Oh, don’t mistake me preferring Steam (and GOG, for example, who have an actual value proposition to me as a consumer - unlike Epic!) to “Valve worship”. They’re simply the least bad option, but of course they’re all huge corporations. Realistically though Valve has actually surprisingly little bad given the amount of money and market control they have, so eh… for now, I’m happy buying about half my games there (usually ends up that way, though I prefer GOG for games also releasing on that).
it’s a big circlejerk, it happens. everyone has the exact same opinion but also wants to feel like they are making a valiant statement in opposition of the bad thing
it’s all a massive oversight of course, statisticly everyone here is likely going to outlive Gabe Newel. and when valve goes public someone else will control that monopoly.
It’s not a hard thing to get. Over the years Valve has had relatively low amount of blunders and for the most part they were of the misjudging customer base kind but ultimately they have been very consumer oriented and have provided great value for the money. From universal refund policy to family sharing and similar. Their service consists of many benefits for the consumer but all of that is charged from the developer. Very hard not to like such approach.
Epic on the other hand did the opposite. They catered to developers and inconvenienced consumers. You get to pay the same price as everywhere but you are forced to get exclusives from them and you don’t get any of the benefits Steam has. Am in fact surprised it gained as much popularity as it did. Goes to show people will sell their own pride for occasional free game you don’t even get to chose.
Am not sure I have ever overpaid a game on Steam. It’s either same price everywhere or I get it at stupid discounts during sales. There’s no pretending. Valve even said it there are things in place should Steam ever disappear you get to keep your games.
I don’t think anyone has a problem with their being two big competitors, it’s just we don’t want it to be epic games. gog games would be a good competitor
Steam is a better product, but you give less money to the developers of the actual game. Unless it has Steam exclusives (e.g. Steam workshop) I would rather buy wherever I give the devs most money.
Yeah, I understand why people like and buy from Steam. It gives real value.
However, especially for smaller game studios, I believe I get more value if actual game developers get more money than Steam getting it. Let’s say a studio gets $1m in revenue after years of work. Having $180k more ($120k Epic fee vs $300k Steam fee) to spend on artists and developers for their next games/DLCs is a big difference.
Those $300k is literally 0.003409% of Steam’s revenue (estimated 8.8 billion in 2020). Valve could have an army of over 40,000 developers at a yearly $200k compensation and still be profitable just from selling other people’s games.
So I make a big convenience sacrifice when I buy from Epic. I also don’t like to support Tencent. But unless the dev is selling Steam keys directly from their web site, that’s where they get the most money.
When it introduced Steam Direct, Valve prioritized the development of Steam features that helped users discover games they might be interested in, such as the Discovery Queue. The Epic Games Store will continue to get interface updates, but as a matter of principle, Allison says that Epic will not track user behavior and use it to algorithmically recommend games. Epic has said in the past that it's more interested in supporting the game discovery that already happens outside of stores, such as on Twitch and YouTube.
So Epic will put your game trailer on their YouTube for 300 views and call it a day.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Find me a source confirming that they actually studied Steam’s position in their market. They have specific criterias, including financial and user ones, and Steam doesn’t meet them… oopsy!
Find me a source confirming that they actually studied Steam’s position in their market.
I found a super recent source that does not list Valve as a monopolist. Maybe you should go and find a credible source other than “Trust me, bro” that Steam is a monopoly.
They have specific criterias, including financial and user ones, and Steam doesn’t meet them… oopsy!
So Steam does not rake in so much money to hog the market and also does not have enough users to hog the customer base. If anything is an oopsy, it’s you accidentally admitting that Steam is not a monopoly. Good we cleared that up!
No, what I’m saying is that they didn’t check the PC gaming platform market at all because it doesn’t fit the criterias necessary for them to pay attention to it, which means that Steam not being on the list doesn’t mean they’re not a monopoly. You try to use that as proof, yet the European Union just didn’t check what’s happening in that market at all!
There’s tons of monopolies they don’t list because the market they’re in is too small to bother, it doesn’t mean they’re not monopolies.
You try to use that as proof, yet the European Union just didn’t check what’s happening in that market at all!
Funny how nobody other random commentators on the internet and their “Trust me, bro” line of evidence sees Steam as a monopoly and you people conveniently keep forgetting that the biggest PC games – Roblox, Minecraft, and Fortnite – are not on Steam and the combined active user base of those three games dwarf the active Steam user base. So the gatekeeper list by the EU does not count. Great. Where are the antitrust rulings on Steam by the USA, the UK, Japan, Brazil, Kenya, or any other regulatory body on the planet?
As a video game store they are the biggest one in term of total users and number of games for sale, are you questioning that?
How many users get Fortnite from Epic Games Store and how many get Minecraft from Microsoft Store? What does the “Trust me, bro” line of evidence say about those? None of you provide anything facts-based after all…
You’re the one that needs to provide a source since this was your original claim to refute someone else’s cited source. Don’t sealion and constantly ask someone else for more and more and more sources when they’ve already provided one and you’ve provided none.
They haven’t provided a source! They extrapolated from data they don’t understand! The criterias for companies to be analysed under the DMA are public and the PC video game market just doesn’t fit! The reason Steam isn’t on the list isn’t because it’s not a monopoly, it’s they the industry they I operate in isn’t taken in consideration by the law.
You could be the only online windmill hat seller, the EU wouldn’t put you on the DMA list because you wouldn’t sell 6.5B euros worth every year and your market valuation wouldn’t be 65B euros. It doesn’t mean you wouldn’t have a monopoly!
Heck, Valve doesn’t even have a market valuation because it’s not public! They’re evaluated to be worth less than 10B USD and it’s purely surveillance, that’s a long fucking way to the minimum threshold required be the DMA isn’t it? They’re still the biggest player in the PC video game sales market.
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.
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.
*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
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.
The European Union considers some companies to be a monopoly with a smaller market presence than Steam has in the PC video games sales market. That comes from your own source buddy.
