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.
If it’s even possible it would take years or decades of work building up good will. It’s kinda Valve’s game to lose right now. They just need to not make any enormous mistakes and they win by default. Fortunately for Valve, they seem to be one of the few companies in game dev that isn’t managed exclusively by misanthropes and buffoons.
Would it though? Being a competitor to Valve, not sucking, and not pulling shady anti-consumer shit would result in immediate good will for a decently large (though disproportionately loud) section of the market. Hell, EGS failed at the 2nd and 3rd thjngs in that list and they still got a loyal fanbase
Epic can't make a dent because their product is dogshit.
Customers don't care that Valve takes a well earned cut (that only applies buying directly from Steam); they care that their games are on a platform that's actually fucking useful. If Epic didn't insult gamers shipping that piece of trash and had put work into actually providing a product that could possibly be considered acceptable, they might have been able to make a dent.
You're not going to take market share with shitty gimmicks if your actual product is a crime against humanity no one wants.
For starters, they put so little developments money into EGS that they went two years without a shopping cart, a feature that effectively every other online store has and could be custom coded properly in a day
And every one of them comes back because paying Steam 30% is by far the most profitable way to do business. They absolutely deserve every single penny of it.
30% commission on an all margin product is not even sort of unusual or unfair.
The fact that using their services and paying them their cut is more profitable than not doing so absolutely, in and of itself, proves beyond discussion that their cut is fair.
Yes, sales should cost money. Moving units is a fucking massive value add. Valve deserves every penny they take and more. They're the best thing that ever happened to PC gaming and nothing else is remotely close.
Continued use only proves this is a way to make money. Probably the best available way. But to suggest that, so long as people are doing it, there cannot possibly be problems, is obvious crap.
Especially when you add “and more.” Oh: so this isn’t the exact right amount, as decreed by mighty god himself? We can talk about the middleman’s cut, so long as the rent goes up?
If your complaint is the money they take in exchange for sales, it's literally impossible for anything but the fact that paying them nets you significantly more money to be meaningful.
Valve built PC as a platform. If they never existed, you wouldn't get 10% of the PC sales. That absolutely means they're entitled to their share. Platform development is a massive value add, and useless jackasses trivializing their contribution by pretending that the massive development project of building a platform isn't every bit as important as single products on the platform can fuck right off.
Valve could take a lot less and it wouldn’t kill them. Or PC gaming. Wouldn’t be whatever frothing insult you pretend it is, either. It’s just… less money. They’d still make a shitload of money. Just… less.
The number can be smaller and the sky wouldn’t fall.
The number right now is obscenely high. It’s the most they think they can get away with. And they can only get away with it because of their de-facto monopoly, which should end.
Also key activations cost the dev zero on Steam. And the dev can generate keys for free to sell elsewhere. details here: partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/keys
Weird because I provided actual services and functionality that steam provides in exchange for that cut, and your response was that me mentioning devs do have other options isn’t “understanding criticism”
Your response to criticism of Steam was ‘there’s other services.’
That does absolutely nothing to deflect from criticism of Steam.
Praising their various features comes a little closer, but still doesn’t justify taking an entire third of every game’s revenue. It takes a whole fucking lot of hypothetical work, which you imagine developers would have to do, to amount to the slice Steam takes right off the top.
What Valve offers that makes companies put up with that is their de-facto monopoly presence. They can sell many copies through Steam - or they won’t sell many copies.
Then developers can release games off steam, and some do.
‘There’s other services.’
But steam has many features people want and use that would add development costs if every dev had to make similar tools in house.
’ It takes a whole fucking lot of hypothetical work, which you imagine developers would have to do, to amount to the slice Steam takes right off the top.’
Do you think it’s simple for a developer to create a friends list network, host/moderate community forums, host/moderate a mod website integrated into the game, achievements syncing, ability to share the game with friends, and integrate VR functionality for the above, on their own dime?
These are recurring ongoing costs for server and continued developmental changes, you are severely underestimating the time and money cost to create/host/maintain all those services?
