A monopoly is a monopoly. Just because Steam is a good store today doesn’t mean they deserve to hold a monopoly over the pc gaming market. So what happens when Valve has crushed every competitor? Gamers and devs have nowhere to go if Steam turns to shit. Eventually there will be a change of guards at Valve’s C-suite when Gaben retires or is dead. There is a good chance that those new execs will hollow out Steam and extract all the value out of it for their own benefit by screwing over the customers and developers. And they can get away with that if there is no competition. Competition is what keeps Valve in check.
Doesn’t matter. It’s still competition. They motivate Valve to create a better store and keep it that way. Since that is Valve’s unique selling point and what distinguishes them from the competition. Therefore I believe devs should make their games available on every storefront. Not just the best one, to give customers a choice.
Steam was great before epic and has been adding killer features since before egs came along. EGS tactics to win over steam users is to be anti competitive…
Like Walmart coming into a town to compete with the stores already there and then putting them out of business? Then moving onto the next town to compete again?
competition is good when the rest of the competition is able or good. EGS is so shit it has to buy exclusives and give out free games and it still doesn’t work. There has to be some equality in quality to have any chance of making steam better otherwise they just exist to make anti competitive moves, what is steam supposed to do? Also pay for exclusives?
When their launcher is literal malware or they engage in anti-consumer practices like exclusives, no, they are not good for the customer.
(Not that any publicly traded company can be good for the customer, mind; by definition they can only be good for the shareholders; any benefit they might accidentally provide to the customer or to society is an inefficiency that will eventually be corrected through enshittification. The only reason Valve isn’t entirely harmful is that they aren’t publicly traded yet.)
The only thing Valve has done with Steam that apparently is anti-competitive, is actually having a decent product with good features and no one else is capable of actually delivering parity with it to be a viable competitor.
A natural monopoly is a far cry from one built through anti-competitive practices, and easily toppled by competent competitors.
Perhaps if Valve’s competition was competent, there would be better options.
True. But Google became the number one search engine by creating a better product and basically got a natural monopoly. And now look what kind of monster the company has become.
Just because Steam is a good store today doesn’t mean it will stay that way in the future. Therefore I rather not see Steam be the only game store left in the pc gaming space.
Well no. Google used to steal results from other search engines initially.v And then suppressed search results for competing products for at least the last 20 years.
Then get mad at the weak-ass competition. Start a fire under their asses to make something that is actually just as good, if not better.
Punishing the one good product for being good is just gonna lead to there being no good products and only shitty ones just as much as your slippery-slope scenario. 🤦♂️
But they haven't crushed any other competitor through any mechanism but having a dramatically better product.
They don't force you to be exclusive to be on steam. They don't force you to implement any of their Steam stuff. They are very permissive unless you do shit that potentially exposes them to liability down the road, like the NFT nonsense.
And they let you generate keys for literally free to sell on other stores.
All their stuff companies use is because it's things customers value.
When they started, they did used to force you to use products edit: aside from their own games(fair cop), some 3rd party games like Lost Planet also required it.
Certain games, and not just valve games, you'd buy in a store and the disc would force you to install and create a steam account to play the single player offline game.
They're a distribution mechanism. If you buy a Steam game you need Steam. Allowing developers to require Steam to play their game is not anticompetitive or in any way unethical.
They didn't force any developer who wanted to sell games on Steam to only sell games on Steam. That's what would be anticompetitive and abusing their market position. Games choosing to only distribute through Steam because there's no other storefront that wouldn't be a worse value if it was free isn't Steam doing something wrong.
Looks like it was a console exclusive before it released on Steam, if you're talking about Lost Planet: Extreme Condition (which is the only one I can find by that name).
Do you have more information about the release? Or perhaps it's a different game?
They didn’t force any game to use Steamworks, developers and publishers chose to use it because it offered a lot of good middleware. And of course it requires Steam to use Steamworks.
I’m one of the few who actually like the existence of Epic. Like, not necessarily Epic itself, but some serious competition is needed. I personally would’ve loved it if the competition was GOG, but it seems consumers don’t particularly care about ownership, so we have Epic.