Your whole argument to show that it isn’t is based on ignoring their market dominance and referencing the DMA that hasn’t even been used to analyze Steam’s position in their market because the PC video game market as a whole isn’t big enough to be covered by the DMA.
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.
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.
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: arstechnica.com/…/valve-issues-scathing-reply-ove…
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: 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Retail stores get a 30% cut from a game sale. Console manufacturers get a further $10 in licensing fees from that sale price, on top of the retail fee. That license cost is what goes to closing that loss leading pricing of the consoles. The retail fee they can charge through their digital storefronts is new to them but only helps them pay down their gap quicker, but they are also still taking that further $10 of licensing on top of the 30%.
That’s why some PC games are $10 cheaper than their console versions.
The reason it’s the same price on Steam and Epic is that Steam prevents the sale on their platform if the game is sold for cheaper on other platforms…
I would also gladly increase the developer’s profit instead of the platform’s profit if the price is the same on both as I don’t use all the extra crap that Steam comes with…
Oh if you’re talking about exclusives then pricing is all over the place because they have exclusive in all categories (AAA to indie)…
There’s also more than them in the balance to determine the price at which games sell, 2K games won’t sell the new Borderlands for 60$ 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.
Yes, that’s much more credible - thank you for sharing that. This part in particular is concerning:
The ruling 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.
I wasn’t able to find any instances of Steam actually de-listing a game because it was listed cheaper elsewhere, but a credible threat to do so is almost as bad (possibly worse, really, since such a threat hints that Steam might have used other underhanded tactics when dealing with game devs). I wasn’t able to find any more recent news on the case, but hopefully we’ll learn if the issue was that particular Account Manager + lack of oversight or something more.
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.
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.
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:
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.
@Kecessa 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
I personally get most of my games from GOG and itch.io these days. And I’ve never bought anything from the Epic store whatsoever.
I will say though that I find it kind of weird how much hate Epic gets for their store. Like, I understand that someone prefers Steam, or doesn’t want to buy stuff from Epic etc. - but what we see goes way beyond that. Epic has people actively campaigning against it, as if its mere existence is insulting. I don’t really get why.
As for the 30% cut… Developers will try to price their games competitively, and within customer expectations. So with or without Steam’s 30% cut, you can expect games to be similarly priced. The large 30% cut from Steam is basically coming out of the developer’s revenue rather than from your pocket. (I’m under the impression that GOG also has a similar 30% fee. Epic has a lower fee. And on itch.io the seller gets to choose how money goes to itch.io anywhere from 0% to 100%. So itch.io is the best deal for developers in terms of fees.)
The reason people hate Epic is fairly obvious – they don’t give a shit about the gaming industry nor about players. At some point their client contained literal spyware, they tried to brute force market share via sleazy exclusivity contracts, their software doesn’t have one tenth of the features Steam has, their CEO is a piece of shit, etc.
The reason people hate Epic is fairly obvious – they don’t give a shit about the gaming industry nor about players.
What do you mean by that? For developers, they take a much smaller fee than Steam or GOG, and for players they’re constantly giving away free games.
At some point their client contained literal spyware.
That sounds like a decent reason to campaign against them. I haven’t heard anything about that before. What was the story behind that? (As in, when / why / how / what? Perhaps you have a link or something.)
brute force market share via sleazy exclusivity contracts
I’ve heard people talk a lot about exclusivity contracts… but can you name even a single game that has such a contract? When people have discussed this the past, the relevant developers basically said “there is no contract”. But maybe there is some different case I don’t know about. In any case, that personally doesn’t bother me anyway. If some developer wants to take money to be on one store rather than another, they can do that at their own peril. As for customers, we’re only talking about a store. It’s not like anyone is in danger of not being able to buy / play their favourite games. So it seems like a bit of a nothing-burger to me. Like, is there actually something bad happening here? Or are people just speculating that something bad might one-day happen if Epic got bigger?
their software doesn’t have one tenth of the features Steam has,
Steam has more features, yeah. Steam is very good. But Steam has been around for some 20 years. It’s hard to catch up with that so quickly. In any case, although missing features is a good reason to prefer Steam, it certainly isn’t a reason to campaign against Epic.
… So from your list, I’ll keep the spyware thing and the CEO complaint. I don’t know enough about either of those to say much though. I don’t recall who the CEO of Epic is right now, so I won’t say whether or not I think that’s a good reason. And the spyware… I take that kind of stuff seriously. Right now I’m posting this from Linux - because I’m fed-up with Windows spyware. But as I said, I’ve not heard any details about any Epic spyware thing.
Incidentally, I’ve found that Steam is very good for Linux gaming. … But obviously that doesn’t mean that I’m going to start making posts trash-talking Epic. I don’t find it weird that people prefer Steam. I just find it weird that people put so much energy into attacking Epic.
As for the games that were Epic exclusive for a year: Borderlands 3, Satisfactory, Darksiders 3, Hitman 3, Dead Island 2, Borderlands TTW to name a few. They have a year exclusivity deal with Epic - we know how annoying exclusivity deals are on consoles.
About the features, it’s quite tricky. Epic rather spends thousands on exclusivity deals rather than invest into a launcher to have a working basket.
It’s super obvious where Epic’s priorities are, and it’s not the gamers. How are they able to dedicate so much work on Unreal, but now on a launcher? They try to substitute a half-assed launcher with exclusivity deals, because they know nobody would use it willingly.
It takes quite a lot of time to repeat all the wrong doings of Epic and it’s CEO Tim.
Thus, I can only relay to the collected information of bad old Reddit, if you want to (I’m intentionally not linking, you can search it up easily). r/fuckepic has a lot of collected information on their side page.
In short, biggest issue for me exclusivity contracts with games advertised on Steam, then as a bait and switch removed from the store page and their physical copies getting a sticker on top of the Steam logo, so a last minute deal, for Metro Exodus. And then they continued their exclusivity hunt for games, they didn’t even helped to develop. Nothing against self-made or published games to be limited time exclusive in my perspective, but not second hand bought (out).