You are asserting without evidence that Valve needs to take all that money. As if they would go broke if they only took a quarter of all the revenue on most PC games.
Valve makes ten billion dollars on Steam, every single year. Their margins are not slim. And being an established de-facto monopoly, people go there because that’s where the products are, and products are there because that’s where the people go. They could slash costs to nothing, do the bare minimum work going forward, and still rake in the money on sheer momentum, for years and years and years.
The only feature that really matters here is adoption. And that’s not a feature you can design. Even Valve didn’t rope people in with a convincing sales pitch. They forced Steam onto everyone who wanted to play Half-Life 2. If you didn’t want to put up with an always-online DRM service aimed to take over PC gaming - you didn’t get to play the most anticipated game of the year. Whatever benefits you ascribe to the service, whatever functionality you argue developers would otherwise budget for, the core was always ‘accept this or pound sand.’
No they don’t lol. GOG doesn’t even have a client, you have to use Lutris or Heroic Launcher that support it.
Itch has a half implemented Linux client that they gave up years ago and is straight up unusable/broken. The client is worse then a web wrapper and nas no support for Wine, so if the game doesn’t have native Linux support, it just won’t run through the client. It will download exe’s that won’t actually run and silently fail, and doesn’t have any wine support.
They don’t have a client but both allow you to just download the game and run it from a .sh that installs it in the local folder. That’s enough for me but I agree it may not be for everyone.
Lol, Epic cut Linux support when it bought Rocket League.
But you are right, no one even tries. Everyone wants to have Valve’s income, but no one wants to do the legwork of innovation that Valve does. If someone would compete with Valve where they don’t already have a massive foothold, there might be some better results. For example, Linux. If any of these funding-gorged companies were to put serious money into competing with Valve in the Linux space, it’d be a real competition. Then you could leverage your stake in that to compete in different sectors. But the Linux market is small, and averse to paying for things (userwise) so not much to gain. But Valve understands that if gaming parity with Windows happens, then it will have a compounding effect. It would unshackle the PC market from Microsoft. It would make spending funding on a gaming device that DOESN’T have to have Windows involved a much more appealing prospect. Hell, the phone gaming market. No need for these re-skinned Skinner boxes when you can have the actual PC version on your phone. Whole new market, right there.
The companies that innovate tend to lead. And those who follow the coin and not the music, do not.
Not to mention family sharing. I'm not sure of another PC store front that does the same, but it's been a bit help with my friends in being able to show games to each other and letting us try things before buying, similar to sharing discs back in the day.
It kind of doesn’t, though. Because you can still launch non-Steam games through Steam, and activate retail Steam keys without Valve taking a cut, there are plenty of ways for things to compete against the Steam Store without needing to also compete against the Steam launcher.
You don’t even need all of that really. A lot of Steam functionality can be utilized just by adding it as a Non-Steam Game. Steam Workshop isn’t the necessary if you have a modding scene, you just need a good mod manager.
The key point on whether I’ll use your storefront or not is whether your plan for success is to buy out anti-Steam contracts (remember that it’s not exclusivity to EGS, its to not release on Steam) to get customers and low revenue cuts to get developers and most importantly, to run a loss leading business for a number of years until you are profitable. If EGS were to ever become profitable, how long until they switch to squeezing out as much as they can? They’ve already rescinded their “curated” catalog.
This is not a good way to look at it. Competition is good regardless. It doesn’t matter how good Valve is today, if a viable competitor comes out, Valve will be forced to get better in order to compete.
All we need is some way to guarantee valve doesn’t become public.
This is wrong. Valve can enshittify without going public. If you think that public corporations are the only ones that are greedy/evil/anti-consumer, then you’ve never heard of the “private equity” industry. Look up the recent fight between the FTC and U.S. Anesthesia Partners in Texas for a clear example.