If you are trying to argue that ownership was not even a part of the multitude reasons Stadia failed and is off the table, you should seriously need to consider evaluating your critical thinking skills.
This was supposed to be the comment where you show why ownership was a major factor in why Stadia failed, not a comment where you huff and puff and complain that something you insist on isn’t being accepted.
The problem is that all the competition to steam is far far inferior to steam in technology and ideology and future prospects. Steam isn’t a publicly traded company, has features that are pro consumers, is supporting other OS’s and doesn’t have a CEO that is a prick like epic.
Sure. But what if Gabe newel decided to sell tomorrow. Just wants to retire maybe he’s pretty old. What if Microsoft buys it and you’re left with a monopoly you don’t like. That’s the eventuality of every unhealthy industry.
Well it will be a sad day and Ubisoft, Microsoft and Epic competition won’t fix anything if steam goes to shit. Steam is basically the unicorn and once it becomes extinct we won’t get anything half decent to replace it with. Publicly traded companies are the bedrock of unhealthy industries.
Competition in the marketplace is the only thing that has any chance of saving you when that day comes.
You are in lucky days today. Tomorrow won’t be so good, but you can choose to support an industry controlled by a monopoly, or you can support an industry with healthy competition.
I would hope that Gamers aren’t so near sighted, but I’ve been proven wrong over and over again.
When steam shuts down and we have Ubisoft and Epic to replace it with I’m just moving to itch.io and probably torrenting my steam library if it comes to the worst. Also I might actually stop playing games since steam is pushing proton development forward and without them I have no reason to play or buy anything new. Epic’s shitty CEO has made toxic remarks against linux before and Ubisoft just couldn’t care less. I’ll support a company that supports my interests, epic doesn’t so I don’t simple as.
“Supporting competition” is not a good enough reason to use a shitty service. If I start a service that charges twice as much as Steam and has none of the features would you use it in order to “support competition”?
If the only reason to purchase from Epic is “they exist” that’s not good enough.
I will happily avoid Epic’s attempts to be a monopoly now over worrying that Steam might be shitty in the future.
It’s super weird to me that you guys think epic is trying to be a monopoly. Epic had 0.00001% of the market. In their wildest dreams they might expect to get ten percent.
I feel Steam vs competitors is like how after 1st wave MCU, everyone was jumping on that bandwagon, but instead of putting in the groundwork just skipped ahead, or like the monsters one just abandoned it because of one bad movie.
No, 99% of the reason they use it is that they were first to market, made it mandatory for their first party games that were extremely popular at the time (and even today) and became defacto mandatory for many third party games as it made it simpler to control piracy to just sell through them or include a key in the physical copy and force people to install Steam. The majority of Steam users are casuals that couldn’t care less about their forums, cards, social profiles and so on. It’s the same thing in everything, there’s enthusiasts that think everyone is as crazy as they are about their hobby, the majority are just casual users that will never know/use half of the possibilities available to them because they don’t care.
i would love for steam to have some competition. i will gladly switch over to the first competitor that has
a big picture / controller-friendly interface
controller configurator that
is more powerful than rewasd
is editable in the overlay
has import/exportable configs (incl. with the community)
supports the best controller i’ve ever used, the steam controller
cross-platform client
cross-platform cloud saves
workshop/modding support
proper reviews system
community page for each game
etc.
and doesn’t
buy exclusivity rights to games
i don’t mind revenue deals for exclusivity, but buying existing games takes the biscuit
actively worsen existing games
e.g. removing the impeccable siapi support in rocket league, and making it run on the shitty epic servers so it disconnects all the time
particularly now that steam has switched over to electron, so the client runs like shit
i do sometimes use gog because i like their ideology, but they’re missing quite a few from this list. any gog or itch.io games i buy, i inevitably add to steam as a non-steam game. which adds a lot of these handy features, but not all
unfortunately, until a competitor brings along something new to the table, i’m quite happy to wait and pay more for a game on steam. it just has too many features i can’t give up
particularly now that steam has switched over to electron, so the client runs like shit
It uses CEF not Electron, which it has used for over 13 years. This isn’t something they just added. If it’s running slow for you you probably have an issue with hardware acceleration.
