Ehh. They haven’t really abused their position. They’re popular.
It would be something else if they were buying up competitors like Facebook and Google do. Part of how they maintain their dominance is buying out anyone that competes. Notice how Google kind of sucks nowadays? They’re not really competing on merit anymore.
But at the same time, steam could turn around tomorrow and be like “mandatory $39.99/mo subscription fee” and it would have an outsized impact on the sector.
I lean towards ‘no’ because I do not see moves on their part to actively attack other distributors, but I admit I have not done research on this subject.
Based purely on having used many other distribution platforms, I think they (Valve) just legitimately have the best service currently. Everyone else either kinda sucking (GOG, as much as I love them), or really sucking (EGS, Origin, UPlay, etc), and losing to you in the market, doesn’t make you a monopoly.
I think they care about their customers just about as much as they care about making money, and aside from GOG, the competition simply does not. It’s a pretty good demonstration to how capitalism has failed us, to be honest, because any of those competitors would have been able to compete if they hadn’t treated their customers like shit.
I lean towards 'no' because I do not see moves on their part to actively attack other distributors
That doesn't matter. There's a difference between having a monopoly and abusing it to distort the market. It's the abuse that's illegal, not the monopoly in itself.
There’s a difference between having a monopoly and abusing it
Sure, but whether Valve fits the definition is debatable. Being highly dominant does not automatically make something a monopoly. At best you could call it an imperfect monopoly/ imperfect competition, because substitutes absolutely do exist, but they’re not mostly close enough to be truly competitive. It’s also important to factor in that 4/5 of the largest games on PC are not even on Steam at all: Fortnite, Roblox, Minecraft, and League of Legends. PUBG is the only one of the top-5 that’s on Steam.
M$ did hella shady, monopolistic stuff (patent theft, market manipulation, very likely corporate espionage, and certainly most visibly prefferential treatment of their own software ecosystem and sabotage of third party software on their platforms) to create and enforce market dominance. Unless Valve has been doing something I’m unaware of to kill other platforms, they’re not really similar situations.
Valve runs a couple of online casinos that target children specifically, not sure we should be arguing who’s worse here. I think Steam is a clunky piece of software that’s popular mostly because everyone else missed the moment to start competing and Valve gained monopoly unopposed. Other viable competitors tried and failed at even gaining a foothold and are relegated to small niches because it’s impossible to move people who amassed content libraries over the years. Valve skims 10-30% of an insanely large volume of transactions and should be held to a much higher standard. You’re ignoring all of the warning signs because they didn’t screw you over yet.
Valve runs a couple of online casinos that target children specifically
I’m interested in which of their games that have loot crates you think are targeted specifically at children? Basically all of their games, but especially their games with loot crates, tend to be targeted towards adults. Hell, TF2 came out in 2007, which is 18 years ago, so no one who is a child today was even alive when it came out. It’s mostly elder to mid-Millennials. You can dislike loot boxes (I do), but don’t try to paint Valve like they’re Roblox or Epic Games.
everyone else missed the moment to start competing and Valve gained monopoly unopposed.
Other platforms were around before Steam was fully dominant, but they tended to be focused on the creators’ first-party games, and excluded other publishers and titles from using their platform. Desura and Central/Impulse both had decently large user bases. Stardock Central actually preceded Steam’s release, but was overtaken because Stardock was mostly just using it for its own games, but also billing the service more as a way to unify your physical and digital libraries, and to provide patches and whatnot, whereas Steam went all-in on digital-only.
because it’s impossible to move people who amassed content libraries over the years
Yes, but this is sadly just the natural reality of digital sales. Because you are buying a license, it’s not trivial from a company’s perspective to make those portable, and the company you’re moving the license to is then having to host your content without ever actually receiving the money for it, which isn’t super appealing. GOG actually tried this for a while(GOG Connect), where you could essentially redeem your Steam games to your GOG account, but they realized it wasn’t worth it (especially since there isn’t game parity on the 2, so most people have to keep Steam anyways).
You’re ignoring all of the warning signs because they didn’t screw you over yet.