In capitalism, free market forces are what keep tug of war between produces and consumers fair, and competition is the fuel that keeps those free market forces moving. The fact that the Valve of today is both good and a monopoly is just a temporary rounding error/outlier. Over time, Valve will go to shit and consumers will suffer simply because Valve has almost no competition. This isn’t a question, it’s a fact of the mechanism of the economic system they exist in. It’s like gravity; just because you haven’t hit the floor yet doesn’t mean jumping off that building was a good idea.
Epic games, whether you hate them or not, is fighting the good fight. They are doing shitty things (exclusivity, etc), so maybe they aren’t the chosen one who will take challenge Valve, but they are on the right side of that fight. Hoping that Valve will stay great forever is foolish.
…but I will add that I don’t think Epic alone should be trying to take down Valve. Valve is way too entrenched in this market to be taken down with any realistic competition (probably why Epic is resorting to exclusivity deals). The FTC needs to step in and regulate the market. Idk what that would look like, but it’s possible to do it in a way that makes everyone happy. For example (off the top of my head, so probably flawed but whatever) the FTC could enforce interoperability between digital marketplaces so that consumers don’t need to install 30 different launchers to access their purchased libraries. That relatively small change could lower the bar to entry for competitors by a lot, and not be a burden to consumers at the same time. EDIT: and it would not be anything drastic like forcing a break up of Valve.
“hmm… a well thought out, reasoned response. But I disagree! How should I express my opinion effectively, to both this person and others who wander by?”
What a shittake
“Ah, yes. My masterpiece. Everyone must see this.”
Its funny how you credit the invisible hand of free market forces to keep things fair but acknowledge everywhere else that the only thing that actually intervenes to promote fairness is the FTC as government regulatory body.
If we could drop the obvious bullshit romanticism of capitalism this would be a mostly accurate post.
Unregulated capitalism doesn’t work. I don’t think anyone has ever seriously claimed that it does. The FTC isn’t the only thing keeping the market fair, the free market does that on its own. When a company does a shitty thing, they lose customers and die. That’s true in pretty much every market in the real world, except for a few problematic ones where there are bad actors trying to cheat the system.
Plenty of people claim that it does. That is the entire ideological premise you invoke with the free market fetishism (laissez faire, Chicagoan school, Austrian economics) the “free market” means free to exploit consumers, not free to choose. Consumers do not have enough capital to afford any meaningful check against corporate snake oil. This over simplistic narrative youre spinning doesn’t match up with the track record.
Also, you don’t have to be an authoritarian communist to know that the free market is a crock of shit. Anybody with the ability to look at the past few hundred years would know Friedman hayek rothbard and most all libertarians are absolutely full of shit or just plain misguided
Tankies are specifically defenders of Marxist-Leninist communism and their one party state rule (which is ironically not communism, it’s Stalinism which is a form of autocratic socialism)
So I operate on the assumption that anticapitalist people on Lemmy are tankies. It’s not true in all cases ofc, but without more info, I think that’s a safe default.
That dude calling my post “bullshit romanticism of capitalism” gives a bit more confidence that they’re a tankie with a strong case of grassphobia.
Great example of oversimplification and reaching for conclusions that reinforce your bias. An effective way to shield yourself from valid criticism or any self reflection is to automatically discredit the person who brings it to your attention, whether its true or not is of little importance right?
So I operate on the assumption that German people on Lemmy are Fascists. It’s not true in all cases ofc, but without more info, I think that’s a safe default.
And before you call my flawless reasoning stupid… I don’t really have anything to say.
Epic games, whether you hate them or not, is fighting the good fight. They are doing shitty things (exclusivity, etc), so maybe they aren’t the chosen one who will take challenge Valve, but they are on the right side of that fight. Hoping that Valve will stay great forever is foolish.
My dude… If you’re doing shitty things, you are in fact not “fighting the good fight”. if anyone is doing that it’s someone like GOG.
I meant that they’re fighting Valve, which is “the good fight”. They’re not the only ones doing it, and they’re definitely not the best ones doing it, but they’re doing it. If they do manage to take a big chunk out of Valve’s marketshare somehow, that will be good for everyone, even people who decide to stay on Steam.