you mean that the store has been an embedded browser? in that case yes
but the whole steam client? has always been vgui, not electron . did you even read the link you sent? just because there is reference to chromium in the commit log doesn’t mean the whole thing’s built in chromium, and just because a programme can render web content also doesn’t mean it’s built in chromium. when firefox switched from xul to html did you go “akshyually, it was always able to render html content so it hasn’t switched at all”
If it’s running slow for you you probably have an issue with hardware acceleration.
it’s not just me who has performance issues. at one point it was everyone on linux with an nvidia gpu. which is supposedly fixed (and it’s definitely better) but it’s still unusably slow on both linux and windows. also, so what. “it works on my machine” isn’t a great excuse to ignore the biggest gaming gpu brand, and electron is notoriously non-performant (if my pc can handle playing a video in ffx whilst playing recent 3d games, i think it should also be able to display my list of owned games without stuttering). my point was that i never had issues with vgui, and now i do.
edit: ah, i’ve just looked through your comment history. i don’t believe anyone who’s not a troll has -10 karma and no negative comments (especially with some comments with >100 points), and i also suspect vote manipulation. i should never have engaged. sorry. i won’t engage any more.
but the whole steam client? has always been vgui, not electron cef. just because there is reference to chromium in the commit log doesn’t mean the whole thing’s built in chromium.
The “whole client” hasn’t been VGUI. Yes now every element is CEF but many, many pieces have been CEF for a very long time. “Switched over to Electron” implies it was entirely changed but it’s just using more of the thing it was already using. Those are two different things.
it’s not just me who has performance issues. at one point it was everyone on linux with an nvidia gpu
The issue you linked had nothing to do with Steam it was a bug with the Nvidia driver itself. Not sure what that’s supposed to prove.
my point was that i never had issues with vgui, and now i do.
And my point is that is not an inherent problem with Steam, that is something specific to your configuration. If it runs fine for other people it can run fine for you. I’m on Arch with an Nvidia GPU. I have zero issues with the performance.
How is a competitor ever supposed to compete with a feature list like that? It has to come out of the gate with all those things? This is why monopolies exist.
honestly? i kind of agree. but gog spent a lot of dev time revamping their client into "gog galaxy 2.0" just to make it less controller accessible; and the epic client is just unusable
i would have more sympathy if they were little indie companies. but the itch.io client is better than either. these companies are pouring money into breaking into a market, but not bothering to develop features
that comment was more an example of why the egs isn’t yet a real competitor than a criticism of any as yet nonexistent competitors
Just like I am happy with Apple and Google taking a cut and running their app stores. If these big companies could make their own store, they would. Apple would lose a cut, but that does not affect me as a consumer. What does affect me is a gate keeper keeping terrible practices in check. Making it nearly impossible to cancel a subscription instead of having a handy menu to just turn it off. Having places to put credit cards that are not secure. Collecting personal data nonstop. Etc etc.
Gamers have gotten quite lucky so far that the company that has been in the position to turn the screws and establish a monopoly has been content to only make gobs of money, instead of trying to make all the money like pretty much every other entertainment industry.
Yeah, the reason why Valve can do that is that they are not a publicly traded company but a privately owned one. Gabe Newell doesn’t have a fiduciary duty to any shareholders, so they don’t have to squeeze every penny from their users or abuse their quasi monopoly.
The whole idea of investments always going up is an absurd idea that needs to go. At this point I infinitely prefer a private company over a publicly traded one.
It’s a bit of an inherent issue sadly, if your goal is to multiply money why would you invest in a company whose profits stay the same over one whose go up? And you have no reason to care if the company eventually dies as a result, you just move your money into the next one.
And most people investing money will be doing so with the only purpose of multiplying that money, as it’s mostly banks and similar institutions. In theory if the main investors of a company want it to prioritize user experience over profits, the companies’ duty to its shareholders would also be to ensure good user experience. But that’s never going to happen.
Multiplying your investments is the basis of capitalism. To speak to your point of it being an inherent issue - I find the idea of removing the profit motive from capitalist enterprise to hilariously reactionary. Not because I like capitalism, but because so many people that support capitalism want to “reform” it by ripping its heart out (one artery at a time, at least). I want to rip its heart out for the express intent of killing it - what strange allies we make!