The other about their CEO, r/timcritizisestim He’s… a douche. Using kids with the free games to bait them to his store, using them against Apple’s store rules like a little army… he is a bad person with too much money and luck to have build the Epic engine with Fortnite…
Also adding to other people, they “poached” games from other platforms.
eg they wanted Rocket League, which I have on Steam and am happy to continue using there, to be completely removed from my account and available through the epic launcher some 3(?) years after I first bought it. Eventually they backpedaled, only due to community backlash, people that owned it on steam can still play it there.
Are you saying that Rocket League was removed from the Steam accounts of the people who already owned it? That sounds like a big deal, and surely must be illegal. But I didn’t see mention of that in the link you posted. Most of the things in the list seemed to be just saying that they didn’t think the Epic store is high quality. (eg. prices too high, not enough features, difficult to use return policy, etc.) Those are all fair complaints, and good reasons to not use the store - but again, they are only good reasons to not use the store. They aren’t really good reasons to crusade against it. There are heaps of crap online stores, and generally people just ignore them.
The Rocket League thing you mentioned would be a good reason to get upset at Epic beyond just not wanting to buy from them. So I’m kind of surprised to see it missing from such a comprehensive list of grievances.
Others have mentioned spyware, and like I said, I care about that. That’s a big red flag. But I looked at the links in the post you gave, and as far as I could tell they were all speculation. Things like Tencent owns 40% of Epic, and Tencent is bad - so Epic is probably bad. … Which is quite possibly true! I certainly wouldn’t want to trust Epic with my personal info. But it’s still a big step away from them having spyware built in.
I personally think that many gamers put up with too much privacy invasion and ‘telemetry’ in the form of online accounts and especially ‘anti-cheat’ software. The “anti cheat” software that some games require explicitly demand access to see every program you have installed, every program you have running, and in some cases even read RAM outside of what the game is allocated. That’s an enormous security risk and privacy breach… but people install that crap all the time with barely a whisper - but then complain about the risk the Epic will share its telemetry data with Tencent. I’m certain that some of Epic’s online games have software like that, but that wasn’t mentioned in thread you linked to.
Maybe I just don’t care about the same things that other people care about. Like, if Epic has a crap store… I just don’t care. It makes no difference to me how crap it is. It makes to difference if they say it is going to be great, and it falls short of what they said. I’m not going to go around telling people how crap it is, because I don’t think it matters. I don’t intend to use the store anyway; and if other people like the store for some reason, then fine. I don’t think it matters. They can like it, and I won’t try to convince them otherwise. But if they are somehow removing games you’ve already bought elsewhere - then that’s a big deal. That would be worth telling people about. I hope you can see what I mean.
Anno 1800 was available for purchase on Steam prior to release but at some point they made a deal with Epic to sell it there for a year. Then it was removed from Steam. If you already bought it you could use it on Steam but everyone else had to wait. You could also directly buy it from Ubisoft’s own store Uplay so in the most strict sense it was not an exclusive contract but pretty damn close. Also it wasn’t a secret. The company talked about it. They had to, because it was literally available for pre purchase on Steam and then suddenly wasn’t.
For developers, they take a much smaller fee than Steam or GOG, and for players they’re constantly giving away free games.
“Free stuff, pl0x” isn’t an indicator of supporting the industry or players. That’s a business tactic for clawing market share away from their competitors by attracting people without the means to buy games and devs desperate for funding. Also, if parity is your worry, many games on Steam go free or effectively free (<1 USD) all the time.
That sounds like a decent reason to campaign against them. I haven’t heard anything about that before. What was the story behind that? (As in, when / why / how / what? Perhaps you have a link or something.)
With Reddit going tits up and a coverup operation by Epic throwing a bunch of garbage info around, it’s been difficult to find the exact sources (why I’ve been taking so long to reply). If I find the actual articles/posts I’ll link them, but in summary:
EGS bypassed many APIs, such as Steam’s API, to data mine your usage statistics of their competitors, including friends and games played - they didn’t ask for your consent nor Steam’s.
Some major red flags with memory manipulation and internet traffic obfuscation.
They “apologized” about it, citing some bullshit reasons for that behavior. Suspiciously, behavior changed.
I’ve heard people talk a lot about exclusivity contracts… but can you name even a single game that has such a contract? […] Like, is there actually something bad happening here? Or are people just speculating that something bad might one-day happen if Epic got bigger?
There are loads of games in my “do not buy unless heavily discounted” list precisely for taking exclusivity deals. Hitman 3, Darkest Dungeon 2, Hades, Satisfactory, among others. The danger, beyond rewarding shitty behavior, shutting out large portions of the community, and limiting consumers’ options, is the same as always - you’re effectively telling companies that whoever has the biggest pocket gets to dictate what the entire industry has to do.
But Steam has been around for some 20 years. It’s hard to catch up with that so quickly. In any case, although missing features is a good reason to prefer Steam, it certainly isn’t a reason to campaign against Epic.
It wouldn’t be if Epic had shown any intention of eventually having parity. It’s been however many years since they released, with the immense advantage of seeing what works for Steam so they could copy it, and yet their client remains just as bad. It clearly shows that their focus in on getting market share to exploit gamers and devs, not on making the best platform possible.
Steam can also leverage their insanely huge userbase. Even with the 30% cut, a company will probably see more profits if they use steam and give up 30% than trying to launch it outside.
At this point. The 30% is just the cost of doing business
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’ll never buy another game on Microsoft’s store ever again. And this is AFTER all that GFWL bs. Bought Forza 7 and it refuses to install. It did once before but now it says it’s done immediately and is nowhere to be found. I’ve tried everything short of a reinstal, which I will not do
I have a lot of problems with them too. I gave Game Pass an honest shot once, but could never get any games to run or install properly. Can’t imagine the normal store front is any better.
Epic only has a lower cut because they’re leveraging their undoubtedly massive Chinese investments to gain market share. You can rest assured they would charge 30% if they could.
I don’t like that Steam or Apple or Google charge 30%. I think it’s absurd. But also Valve is basically a saint compared to every modern corporation so I don’t think twice about it.