Apologies for the confusion when I said to stop preventing steam becoming public. I was just too lazy to write something along the lines of defining some kind of perpetual way to prevent the downfall of steam. Ideally it becomes an open source utopia tomorrow… but that’s not exactly realistic for a game store or as a business decision by valve and without people beying able to fork it we are never safe.
All of the following? Why would you need to be better in every way? There’s a perfectly valid use case for trade offs. Eg, let’s say some competitor had exclusives, no VR, the store interface was a little worse, and it was only roughly comparable on many other points. If it’s simply faster and more lightweight, that’s its competitive advantage. Or if it focuses on being open source and DRM free like GoG, that’s a competitive advantage.
Expecting something to be better in every way (than something with a massive head start) or else it might as well not exist? That’s just unreasonable. I don’t require a clothing store to be better than Walmart to shop there. I mean, the clothing store doesn’t even sell fruit! Why would anyone shop there when you can go to the Walmart and buy some grapes with your jeans?
Except these aren’t two different kinds of stores, they’d both be gaming marketplaces and if one has better features in every regard… Why use the inferior one at all?
If It’s not better in every way why would I swap? I’ll just keep using steam. The only selling point you could use to get me to swap is the promise of feature parity with steam and open source. I would support that even if it hurt a lot along the way, but I doubt it will happen.
It can’t exist. You can’t launch a new competitor to a mature and well-developed platform and hope to come anywhere near its feature set right off the bat. That’s never gonna happen, especially when a lot of the “requirements” you presented there are expensive shit that takes years of hard work to develop. You’re gonna have to give them time. And money, as it happens. They’re not gonna be able to develop that VR you present as a requirement if everybody refuses to use their platform because there is no VR. It’s a catch 22.
I’d be happy to support any kind of platform aiming to do these things even if it doesn’t have them yet, so long as it was open source or had some kind of structure that prevented enshitification. I’d contribute, probably force myself to use it where possible much like I do with other things. The issue is that the current competition trying to do what steam does (epic) is just trying to do it but worse.
As soon as it has linux support for more than wow… people praise valve for proton lots but workshop has also done so much for Linux nmodding which is otherwise a nightmare.
It’s incredibly frustrating from an ideological perspective that the whole PC gaming industry runs on a benevolent dictatorship by Valve.
I mean they have near total control not just over sales, but over the gaming software installed on our PCs. They have the power to do whatever, whenever, to whoever.
But at the same time, they’re cool people with good products who have good stewardship of this role.
The day Gabe dies and pathetic bastards with business degrees take over and ruin everything that’s made Steam great for all these years, is the day I begin pirating everything.
Exactly. Steam is a load-bearing member. After seeing what happened to Twitter, Reddit, Unity, Wikia, etc. it’s reasonable to think ahead. If Valve gets enshittified that’s basically the end of PC gaming.
I don’t even play games that have Denuvo. But I’m happy to see many of them remove it after a few years because they can’t afford to keep paying for their game to literally be worse and several had been cracked (although it’s my understanding that only one person was cracking those games).
…but… Literally, benevolent, sectionalized dictatorship is the only response to the Tragedy of the Commons.
…that is to say, individual responsibility and exercise of power. Work primarily on responsibility until you’ve got one area covered - then expand your power. Know your limits, and don’t try to expand your power beyond what you’re capable of handling responsibly. Encourage others to do likewise. Steam is good because they haven’t sold out, but are managed by people who have genuine interest in the industry, and who are willing to exercise power responsibly.
I have no problem with competition, but don’t force me to use your inferior product. If any of the major companies developed an actual competitor with the Steam launcher (in terms of features, not just a lousy storefront), it would likely get some use. If they somehow made it better than Steam, plenty of people would likely jump ship.
