your logic monopolies can’t exist, Microsoft wouldn’t be one and Amazon and so on, that’s plain wrong…
I linked to the definition of the word, because we appear to have a disagreement on what the word means.
As long as the system is not exclusive, it’s not a monopoly. Steam is not excluding anybody.
But since we disagree on the definition, I don’t think there’s any point in talking anymore.
I don’t think there is much of a point in it judging from the rediculess replies I got from you and others but that’s just plain fucking wrong, a monopoly is a entity with abusable position and not a entity abusing it’s position! “In law, a monopoly is a business entity that has significant market power” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly
No, the market position makes a monopoly! What you are talking about are anticompetitive practices, a monopoly enables you to leverage those in a damaging way but they aren’t part of a monopoly…
I will always support valve because of their amazing Linux support but if GOG finally made a client for Linux then I would try to use that more. I wish Epic would also support Linux but with massive douchebag Tim Sweeney running the company, that will never happen.
There are so many companies that have all the pieces to make good competition to Steam but their greed gets in the way. Microsoft in particular should have been a shoe-in for it, but GFWL was an embarrassing failure, the WIndows store is rubbish and insists on a new file format that (at least in the past) caused all kinds of issues for games, and now their Game Pass service has no focus on a buying element. This is without going into both Amazon and Google tripping on the starting line when it comes to getting in the gaming space. A launcher that was tied in with Amazon’s web store would be a really quick way to get a lot of people in naturally.
I really wish more people used GoG to where it could be a competitor. Unfortunately the game selection is much lower due to companies turning their noses up at no DRM. Also, I will admit that I tend to buy things on Steam in favor of GoG due to a lot of the features Steam has.
I don’t see what people have against Epic, they’re just another company running a storefront, right? Or are they union busters or something?
Any competition that can take on Stream’s monopoly is good, it’s been a long time coming.
You might think Steam are the good guys because they don’t abuse their customers yet, but all good things come to an end, eventually. A company with their level of monopolistic grasp doesn’t remain benign forever.