If Gabe ever leaves Valve and the powers that be decide to go public I hope it’s done in a way that gives power to the users instead of faceless investment firms. I don’t even know what that would look like but I fear the day that Valve comes under control of an ex-AAA game company CEO or the like.
Perhaps a transition to a not-for-profit organization structure might be what folks would prefer? It seems like a potentially better alternative than going public, but I’m not sure how it might work in practice for something like a digital storefront.
In a weird way, one could almost argue that’s roughly how Valve’s been operating anyway, except I imagine they’ve been lining their pockets more than a not-for-profit organization’s owners/employees do.
I bet they make a shit ton of money but they certainly seem to reinvest enough of it too. There is a interesting concept called purpose companies here in Europe but it’s not especially wide spread or planned by regulators so the transition is extremly complicated and expensive. The search engine Ecosia is a relatively well known one, it’s basically a company in self ownership where no one from outside can become CEO and no one can sell or go public, they are obligated to their chosen purpose and that’s where their profits go (in the case of Ecosia that’s planting trees), not sure how it works exactly or if it’s doable in the USA at all tho.
I said this elsewhere but that’s not true. The idea that publicly traded companies have a duty to maximize shareholder value is a myth, and anyone privileged enough to sit on a board of directors likely knows this. See this article for an explanation. Every time a board squeezes a company for short term profits at the cost of long term good will, long term profits, etc., that is because they chose to do so.
Well the relation is wrong but it’s a real thing, they have a duty to grow infinitely or the sroxk price will crash and since that’s impossible to achive they essentially have to squeeze their users for short term gains to seem like they still grow sooner or later
“People like me” meaning “People who cite their sources and investigating claims before making them?” Yes, I can understand why you might find it difficult to convince “people like me” to believe something that’s trivially shown to be false.
The idea that publicly traded companies have a duty to maximize shareholder value is a myth, and anyone privileged enough to sit on a board of directors likely knows this. See this article for an explanation. Every time a board squeezes a company for short term profits at the cost of long term good will, long term profits, etc., that is because they chose to do so.
EDIT: See also This NY Times article. And note that I’m not saying that corporations, board members, etc., aren’t pressured or incentivized to maximize shareholder value - I’m saying that they do not have a legal duty to do so.
It’s not a myth, it’s called Fiduciary Duty. The board, officers, and executives of a public company have a legal responsibility to put the financial interests and well-being of the company above other personal interests. The article you linked doesn’t deny this, and it also isn’t discussing the legal definition of it. It’s discussing what you might call “toxic fiduciary duty”, or more or less the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition. It’s the idea that profit is the primary motive and should always trump all other considerations.
Fiduciary duty is important to create a concrete stance against corruption and misuse of the company’s assets for personal gain. But when taken to an extreme, it becomes toxic and has negative consequences for the company. Employee wages are probably the most obvious example. There has to be a balance between underpaying and overpaying. If you chronically underpay, the best employees will seek more gainful employment elsewhere and the company will suffer from a poorly qualified workforce. If you overpay, like 100% revenue share with employees, the company will cease to make a profit and will be unable to function. A balance has to be struck to retain the best talent in order to drive success for the company; that is the point of the article you linked.
TL;DR extremism is always bad
(Please don’t mistake this for a pro-capitalism rant, there’s nuance to be had here)
It isn’t. If it were, that would mean that in practice, board members act to maximize shareholder value because they are legally obligated to do so, and that simply isn’t true.
In practice, board members and C-suite employees are incentivized to maximize shareholder value. They are not legally obligated to do so.
Fiduciary duty is a legal requirement, meaning that if you don’t fulfill your fiduciary duty, you’re liable. But nobody has been successfully sued for not maximizing shareholder value when their actions were in line with the business judgment rule (“made (1) in good faith, (2) with the care that a reasonably prudent person would use, and (3) with the reasonable belief that the director is acting in the best interests of the corporation”). Successful lawsuits regarding breach of fiduciary duty (in the context of corporate law) require the defendant to have acted with gross negligence, in bad faith, or to have had an undisclosed conflict of interest.