Epic is just a failure of a launcher. Nobody uses it over Steam by choice, because it’s lacking in nearly every way. While I’m not big on exclusives, if the launcher was a reasonable Steam alternative, they wouldn’t bother me nearly as much. As things stand, I’m firmly in the “fuck Epic” camp.
That honestly sounds reasonable. It’ll be impossible to troubleshoot legitimate issues when they can’t even determine if the issues are being caused by a mod that the user installed years ago and hasn’t touched since.
We are just now getting out of the bullshit days of 40 game launchers. The Big Industry morons like Ubi, Ea and Bliz are crumbling. Indie devs are being celebrated and releasing titles now more than ever before. We are in a ‘quiet’ time of gaming. i believe. not a dark time. If the mainstream industry can get back to more honest and longevity based projects then we will in the next 5-10 years see another golden age (think 2007 or 2017 release titles) and of course year over year everyone can point to one or two games worth playing for the whole year or two till the next one.
Remember, Skyrim was released closer to the first year you listed than the second one and the sequel is still quite a ways out. There are entire release day players of Elder Scrolls 6 who were not yet born when 5 came out.
Valve may not be the cheapest by any means, but that’s because they’re offering a product 30x as valuable. The other launchers companies have are shit, across the board, nothing but shit. It’s not even in the same continent. If any one of these companies actually wants to ever see this change, they are going to have to set their greed aside. That’s impossible for CEOs in this day and age, so I don’t see Steam ever losing their stranglehold unless they do an about-face from everything they’ve done so far. In the grand scheme of things, Valve is one of the most customer friendly companies on the face of the Earth and they continue to be innovative and supportive to users. Epic on the other hand is everything wrong with capitalism, and much the same can be said for any of the other companies with competing launchers/game stores.
What’s so wrong with Epic? I prefer Steam but Epics client has a better UI, I haven’t found any problems, and deals seem better than Steam, especially with free games.
No communities, no guides, no VR , no game streaming, annoying download manager, annoying friends tab, no steam deck, no game collections AFAIK. When Fall Guys came out for free I gave the Epic launcher a real chance and it was incredibly limited in it functionality and frustrating to use compared to Steam.
Steam is shaping up to be your all in one library for anything games be it PC, VR or portable. The Switch, Quest, Playstation, Xbox and Epic launcher all offer a piece of that experience but having a unified platform that syncs your saves and doesn’t nickel and dime you for features and accessories is why Steam is more popular.
I haven’t been using Epic enough to really compare with Steam sales but stuff gets really cheap on steam really fast. I would also gladly buy my games for money on Steam just to be able to play them easily on my Steam Deck. Also Epic is only doing the free games because they have unreal and Fortnite money, there’s no telling when the free games will stop.
You’re right about most things, and Linux/VR support is often a deal breaker for me so I rarely use Epic. But you really think its that unusable? I’ve heard mostly positive things from my friends. I don’t care how or why they’re giving out free games but its a huge plus. I just really don’t understand all the hate.
I remembered some more stuff epic doesn’t have. Steam input and launch option customization. I can play Civ 6, a game meant for kbm, on my steam deck with the controller buttons. Epic obscures their exe files to make it hard to know which to add as a non steam game to steam.
It was annoying to go from steam with it’s deep and helpful functionality to epic with what essentially just feels like the iOS appstore. I especially hate being forced to use epic online services on a game I bought ON STEAM. I couldn’t play the sackboy game with a friend on steam deck because something along the way broke and epic services wouldn’t let me. This game is P2P there’s definitely no servers being involved so why the heck can’t they just use steamworks?
Epic being unusable is a bit of an exaggeration but in terms of the platform they offer it is inferior to steam in every single way and they have done almost zero to make up the gap. Instead they pay money to keep games away from steam and force you to use their launcher in the most annoying and inconvenient way. That’s why they get so much hate from people.
Adding to what Natryamar said, epic once bundled actual malware with their client and is partially owned by Tencent, the chinese company known for turning games into garbage.
I buy all my games on Epic Games Launcher becomes it has less DRM than steam. If you have kids, they can’t play 2 completely different games on two different computers.