I must have missed where I said Valve would never do something bad? But yes, I don’t believe in condemning someone for what they might do in the future, preemptively. If and when Valve goes darkside (probably when Gabe dies, and it ends up under new management), they should be condemned. Acting as though they’re bad just because they’re dominant in the market is silly, though; they didn’t get there through anti-competitive business practices, they got there through others failing to do better.
Adding gambling to video games without verifying user age is targeting children with gambling. There’s a lot of convenient combinations of circumstances that Valve is fully aware of and profiting from. I don’t care about plausible deniability because Valve employees were visibly smug and amused when questioned about it. There is no absolving Valve after this.
You blame others for Valve monopoly. Yeah, I said they missed the ship. We have a private monopoly in PC gaming storefronts now and that’s not good. It doesn’t matter if they won fair - they are a parasitic middle-man that makes everyone lose.
Ask yourself and be honest about it: if Valve had a true competitor would their cut be as high as it is now? This is the only thing you should be concerned about, not that they engage in Linux philanthropy or that they make cool games.
Valve runs a couple of online casinos that target children specifically, not sure we should be arguing who’s worse here.
I agree with the sentiment of this… MTX/lootbox shenanigans are a bad, harmful practice that should be much more heavily restrained…
But that has nothing to do with being a monopoly.
At this point, its a widespread industry problem.
You’d address that with regulation, but not on the basis of Steam being a de facto monopoly, instead based on some kind of consumer protection regulation.
… But Trump and Elon are blowing all of that up, so, probably not gonna happen anytime soon.
Valve skims 10-30% of an insanely large volume of transactions and should be held to a much higher standard.
10 - 30 % really isn’t that unreasonable compared to a lot of existing comptetitors… though I guess we’ll see how their ongoing lawsuit around that ends up.
Either way, this also doesn’t make or not make them a monopoly, unless you or the ongoing lawsuit can prove that a 30% is functionally an outsized monopoly rent, wildly out of step with the rest of the industry.
If this is instead roughly in line with the rest of the industry, you’d again need to address this with some other legislation that spans the whole industry, not specifically targeting Steam as a monopoly.
The monopoly case against MS was bullshit. They had all kinds of bad business practices to go after and they decided to go after them for including a web browser in the OS. They fucking made the whole process a waste of time.
Pressure on their web browser monopoly was necessary because IE6 was stifling entire industry. From a legal point of view it’s not illegal to be a monopoly but to abuse that position so there isn’t that much you can do about it, especially in the US. Going after operating system or office suite monopoly should have been done but matters less and less these days.
MS prevented you from using other browsers by using vendor lock-in. It was a prime example example of now misunderstood concept of embrace, extend, extinguish. You could download Mozilla Phoenix but you couldn’t use it for everything because CSS rendering in IE was so detached from standards. On top of that you had ActiveX which meant you HAD to use Windows for some websites.
The word for a market dominated by only a few very large players is oligopoly, not… polyopoly.
Not saying you’re saying that, just saying.
…
As to the etymology…
Its derives from Greek.
A monopoly has one (mono) influential seller for many (poly) consumers.
An oligopoly has a few, wealthy (oligo, as in oligarch, oligarchy) sellers for many (poly) consumers.
Importantly, in Greek, poly is closely related to polis, meaning basically ‘all of the people/citizens’.
This is also where English gets ‘Politics’ from.
…
Also, I wrote a whole other comment, but the mere existence of any competitors, no matter how small… doesn’t mean you aren’t a monopoly.
Its just means you aren’t a perfect monopoly, which basically never exists in real life, outside of public utilities.
If the rubric for ‘is it a monopoly?’ was ‘do any competitors exist?’, then basically no company that’s ever been broken up or regulated for being a monopoly was actually a monopoly.
Because a monopoly is a company that operates in their market unopposed. In this instance, it’s not Steam’s fault the opposition kinda sucks (or doesn’t quite aim to be a direct competitor in the case of GoG) but the argument is still there that Steam is sitting as the only distributor for PC.
Personally, this is why I keep wanting to root for GoG, Epic and such. Monopolies are dangerous to consumers and the markets they operate in. Right now, Steam is being surprisingly effective at remaining a “good guy” but there’s a lot of concern even among Steam fans of what the landscape will look like in a post-Gaben world. Setting the PC gaming market up to have Steam as the only option when that inevitably comes to pass (touch wood that that’s no time soon, of course) could spell a certain level of disaster in a world where the anti-monopoly law-makers have shown to not really care about upholding that standard.