While 30% is high it seems developers consider it acceptable since number of games Steam releases is not reducing. Any one of those developers can decide not to publish on steam and go that way, but in the end I think Valve’s service offers so much exposure that it’s worth considering.
Getting 100% of 1000 sales is not the same amount of money as getting 70% of 30000 sales, especially when it’s a digital distribution where copying bytes costs nothing. Steam also offers bunch of other services as well, things like networking, cloud saves, streaming and similar all of which cost money to maintain.
While 30% is high it seems developers consider it acceptable since number of games Steam releases is not reducing.
Yeah that’s not how that works. Acceptable or not, if you want to sell your games, they have to be on Steam because that’s where people are buying them.
That’s the whole point. If people prefer to buy it on Steam, then that’s it. Forcing people to move away to other store due to exclusive deals and similar means only making people with money more annoyed and more inconvenienced.
Your “point” is shit. Backing people into a corner and then claiming that your choice is “acceptable” because they didn’t go somewhere else is bullshit.
But Steam doesn’t have a monopoly. There’s Epic and GOG and whatever Origin’s called now and probably others. They’re all free to exist, Valve doesn’t do anything to stifle competition, and even lets other companies sell games that start their launcher from Steam.
The only thing you have to lose by using a different system is that it’s probably not as good.
All they’ve done is produce a really fucking exemplary product and it’s become really popular because it’s honestly just good. The second it stops being good or Valve stop being awesome there’s plenty of alternative ways to buy games that I’m sure will be there to replace it.
And Valve is perhaps the best PC store since they have continually pushed PC gaming forward, for example:
Valve Index - still one of the best, if not the best, VR headset out there; it made VR a lot more interesting
Steam Controller - didn’t make as big of a spash as they wanted, but it was really innovative and lead to…
Steam Deck - yeah, they weren’t first, but it’s affordable and made a big enough splash to get big studios to care; now we have a lot more options as well for handheld PC gaming
Not to mention their Linux support, awesome customer support, free dev keys, and Steam Link app. What did other stores do?
GOG - DRM-free is great! But that’s about it.
EGS - free games and lower store fee are cool
Xbox Game Pass - pretty good for users, but it’s troubling long term, and it only works on Windows
everything else - can’t think of anything special here
So no, I don’t think Valve is bad in any way. Quite the opposite, they’re the best behaved games store on PC.
GOG Galaxy is actually amazing in what it accomplishes, GOG just don’t have the resources to make it frictionless.
Gamepass is probably the main competition for Steam at this point. Publishers have been busting to make games run on the cloud, it’s the ultimate DRM, the ultimate goal of the erosion of ownership.
There will be a time where there is a push towards partial-cloud gaming and then fully cloud gaming, and it will be hard for PC gaming to compete in the mainstream when you buy an Xbox dongle for $50 and game as soon as you plug it in. That’s the real threat to Valve.
GOG just don’t have the resources to make it frictionless
They had enough budget to make Cyberpunk 2077 and The Witcher 3, I think they can handle making a decent desktop client. They just don’t prioritize it.
But yeah, subscription and cloud gaming is where the industry wants to go, and I sincerely hope they don’t succeed.
Then they’re either not meeting the needs of potential customers or not finding new customers.
For me personally, I would buy more from them if they supported Linux with GOG Galaxy. I would but a lot more from them if GOG Galaxy had a good experience on Steam Deck. I can’t speak for anyone else, but that’s my price, and apparently it’s the most upvoted feature request for GOG Galaxy.
I didn’t have a Steam account until they made a Linux client (they released in 2012, I made my Steam account in 2013). I bought a few Linux native games here and there, and when they launched Proton in 2018, I bought a lot more games. Before that, I mostly bought games directly from indie devs (Minecraft, Factorio, etc), or tried my luck buying Windows games and running them through WINE (e.g. Starcraft 2).
That’s my price. If they want me as a customer, they need first class Linux support. That’s why Steam gets my money, and GOG could win my business by offering DRM-free games on top. But to me, a Linux desktop client is more important than DRM-free, so that’s why Steam gets my money.
The Valve Index is the least popular VR option and doesn’t rank near the top of VR headsets. Still being beat out by entry level Oculus.
The Steam controller was poorly made flop and has been discontinued. The vast majority of reviews put the controller well below the Xbox controller, which was already PC compatible.
Steam Deck is very expensive and has a very poor battery life. Making the handheld cable tethered. It also went against its open promise by including locked down proprietary software.
Steams customer support ranks the third worst of all top level game stores. Just above Ubisoft and Blizzard.
You mention their Linux support yet the majority of games are yet to be supported and plenty of game will never be supported due to their nature or inclusion of anti-cheat. The only thing Valve has done was release the Steam Client to Linux.
Steam popularized gambling for children and continue to be one of 2 PC companies that continue to do so.
Valve’s goal isn’t to sell a lot of headsets, but to show what’s possible with high quality VR and encourage more VR games and headsets. Valve’s ultimate goal here is to sell more VR games.
Oculus wants to sell a lot of headsets so they can push some kind of SM interaction and profit from having lots of ads. The priority there is adoption, not quality or compatibility.
Steam Controller was poorly made
No, it was well made, it just wasn’t popular. And again, it wasn’t their goal to sell a ton of them.
The goal was to design a flexible controller to build out their controller API and give an option for a decent desktop mouse replacement for a PC “console” format (i.e. Steam Machine). I think they succeeded at that, but the market wasn’t interested, probably because Steam Machines didn’t go anywhere. It was never intended to replace existing controllers, but to complement them.
Steam Deck is very expensive
It’s $400, which is really competitive. Direct competitors like the AYANEO cost ~$1k twice as much, or even more. The Switch cost $300 at launch (OLED is $350, even today) and wasn’t even competitive with current console hardware at launch, while the Steam Deck is competitive with both price and hardware.
And it’s not cable tethered. I get a few hours of battery life as long as I’m not playing the most heavy games. Most of what I play are older AAA games and newer indie titles, and I get 3-5 hours of battery life, which is longer than my play sessions anyway. If I switch to a modern AAA titles, it’s like 1-2 hours, which is still enough for most play sessions.