It’s like your kid not being able to play Mario kart on her switch because her brother is playing Halo on Xbox in another room. Steam doesn’t support that. Epic games doesn’t have a problem with you having 2 different games being played on 2 different computers, so I buy my games there whenever I have the choice because it’s the more consumer-friendly platform.
If you have kids, they can’t play 2 completely different games on two different computers.
Steam does support that tho. That’s what Family Sharing is. And it works really well.
Now, if you wanted to play the same game at the same time, that’s on a single Steam account, that you can’t do. But I’m pretty sure you can’t do that on EGS, either. Not without 2 accounts and 2 copies of the game.
No, it explicitly does not work that way. If you share a game to another family member, and that family member plays that game, you are not allowed to play any other game at all on steam.
“A Steam library can only be used by one user at a time to play one game at a time. The same is true if that library is being accessed by another user via Family Sharing.”
I know the wording there is fucked up, but have you used it? Because you can play two separate games at the same time with it, but you can’t play the same exact game as each other. I use it all the time to play stuff my sister has that I don’t, while she plays something else.
Unless you’ve got some weird special option, they’re right, as soon as you launch a game in your library, it becomes unusable to family sharing, my wife and I use it but it’s very limiting in that aspect.
It even notifies you when the “family library” becomes available.
I’ve used GoG once for a game that wasn’t on steam but I have done much more. Honestly I acknowledge that this ephemeral moment in time where PC gaming is kept in balance by Gaben can’t last. But I really think the lens we should look at PC landscape today is one of appreciation. If EA ran the game in steam’s shoes we wouldn’t get things like summer sales or games at reduced prices long after their launch.
Don’t be sad it will be gone be happy it happened.
Both Valve and Epic are private companies. I still trust Valve over Epic, but I think technically Tim Sweeney has pretty much full control over Epic as well (for better or for worse).
He does, but not the stake Gaben has. Sweeny sold 40% to tencent. This still gives him control, but thats a very large shareholder that can push and pull when they want.
They can’t “push and pull” anything. With Sweeney owning 50%+1, Tencent and anyone else he sold shares to can literally do nothing - he will always have the final say. And since the company is private, there’s almost certainly an agreement/contract in place on those share purchases that if someone wants to dump them they have to offer them back to him/the company first. Since it’s not a public company they can’t just go sell their shares on an open market. The threat of a large shareholder is gone in a case like this - they can’t stage a hostile takeover and they can’t dump and run.
You’re thinking of technically taking the decisions in the company. But shareholders can do much more. Like influencing the value of stocks by selling too many at once.
Another point for me at least, I actually put in effort to not getting made in China products where feasible. The same thing applies here, supporting epic is supporting China. I really just prefer not to support China, so no epic games for me.
Gaben has been hands off at valve for a decade. He’s off breaking world records with research submersibles. Playing with his rubber duckies in the bathtub.
The point is that, other than Gabe, Valve doesn’t have any shareholders to put before their customers. A publicly traded company, on the other hand, effectively has no choice but to cause as much harm as possible to their customers and to society in general in order to maximize short term shareholder profits, leading to runaway enshittification.
A publicly traded company, on the other hand, effectively has no choice but to cause as much harm as possible to their customers and to society in general in order to maximize short term shareholder profits
Nobody is talking about public companies here. Both Valve and Epic are private companies.
If you want to complain about profit motives, that’s a capitalism problem overall, not an issue with public vs. private corporations.
I get like 99% of my news about upcoming or newly released games from steam. There have been so many games I’m not even aware exist, like last week I found out Saints Row got a new game a while back but it was epic exclusive so I never knew.
Also being a Linux gamer steam has amazing support for Linux while epic has none.
Rest assured, you didn’t miss anything with the latest Saints Row. It was decent fun for about 20-30 hours, but it felt like much less of a game than any of its predecessors. I got the impression that the idea was to restart the franchise back to square one with minimal features so they could sell them back to us in future installments.
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