Edit: missed words. Never type when struggling to keep your eyes open kids!
There’s absolutely concern about Steam if you’re looking at the discourse. Personally, I hate the Steam launcher and have kept having problems with it ever since they changed the design to be more Baby’s First like everyone else has done (not just taking about launchers here) but the Steam launcher is still better than the others, which is infuriating.
I used to fill surveys on r/samplesize for fun, it was a mild positive of my day to come across one on Lemmy!
I do have some issues with some of the questions, spoiled for those who have not taken the survey yet.
Issues with survey questionsFor “Do modern video games have too many micro transactions today?” giving our opinion and saying “I never paid a microtransaction” was mutually exclusive. It is possible to notice the amount of microtransactions in video games, and to have an opinion on whether that is a good or bad amount, without ever buying one yourself. Folks who never bought microtransactions might not choose “I never paid a microtransaction” because it is either that, or say if you think there are too many microtransactions. For “There is a possibility that access to your games could be revoked, as stated in the TOS,” I wasn’t sure what to put. I strongly agree that that possibility exists, so I was considering putting Strongly Agree. But I do not agree with that practice, so I also considered putting Strongly Disagree. I wasn’t sure what I was being asked to agree or disagree with here. Similarly, for “Prices of old video games may lower when a modern release of the same game is available to purchase,” I wasn’t sure if we were being asked if we agree that is a phenomenon that happens, or if we think that should be a thing that happens. Luckily I both agree that is a phenomenon that happens and that it should happen. For “Companies should make single player video games be released for a limited time, regardless if its physical or digital” I had no idea what was being asked at all so I just put Neutral.
What is worse, is that The Entertainment Software Association (ESA) is refusing efforts allow remote access to these old games for research and learning purposes, just like a historian would do research of events by reading and viewing any historic materials, the restrictions to access of different media because of convoluted copyright laws are a real world problem!
You may actually want to research what museum curators and the like actually do (or just communicate with them. I have never found one who didn’t want to chat about their job).
Copyright/Trademark/IP Protection is very much a thing. It is the main reason so many museums have “no pictures” (barring the increasingly rare cases where it is genuine light concerns). And that applies a lot more when it comes to “modern” history, of which video games definitely count. But even for ancient manuscripts, the answer tends to be “if you fill out all this paperwork and can demonstrate a genuine need to our board, you can come by and read that manuscript in a clean room. Or… you can spend 20 bucks on a copy in our gift shop. Hell, if you stop bothering me I’ll spot you ten bucks toward that”
And that is more or less what we see with the video game preservation efforts… that operate more like musems than hoarders with a youtube channel. They have a few actual historians who do outreach. And, in rare cases, people CAN organize visits. But “I want to play Metroid” isn’t really a compelling argument to a board that is risking damage every time that NES is booted up.
That said, I WOULD like to see a bigger emphasis on said curators documenting things themselves. But I am the weirdo who would love to see a deep dive on Star Crusader’s DLC. Whereas most people are just going to say “Ugh, they are so boring” if it isn’t pewdiepie screaming at every jagged polygon.
But yeah. If you actually genuinely care about preservation efforts, rather than just a site to download roms, I STRONGLY encourage getting in touch with your local museums and working with them (and lobbyists) to protect those museums. Because I didn’t even get into the active war on The Internet Archive in the US (and similar efforts in other countries).
Oh yeah. You totally aren’t just an obnoxious jerk with a side hustle.
Still, kudos for actually thinking “TL/DR” is a good response. It saves people who thought you might actually be operating in good faith a lot of time.
Copyright/Trademark/IP Protection is very much a thing. It is the main reason so many museums have “no pictures” (barring the increasingly rare cases where it is genuine light concerns). And that applies a lot more when it comes to “modern” history, of which video games definitely count. But even for ancient manuscripts, the answer tends to be “if you fill out all this paperwork and can demonstrate a genuine need to our board, you can come by and read that manuscript in a clean room. Or… you can spend 20 bucks on a copy in our gift shop. Hell, if you stop bothering me I’ll spot you ten bucks toward that”
This is why I appreciate the Internet. Getting insight on how stuff I do not know about—I’m not a museum curator—works.