Their goal, again, isn’t to sell a ton and corner the PC handheld market, it’s to make PC handhelds popular so there’s more demand, thus more competition, and thus more game sales. They also want to show what’s possible with a Linux-based PC, so there’s a credible alternative to Microsoft (and most games seem to be playable, check out ProtonDB for a larger picture than just Steam’s official stamp; look at Proton DB medals, 77% are Gold or Platinum, which usually refers to “playable” and “verified” accordingly).
Steam’s customer support
You claim it’s worse, but you don’t give examples of services that are better. Here are some examples of worse customer service:
Nintendo estore - no returns
PlayStation store - no returns if you have started to download it, unless it’s faulty (e.g. Cyberpunk 2077), and even then you have 14 days
Xbox - within 14 days and don’t have “a significant amount of playtime”
And Steam’s policy is 14 days and <2 hours playtime (so the same or better than above), yet there are countless examples of refunds being issued being both the time and playtime limit, provided you don’t abuse it.
I’m not going to go through other examples because I believe I’ve proven my point, so now it’s your turn: give specific examples of other stores having better customer service than Steam.
No, they’re just one example, and perhaps the most clearly documented one, and IMO the most important one (i.e. the one that most users will need to use).
If you want to discuss another metric, then please do so.
The only thing Valve has done was release the Steam Client to Linux.
*countless improvements Valve engineers have made to the the Mesa OpenGL and Vulkan drivers as well as to the kernel graphics driver components. Not just to the AMD graphics drivers for benefiting the Steam Deck’s hardware but also to Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan and then other common infrastructure. But in this area of the Linux graphics driver support, Valve’s contributions and those of their partners have been incredibly beneficial to the Linux desktop ecosystem even outside gaming. *
I guess that depends on your priorities. It has a competitive resolution and frame rate, is a bit heavy, has fantastic controllers, and has Linux compatibility. It’s also expensive and is best to pair with high end hardware.
So if you’re looking for Linux support (like me), it’s pretty much your only option, unless you’re willing to buy used or accept a lot of compromises. If you’re looking for cheap, lightweight, or compatible with lower end hardware, it’s not going to score well.
But on the whole, outside of pricing, it does a good job in almost every category. If money is no object, the Index is one of the best.
The position makes a monopoly so I would say they are but they remain the good guys because they don’t engage in anti-competitive practices, you can have a monopoly wven if you don’t abuse it.
Monopolies aren’t based on the mere existence of competition. It’s based on power and market share. Eg, Chrome has a monopoly. Firefox, Safari, and a few niche browsers exist. But Chrome is the utter vast majority of the market and has pretty much all the power on dictating web standards as a result.
Microsoft had competitors when they got sued for their IE + Windows monopoly. But they had an utterly massive amount of the market share and used that to push their own browser.
Steam is a legitimate value add for sellers and buyers/users, that justifies its 30% cut. Other than free games, Epic has a seemingly easy-to-integrate online networking system, that’s about it. Steam has a modding platform, broadcasting, remote “parsec”-like controller emulator, Linux support, content sharing, forums and a developer news feed. That’s quite a lot.
What makes me stick with them is that they don’t preclude Steam and other gaming users from using alternatives but simply compete with their own well-made system… plenty of games have their own cross-platform mod-launchers that aren’t workshop for example. Steamworks DRM isn’t required and Steam networking services for multiplayer aren’t mandatory either.
That said, itch and GoG are great alternatives where they have games available. I’d just like GoG to provide better Linux support.
Gog has support problems on some windows games too. Also they mark games run via dosbox as windows, which is annoying when you specifically want to find an older windows game that also had a dos release. Even with those issues, gog is still my goto because at least my games won’t be full of denuvo securom etc. and nobody else seems to remotely care about the really old harder to find games. I’d be scouring ebay for old discs if not for gog.
People saying Steam doesn’t have a monopoly because other stores exist, is the same as saying Microsoft doesn’t have a monopoly on PC Gaming because Mac and Linux exist. Technically true, but ultimately meaningless because its their market power that determines a monopoly, not whether there are other niche players.
While Valve and Steam have generally been a good player, and currently do offer the best product, they still wield an ungodly amount of influence over the PC gaming market space.
Epic is chasing that because they really want what Valve has, though no doubt they plan to speedrun the enshittification process as soon as they think it safe.
When people say Valve doesn’t have a monopoly, they usually mean they don’t engage in anti-competitive practices (like making exclusivity a condition for publishing on their store, cough cough).
Actually, Valve’s recent moves represent what free market capitalism should be about - when competing stores started to appear, they instead made massive contributions to Linux gaming and appealed to right-to-repair advocates with the Steam Deck. Now both of those demographics are suckling on Gaben’s teats, myself included.
I hate DRM but really like Steam, they put in a shit ton of work to achive that! It’s certainly a monopoly but I think one of the biggest differences is that it’s not a publically tradet company so they don’t have to chase that infinite growth many very influencial idiots don’t see any issue with and there for aren’t willing to destroy everything for short term gains.
Despite not having pressure from shareholders Valve pioneered or at least popularized and normalized many of the worst practices in videogame industry designed to milk players dry: microtransactions, battle passe, loot boxes, real money gambling, you name it, Valve has it
Capitalism and a free economy are good when it's serving customers by making the best product or service possible, while balancing that with paying labour to make that happen.
The problem is that nowadays, there's a third party to this for the megacorps: Shareholders, which is where the enshittification begins.
Valve is a private company, so it is not beholden to any external shareholders, which is why it's been able to chart its own course. Still, I do worry what will happen when Gabe steps down.
I just don’t think that’s the case with Valve, they work on steam and add new features consistently, it’s not like they’re providing no value for the cut they take.
I get where you’re coming from though and way too many companies get away with that kind of situation. Just what capitalism often gives us :/
I’m not talking about Valve giving things back to us. I’m talking about the fact the owners of the company get money simply by owning the company. They take money they didn’t work for. Even if the company isn’t manipulative or scummy, they’re enriching people who don’t deserve it.