The closest instance of legal precedent that I know of (aside from “” of course) that eBay v. Newmark (Craigslist), which Max Kennerly took as meaning that corporations . In this case, Craigslist was found to have violated their fiduciary duties to eBay because Craigslist, in Max’s words, “tried to protect the frugal, community-centric corporate culture that was a hallmark for their success.”
Except, if you actually read the case notes, it’s clear that the issue wasn’t that Craigslist wasn’t maximizing their profits, but that they were diluting the percentage of stocked owned and flexibility of selling those stocks of other stockholders. The issue wasn’t that Craigslist wanted to spend half their profits supporting charities or anything like that - no, it was that they were trying to artificially limit, thus directly devaluing, the shares they had already sold. In other words, I agree that this was a case about minority shareholder oppression as opposed to being an edict to maximize profits / shareholder value.
And other than people threatening legal action, the most recent case we have (other than eBay v. NewMark) in favor of shareholder primacy is 124 years old - Dodge v. Ford. But the opposite is true:
Shareholder primacy is clearly unenforceable on its own term because the business judgment rule would defeat any claims based on a failure to maximize profit. 40 Corporate managers formulate business strategy. A rule‒sanction is antithetical to the core concept of the business judgment rule. In over one hundred years of corporate law, there is not a case where a state supreme court imposed liability for breach of fiduciary duty on the specific ground that the board, in managing operational matters, failed to maximize shareholder profit, though it made the decision informedly, disinterestedly, and in good faith.41 That case does not exist. In fact, many cases show just the opposite. Courts have held that shareholders cannot challenge a board’s decision on the specific grounds that, for example: the company paid its employees too much; 42 it failed to pursue a profit opportunity;43 it did not maximize the settlement amount in a negotiation;44 it failed to lawfully avoid taxes.45 There are classic textbook cases where courts have rejected attempts of shareholders to interfere with the board’s decisions on the argument that their views of business or strategy would have maximized shareholder value.46
The belief that a corporation is legally obligated to maximize shareholder value isn’t just wrong; it also:
Implies that no other model is feasible
Removes accountability for the negative effects of such policy from the people who are responsible for perpetuating them
Reinforces the fallacy that this should be resolved through legislation
One of the big reasons many companies go public is it’s naturally a really nice retirement package for the owners of the company. The owners of the company may have put so much time and money into building the company that they don’t have sufficient retirement savings, so by going public they turn a portion of their ownership into a boatload of cash as well as a boatload of wealth that can be leveraged, then simply elect a new CEO, retain their significant voting power on the board so they aren’t entirely abandoning their baby and then peace out
Valve supports linux gaming! The Steam Deck is awesome and with an even better configuration (or the rumored valve's own new steam machine) this is only getting better. So, only Valve gets my money.
I buy games pretty much exclusively on Steam because of the Linux support (my gaming PC runs Linux only).
Hopefully more places follow suit because I believe competition is a good thing but for now it’s Steam all the way pretty much apart from Starsector and until recently Dwarf Fortress.
Oh, I dunno. Everyone seems to bitch about Apple not wanting to give any leeway to Epic on the App Store. Personally I find Epic ridiculously hypocritical, so I say let them eat dirt.
Everyone likes to shit on Epic so it’s probably not a very unpopular opinion ether but there is a big difference between the App and Play store and Steam, only one of them doesn’t use anti-competiive practices and the other two also force their payment provider which is rather shitty!
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.
Yeah because if you don’t, they delist your game. That’s the literal definition of anti-competitiveness. They could never get away with that if they weren’t a monopoly.
That’s the literal definition of anti-competitiveness.
No it isn’t. That’s actually a very common store policy that’s been in place since the days of brick and mortar locations. Why do you think you never see any platform listing games at higher or lower full retail prices than every other one regularly, even when they’re not on Steam?
Where did you get the idea that this was the definition of anti-competitive? There are so many more things that define it more, like buying up all the competition or taking a big hit on loss leading pricing to force the competition to undercut themselves and collapse.
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