I do not know what Star Crusader is but I’m also in the audience for deep dives as opposed to overexaggerated YouTuber-who-wants-you-to-form-a-parasocial-relationship-with-them reactions. When I do drag my butt over to YouTube, I usually find myself watching some long-form informative gaming video. There are some people with a following who get mentioned in the comments of other informative gaming videos (Summoning Salt comes to mind) so you are definitely not alone in wanting deep dives. :)
Not sure where to find deep dive articles, but wish I knew. Someone over at !pokemonprovided one and it’s stoking my appetite for them.
In terms of text articles? Ironically, you want to look at early Polygon and Kotaku. And… absolutely nobody read that and those became the hellscapes they are today. That said, Aftermath occasionally will hang out in the deep end of a hotel pool on a specific game but that is usually in the context of current sociopolitical events or a new release.
Which speaks to games media as a whole being fundamentally broken in favor of the screaming jackasses who market gambling to children (see: xqc).
That said, a few of the longer form youtubers have worked with various preservation efforts in the past. I don’t think Jacob Gellar has (outside of his work on MinnMax which is more just podcasting and interviewing) but I want to say Displaced Gamers reached out to one of the orgs to get a dump of a rare edition of a cartridge once? Although, people like Illusory Wall very much rely heavily on The Internet Archive when they are researching what the deal with the Dark Souls 1 DLC was. Which gets into the other side of “what actually IS games preservation?” that makes people just shut down and start screaming that they want ROMs.
But the big issue? If you are doing a video that can justify flying out to a bunker in Texas or whatever? It is going to be about a game people know about or are interested in. Which means it is likely already available online. MAYBE you get a “deep cut” like CyClones but the vast majority of creators can’t risk a complete dud of a video for that month or even quarter
Its also why the popular history youtubers tend to have a day job as a dealer (Matt Easton) or are running not so subtle ads for auction houses (Forgotten Weapons). And there are a LOT of mixed feelings about them (especially Ian) because of how much they profit off of museum collections.
Although, people like Illusory Wall very much rely heavily on The Internet Archive when they are researching what the deal with the Dark Souls 1 DLC was. Which gets into the other side of “what actually IS games preservation?”
Based off this I’d imagine it might involve backing up the game’s release announcement and some sale pages with its description online, proof the game existed, before the page gets changed because the game is no longer the hottest and newest thing or stores are no longer selling the game?
I get the feeling you know more about this topic than I do and probably have strong opinions about it.
Thanks for the namedrops of where to find articles, and what I assume are people who make long-form videos on video games!
Actually, Illusory Wall’s “How was the Dark Souls DLC Discovered?” video is probably the best example of what preservation of games actually IS and why “I can’t play that SNES” has little to do with it.
At a high level: Dark Souls 1 was notorious for how incredibly convoluted and stupid the path to the DLC is. It involves killing a boss, reloading the area, talking to an NPC at the back of a cave you might not even see, reloading, killing a DIFFERENT enemy in a completely unrelated spot in the world, reloading, and then going back to that original spot.
And there is over a decae of discussion on how people even found that and lots of nonsense theories. And IW actually searched through a mixture of blog posts, press releases, youtube videos, and even message boards to paint a picture of what actually happened. And… it is very very different.
A friend (who actually IS a curator) watched that and immediately compared it to the idea that guns are why the concept of an armored knight went away. At a very high level… it isn’t wrong. But people assume it has to do with penetration and ignore that we were sending folk into battle in what was basically plate armor all the way up to WW1 (and there are very good arguments that a modern plate carrier isn’t that far off from what a conquistador would wear).
And there is over a decae of discussion on how people even found that and lots of nonsense theories. And IW actually searched through a mixture of blog posts, press releases, youtube videos, and even message boards to paint a picture of what actually happened. And… it is very very different.
What is the “what actually happened” that is different? You do not need to explain the entire story to me, what I mean is what is this “what actually happened” concerning? Is it about how people found how to unlock the DLC? Were you commenting a commonly-believed DLC unlock path in your second paragraph but it is actually something different?