Generally companies do provide a service of some sort, the problem is that the higher ups who generally do less actual “work” rake in way way more then the average worker of the company.
That may be so, but that’s not the way that the initial tweet is using the term, and not the commonly understood definition.
I’m not denying that Valve as a whole have been a force for good in the PC gaming market, but it’s pointless to argue semantics and make up definitions to better suit personal bias instead of debating the actual point that’s being made.
they usually mean they don’t engage in anti-competitive practices.
But they do. They forbid devs to sell their games cheaper on other storefronts (outside of timed sales). Basically they enforce anti-competitive pricing on products in a way that makes it impossible for the devs to move the platform costs into consumer prices.
Devs could sell the product on Epic for example for $49 and make the same amount of profit as they do on Steam when priced $59 due to lower cut, but they can’t do it because Valve forbids it. It anti-competitively protects Valve and their 30% cut against competitors who would take lesser cuts, at the expense of end customers.
Epic is chasing that because they really want what Valve has, though no doubt they plan to speedrun the enshittification process as soon as they think it safe.
Like what Steam did with Greenlight and the plague of early access asset flips that clogged its home page for years?
Greenlight had nothing to do with selling out the end user experience to cash out on providing value and leaving the service near unusable, unless you have some kind of compulsion where you have to buy everything on Steam.
The trading card feature created an ecosystem allowing cheap asset flips to quickly make the threshold. And make their money back, creating a positive feedback loop.
Steam allowed its store to be flooded with these games at the expense of its customers because it got it’s cut.
Steam is a natural monopoly, which although still not entirely good but are a wholly different beast from monopolies made by exploiting flaws in the system
What’s a natural monopoly? Valve currently has the freedom to implement anything they want within an extent because they’re so popular. If they decided they wanted to charge devs 35% would people stop using it? Probably not. Steam’s monopoly is as bad as any other for the same reason any other monopoly is bad.
A natural monopoly is when an industry is difficult to break into, making competition difficult or impossible. This favors incumbents, in fact, a lot of industries are natural monopolies (pharma, aerospace, chip production).
The difficulty of breaking into an industry may be because:
new players cannot compete with established scale
start up costs require a nearly all-or-nothing approach, high risk
Look it up? It’s an actual term, not something I made up for whatever reason you assumed to argue against something I didn’t even say. I already said it’s still not a good thing, it just would have happened regardless of whoever that was able to do it on scale first.
You may want to read up on Ma Bell or Microsoft’s legal issues with Internet Explorer in the 90s to see what specifically was so bad about monopolies like those, and then revisit this idea.
Epic is on a decline, never forget what they did to unreal. Also I really like when devs give the option to buy on itch.io and get a steam key with the drm free version. They get more money per sale and I get a drm free version and a steam version in one. Zortch and Dwarf Fortress are the only two games I know of to do this but would like to see more.
delisted all the unreal and unreal tournament games from all storefronts to reduce competition to fortnite. You can’t buy any unreal game legit anymore, either have to pirate or scrounge internet archive. For anyone who doesn’t know unreal was epicmegagames first flagship series, the one that printed the money for the foundation they sit on. Very dedicated fanbase and everything, and epic kills it. even the singleplayer campaigns.
this doesn’t make any sense, these games were never competing with fortnite.
delisting these games was a very shitty thing to do, but there is no reason for us to go around fabricating nonsensical motives to explain it. the far simpler explanation is that they didn’t want to put in the work to keep these games playable on modern PCs.
But that’s not what Epic is after. They tried to go hard after the sellers, figuring that if they can corner enough fo the market with exclusives the buyers will have to come.
They did both things.
Yes, they went after sellers, because they needed something to sell. Nobody’s going to go to the new upstart store without some incentive. For sellers, that incentive was piles of money (with the understandable trade off of an exclusivity period - a completely normal thing for businesses to do).
But they also went after buyers by handing out hundreds of free games to build up everyone’s libraries (something they’re obviously still doing), and by running the best sales seen on a PC store since Valve stopped doing flash deals during their sales.
But nothing they do is going to achieve your statement of “you could run a slightly less feature-rich store, take less of a cut, and pass the reduction fully on to consumers and you’d be an easy choice for many gamers.” They actually tried that at the start, with Metro [Whatever - I don’t play the Metro series so I can never keep the titles straight] launching at a reduced price point because of the lowered cut, but everyone just focused on “ZOMG, I HAVE TO CLICK A DIFFERENT ICON TO LAUNCH IT?!?!11”. Aside from that example, though, the pricing of the games isn’t up to them. Blame the publishers for prices staying the same while they pocket the extra from the lowered store cut - they could easily pass it along to consumers, but they choose not to. Epic themselves did what they could with the coupons during sales (leading to devs/pubs like CDPR maliciously increasing the prices of their games to disqualify them from it just to spite Epic and their potential buyers) and now the not-nearly-as-good-a-deal cash back program they’re doing.
The bulk of gamers simply don’t want to buy from anything other than Steam, and nothing anyone says or does will budge them from that. Every argument against EGS existing is just a rationalization of that stance. I’ve literally seen people say “I want every game on every store and then I’ll buy it from Steam.”
While I can understand the difficulty of trying to come up with competition to a pre-existing and dominant storefront, they went about it almost entirely the wrong way. They underestimated consumers’ aversion to change and overestimated the value their own launcher provided.
Everybody and their mother used Steam at the time, and it provided a whole lot more than just a storefront and icons to click. When Epic launched EGS, it offered absolutely none of that. Without any social aspects or significant consumer buy-in to their ecosystem, it had no staying power. People—myself included—would go to it to play a shiny new free game until it stopped being fun, then fuck right off back to Steam to play our other games with friends. If they had spent more time cooking up the EGS ecosystem into something more similar to XBL or PSN before trying to attract consumers en masse, they likely would’ve been pretty successful. They could’ve even just decided to partner up with (or buy) NexusMods and integrated a mod manager, and a lot of us would’ve had a good reason to prefer EGS over Steam for some games.
Instead of doing something to make their ecosystem more appealing, though, they used paid-for exclusives to make other ecosystems less appealing. It was an obvious attempt to herd consumers into their ecosystem, and it backfired spectacularly. Before that, most people were either indifferent or liked them as a company due to their legacy and/or Unreal Engine. These days, I see a lot of bitching about “timed exclusives”.
If they had spent more time cooking up the EGS ecosystem into something more similar to XBL or PSN before trying to attract consumers en masse, they likely would’ve been pretty successful.
That’s not remotely how it would have happened.
Have a read over this article that was posted by Lars Doucet (well-respected indie developer of Defender’s Quest) roughly a year before EGS even launched. It lays out exactly what a Steam competitor is going to run into trying to break into that market and provides a blueprint to not fail that is almost exactly what Epic did. And yet, the discussion to this day is still filled with nothing but “REEEEE, EXCLUSIVES!!!1”, nevermind the fact that those games all still run perfectly fine on the exact same machine you launch your Steam games from (excepting, now - multiple years on from the whole kerfuffle having begun - the Deck… buying straight from Steam does make that a much nicer/smoother experience). You can even add them to Steam to get the extra features like the controller customization and such.
Basically, even if they built a launcher that was better in every conceivable way than Steam, nobody was going to switch. They had to do something else to bring both devs and players on board. As the article states:
Even if every aspect of your service is better than Steam’s in every possible way, you’re still up against the massive inertia of everybody already having huge libraries full of games on Steam. Their credit cards are registered on Steam, their friends all play on Steam, and most importantly, all the developers, and therefore all the games, are on Steam.
I summarily addressed the inertia issue already, when I mentioned that they underestimated consumer’s unwillingness to change.
The article is primarily aimed at startups, who don’t have the same amount of money to pour into software development, testing, and infrastructure.
Epic almost did exactly what the article suggested, but it notably did not improve anything over Steam. It didn’t even try for parity with Steam. In my opinion, as someone who plays PC games, that removed any chance of me even considering using it in any serious capacity.
I genuinely think they would’ve had a shot at being successful if they had tried to improve the state of PC gaming. Steam is massive, but it’s not without its pain points. The core of the client is ancient, and the fact that it heavily utilizes CEF makes it a bit of a resource hog. There’s a lot of bugs hidden in the nooks and crannies, and legacy cruft makes fixing some of these issues take a very long time.
Epic had the right approach to getting their foot in the door by giving away games for free and paying/bribing developers to release non-exclusive games on their platform. They just fucked up everything else.
Some things they could have done to help themselves:
Released a client that worked more consistently than Steam:
Steam Cloud is extremely opaque about errors.
Download times are inaccurate, particularly when dealing with IO.
Chat windows are pretty laggy and resource-intensive.
Built-in Nvidia GameStream protocol support.
GameStream has lower latency than Steam Link.
Integrated mods.
They wouldn’t get developer buy-in for a new ecosystem, but that doesn’t mean they couldn’t just buy out an existing mod platform and integrate it.
Forums, chat, and social features.
Lacking these, they’re basically asking players to go to Steam whenever they need to find comminuty guides or discussions.
Achievements and matchmaking as a drop-in Steam API replacement.
An equivalent to Steam Input for remapping controller inputs on a per-game basis.
A CEO that knows when to stop talking.
The impression I get from him talking is that he thinks he’s the messiah of PC gaming. The impression I get from his actions is that he’s just like the rest of the publishers trying to grope our wallets at every opportunity. I doubt I’m the only one.
I think Epic definitely fucked some things up, but I really think the takeaway is that, if anyone has any hope for competing, they are absolutely going to need exclusives. This has been studied in the economics literature. In order for a newcomer to compete, you need exclusives. The dominant platform will automatically get the big titles, and players aren’t going to switch platforms to get the same titles they could’ve gotten without switching.
How did Valve get gamers to switch from physical boxed games to Steam? Exclusives. There was actually a digital distribution platform that predated Steam (run by Stardock), and it was more feature complete than Steam when Steam came out. But it didn’t have any exclusives, so it died out in favor of the (at the time) more spartan Steam platform.
Love or hate exclusives, nobody ever gets anywhere in the marketplace without them.
I also think the problem is how they executed some of their exclusives. There have been multiple games, mostly in the past now, that announced launching on certain platforms, including Steam, then had to backtrack and reveal that Epic bought their exclusivity and that gamers that were already expecting to get the game from one platform, now wouldn't be able to.
Even though that doesn't change the end result of what you're getting, the feeling that the timing and method of the exclusivity deal left you with was... a surprise that forced the buyer to reevaluate their expectations and have to consider the purchase all over again on a different storefront, because of that storefront's direct monetary intervention.
It came off as a corporate bribe that lessened the consumer's options, for no benefit to the consumer. The pure taste that actions like that left in my mouth got me to never even claim any free Epic games and to wait an entire year for Hitman 3 to drop on Steam even though the reboot trilogy are some of my favorite games of all time, and I won't even get into the snafu that game particularly had with transferring trilogy content paid for on Steam to Epic.
If they hadn't gone about purchasing exclusivity deals in that fashion, I may have bought some things on sale from them, or at the least claimed some games allowing their launcher to live on my machine, but instead it drove me away.
There have been multiple games, mostly in the past now, that announced launching on certain platforms, including Steam, then had to backtrack and reveal that Epic bought their exclusivity and that gamers that were already expecting to get the game from one platform, now wouldn’t be able to.
There was one game that happened to. Metro. And anyone who had already pre-purchased on Steam had it fulfilled through Steam at launch.
The rest of the games people claim this happened to were Kickstarter projects in which the backer reward promised a “digital key”. Now, at the time of those Kickstarter campaigns, the only stores that existed were Steam and GOG, so there was an assumption made that the keys would be to one of those two. But by the time the games were getting ready to launch, another option came into existence and devs who clearly needed money (or they wouldn’t have been going to Kickstarter to begin with) made a deal.