And for how this ties back to game preservation… would this be preservation of video game history?
Availability of Video Games (originally released before 2010) is approximately 13 percent, slightly above pre-World War II audio recordings (10 percent or less) and below the survival rate of American silent films (14 percent).
These are fascinating numbers, do you have a source?
The last page of this survey is heavy handed and full of leading questions. It feels like you’re less trying to gather research data and more trying to push an agenda; it would not pass scientific review. The fact that I agree with the agenda being pushed doesn’t change my feelings on that.
A better method would have been to ask the question in a neutral way (e.g. ‘Do you believe that storing game cartridges qualifies as preservation?’ or even better, ‘Storing game cartridges qualifies as preservation’ as a statement, with a Strongly Disagree - Strongly Agree scale), then at the end of the survey provide the information you’re providing in the links below each question.
I played a bit of Granblue Fantasy Relink, I’m at the last chapter of the story. I still haven’t finished it, the story itself wasn’t particularly memorable, but the environments were gorgeous and the gameplay is fun. For the gameplay tho, I’m a bit worried about the endgame/postgame, as there wasn’t much variety in fights.
I’m still playing Fire Emblem Engage. The gameplay is overall really good, but I’m a bit confused that new units are much better than most of the previous ones. From the initial party I think I’ve kept using only Chloé and Jean, while the others had better replacements every few chapters. It’s not exactly a complaint but it feels a bit weird.
I would have tried continuing FFVII Rebirth, but I remembered I bought FFIX last sales and played that nonstop during the weekend.
I too am in the mood for Wolfenstein, I’m thinking of playing the second one.
Disclaimer first: I work as a coder, everything I say about publisher interaction is second-hand knowledge.
We have made one Linux game. It was the first one of our two “indie” titles (quotation marks, because both of them ended up being partially funded by a publisher, so they weren’t really indie in the end), where we had promised a Linux build on Kickstarter, long before a publisher got involved.
The main reason why we did not do native Linux in our publisher-funded games is quite simple: Our publishers didn’t pay us for it.
There are actually some publishers who are very keen on getting native Linux versions for their games, but we sadly have not released a game with any of them yet…
The publishers we released games with did not agree to the buget that we think is needed to do a Linux port of sufficient quality. If we would lower the price for doing a Linux port to the point where our publishers would agree to it, we would take on a lot of financial risk ourselves, so this is sadly not an option.
If everything worked as it is advertised by engine developers, making a Linux version would be quite cheap: Just click a few buttons and ship it. This is, sadly, not the case in real-life, as there are always platform specific bugs in game-engines. Our one Linux game was made with Unity, and we had quite a few Linux-only bugs that we forwarded to the Unity devs (we didn’t have engine source code access), and had to wait for them to fix… For the engine we mainly use nowadays, Unreal, we have a rule-of-thumb: “Engine features that are used by Fortnite are usually well maintained.” There is no native Linux version of Fortnite… (We did try Unreal’s Vulkan RHI in Unreal 4.26 for Steam Deck support in one of our games. Let me put it this way: The game in question still uses Direct3D on Steam Deck.)
So, from experience we expect that the chance that we would have to find and fix Linux-specific engine bugs is quite high. Therefore we have to budget for this, what makes offering a native Linux version relatively costly compared to the platform’s market share. Costly enough to make our publishers say “no”.
This, by the way, also answers the question why publishers are willing to pay for the way more expensive console ports. There are also way more console players, and therefore potential customers out there…
(I can only guess, but I would expect publishers to be even more reluctant to pay for native Linux, now that WINE works so well that getting a game running on Linux needs typically zero extra work.)
Multiplayer games will only target Windows, officially, and might even ban Linux altogether because of the perception that anti-cheat is more costly, impossible, or just hard under Linux. True Kernel-level anti-cheat is not possible on Linux like it is on Windows but the real reason is risk: anti-cheat is an arms race between cheaters (and, critically, cheat vendors who would sell cheat tools to them) and developers and those developers want to limit the surface area they must cover and the vectors for new attacks.