Well, I also count Hitman 3 since it delayed my ability to complete the trilogy I'd been playing for years at that point by another year without having to deal with the storefront content transfer issues that weren't guaranteed to be handled by IOI as well as they ended up being after some struggle.
For me, the one time with Metro and the deal with Hitman were two distasteful deal executions too many.
There have been multiple games, mostly in the past now, that announced launching on certain platforms, including Steam, then had to backtrack and reveal that Epic bought their exclusivity and that gamers that were already expecting to get the game from one platform, now wouldn’t be able to.
Valve did a similar thing to this. I don’t know if you remember the original state of Half-Life and Counter Strike, but they originally didn’t require any launcher. Then, one release, Valve announced that the old version was going to be shutdown and they would require Steam for now on. People had already purchased the game and been playing it outside of Steam, so they were pretty pissed that all the sudden they needed this launcher / account to keep playing a game that didn’t require one out of the box. I was especially pissed, because I think I was the only one in my group of friends that realized that they had unilaterally removed the option to resell / give away your game, and that seemed like bullshit to me, because I occasionally gave my old games to my friends when I was tired of them. The boxed copies of Half-Life and CS allowed for resell/transfer of the game, but they forced everyone over to Steam with an update and the Steam terms removed the option to transfer the game to someone else. Plus, Steam was an absolute awful piece of software at the time, and that made everything worse.
I’m guessing this also happened to other games as well. There was a period there where people would pre-order a game assuming it would work as a traditional, standalone boxed game. But then they’d get the game and it would unexpectedly require Steam, and the buyers would be pissed. Nowadays you just assume a launcher will be required, but it came as a shock / infuriated / disappointed people back when it first started being a thing that PC games were tied to launchers / accounts (and people hated Steam / launchers). Lots of people felt duped.
Anyway, I’m of the opinion that it’s bad for software to ever require or be tied to any launcher, even worse if it’s a third party launcher. It makes the future of games access muddy (What if Steam shuts down? What if there’s a court injunction against Steam requiring it to cease operations? What if my country blocks access to Steam?) and also adds extra layers of insecurity (last time I looked, there was at least one security issue in Steam that remained unpatched since around 2012).
So, to me, switching from Steam to EGS just meant consumers were getting punched in the nuts by a different company. I’d be happy if they weren’t getting punched in the nuts at all.
Interesting, that was before my time. I remember getting on Steam for when Half Life 2 released, but I believe that was required right out the gate, and I was already enthralled enough by the game to just give in to it, I was a kid anyway.
I take it you prefer getting games from GOG in that case? They're almost the last bastion for PC games in that way.
I’d say of the current players, GOG is among my favorites since they make the launcher component optional.
In general, I’ve just been disappointed that all the launchers have taken off. I get the convenience factor, but consumers also had some rights that were taken away with the move to launchers. Plus the fact that some of the launchers have terrible security practices, as I mentioned, and that makes it so even a game with great security has unnecessarily increased attack surfaces. And launchers also screw over people with limited internet access, which is admittedly fewer people throughout the world every day, but there are still military personnel, etc. that just cannot reasonably be expected to access the internet on the whim of a launcher.
I suspect we’ll see the same thing happen with Epic that happened with Steam, where people end up forgetting all about the early fucked up stuff and, in the end, just rolling with it. Some years down the line, people won’t even remember how much people were pissed off about the early days of Epic. As an example, any time I mention that I’m not a huge fan of Steam, based partly on remembering the forced move of existing / new games in the early days, people just shrug it off and act like it was fine for Valve to do that since, years later, we got the current, well liked iteration of Steam.
And that’s kinda how I feel about Epic. If Steam can ultimately get a pass for completely ruining the experience of a few games by forcing people to use it against their will in the early days, why shouldn’t Epic get a chance at a pass in the end too? Maybe it turns out to be great years down the line? The only reason we have the Steam that’s well liked today is because consumers put up with it in the early days. Would we be better off if Steam failed early on? If consumers had held their ground when they hated it and forced it to close down? I kinda doubt it. I hate launchers, but, if Valve didn’t make the dominant one, someone else would’ve, and I probably wouldn’t be any happier with it.
Maybe in 20 years EGS will be fucking amazing, and when you tell someone you don’t like it because of what they did with Metro, etc., they’ll look at you the way people look at me when I talk about Steam now, lol.
It wasn’t really even exclusives technically. It was explicitly Excluding-Steam exclusives. It released everywhere else but not on Steam. And it was further aggravated by games that were already on Steam being taken off in favor of launching elsewhere.
The reason that it’s so hard to compete with Steam is that Steam just does what it does so well.
I don’t have much desire to change my primary digital storefront because there isn’t really much of anything more I want from a digital storefront that Steam doesn’t already provide. If the quality of Steam’s experience declines at some point, I would welcome competition, but otherwise, why would I bother switching to another service when I don’t really have any complaints about Steam?
Besides, the TV/movie streaming service market has already demonstrated what happens when not enough competition suddenly turns into too much competition. If Epic were able to demonstrate that it was possible to overtake Steam, everyone would try to copycat their strategy, and then you likely end up with a balkanized market where no one has the market share or resources to provide the level of quality that Steam does.
Exactly, Steam got where it is because it managed to be more convenient than piracy (as Gaben himself said, piracy is a service problem), as did Netflix before the fragmentation (and rampant enshittification) of the streaming market made piracy once more the most convenient (and better quality) option.
Epic store exclusives don’t promote Epic, they promote piracy, as that is the second most convenient option after Steam (it’s worth mentioning that Steam also acts as unobtrusive DRM; infect your game with malware like Denuvo and suddenly piracy again becomes the more convenient — even the only reasonable — option, as cracked games perform better and are more stable than malware DRM infected ones; Steam provides a good enough and, more importantly, harmless option for both consumers and developers, something no alternative, including piracy, has managed to achieve).
And, of course, the instant Gaben retires and Valve goes public and begins to enshittify itself we won’t be going to Epic or GOG (unless they manage to replicate what Steam has achieved), we’ll be back to sailing the high seas.
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