The biggest engines, like Unreal, treat Linux as an after-thought and so developers who use those engines are not supported and have to undertake an overwhelming level of extra work to compensate or just target only Windows. When I was working on a UE5 project, recently, I was the only developer who even tried to work on Linux and we all concluded that Linux support was laughable if it worked at all. (To be fair to Tux the penguin: we also concluded that about 99.9% of UE5 was -if-it-worked-at-all and the other 50% was fancy illumination that nobody owned the hardware to run at 4k/60fps and frequently looked “janky” or a bit “off” in real-world scenarios. The other 50% was only of use to developers who could afford literal armies of riggers and modellers and effects people that we simply couldn’t hire and the final 66% was that pile of blueprints everyone refused to even look at because the guy who cobbled them together had left the team and nobody could make heads or tails of the tangle of blueprinty-flowcharty-state-diagramish lines. Even if the editor didn’t crash just opening them. Or just crash from pure spite.)
A very few studios, like Wube, actually have developers who live in Linux and it shows but they are very few and far between. (Factorio is one of the very nicest out-the-box, native Linux experiences one can have.) Even Wube acknowledge that their choice to embrace Linux cost them much effort. Recently, they wrote a technical post in their Friday Factorio Facts series about how certain desktop compositors were messing up their game’s performance. To me: this sort of thing is to be expected because games run in windows and render to a graphics surface that must be composited to some kind of visible rectangle that ends up on screen: after a game submits a buffer to be presented, nearly all of what happens next is outside of the games control and down to the platform to implement properly. Similarly, platform-specific code is unavoidable whenever one needs to do file I/O, input I/O, networking or any number of other, very common things that games need to do within the frame’s time budget – i.e. exceedingly quickly.
Projects which are natively developed on Linux benefit from great cross-compilation options to target Windows. This is even more true with the WSL and LLVM: you can build and link from nearly the same toolchain under nearly the same operating system and produce a PE .exe file right there on the host’s NTFS file-system. The turn-around time is minimal so testing is smooth. For a small or indie project or a new project, this is GREAT but this doesn’t apply to many older or bigger projects with legacy build tooling and certainly does not apply as soon as a big engine is involved. (Top tip: the WSL will happily run an extracted Docker image as if it was a WSL distribution so you can actually use your C/I container for this if you know how.)
Conversely, cross-compiling from Windows to Linux is a joke. I have never worked on a project that ever does this. Any project that chooses to support Linux ports their build to Linux (sometimes maintain two build mechanisms) if they weren’t building on Linux for C/I or testing, already, anyway. (Note: my knowledge of available Windows tooling is rather out of date – I haven’t worked with a team based on Windows for several years.)
Godot supports Linux very nicely in my experience but Godot is still relatively new. I expect that we might see more native Linux support given Godot’s increase in population.
What’s that? Unity? I am so very sorry for your loss …
If you’re not using a big engine, you have so many problems to handle and all of them come down to this: which library do you choose to link? Sound: Alsa, PulseAudio or Pipewire: even though Pipewire is newer and better, you’ll probably link PulseAudio because it will happily play to a Pipewire audio server. Input: do you just trust windows messages or do you want to get closer to some kind of raw-input mechanism? Oh: and your game window, itself? Who’s setting that up for you, pumping your events and messages and polling for draw? If your window appears on a Wayland desktop, you cannot know its size or position. If it’s on X11 or Win32, you can. I hope you’ve coded around these discrepancies!
More libraries: GLFW works. The SDL works. SDL 3 is lovely. In the Rust world, winit is grand. wgpu.rs is fantastic. How much expertise, knowledge and time do you have to delve into all these options and choose one? How many “story points” can you invest to ensure that you don’t let a dependency become too critical and retain options to change your choice and opt for a different library if you hit a wall? (Embracing a library is easy. Keeping your architecture from making that into a blood pact is not.)
NONE of this is hard. NONE of this is sub-optimal once you’ve wrapped it up tight. It is all just a massive explosion of surface-area. It costs time and money and testing effort and design prowess and who’s going to pay for that?
Who’s going to pay for it when you could just pick up a Big Engine and get the added bonus of that engine’s name on your slide-deck?
And, then, you’re right back in the problem zone with the engine: how close to “first-class” is its Linux support because, once you’re on Big Engine, you do not want to be trying to wrangle all of these aspects, yourself, within somebody else’s engine.
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