Lol, your two examples are from companies that have their own shitty launchers that customers hated using because they aren’t very good. That’s a service issue entirely on them, steams MoNoPoLy is a lazy excuse to paper over that glaring fact.
Again, store do good isn’t a monopoly. Steam isn’t a monopoly just because every other competitor doesn’t know what customers want or don’t care because it’s expensive. And you’re kinda proving my point. There are tons of competing stores out there to use, but people don’t use them nearly as much because they suck or they’re not feature complete. Both Blizzard and Ubisoft have their own competing stores, but neither can get market share because they refuse to offer features that customers want. Epic has the same problem.
Steam’s MoNoPolY is 100% a lack of services and features from the competition, and that’s what keeps people coming back to the environment. This isn’t Walmart undercutting sales to drive competitors out of the market, this is smaller hobby stores mad they can’t slap their customers and be entitled to the business the big player has.
There is a fundamental difference between using anti-competitive behaviour to break a monopoly, and using it to entrench a monopoly.
Yes, and as we all know, a company that gets to the top using scummy tactics will definitely change them once they’re on top. /s
How fucking naive are you? There’s no difference between the two because the later turns into the former every time. You’re just defending your favored party using shit tactics, which is why you can’t defend the opposite.
That’s like arguing that a bully using violence and someone standing up to a bully using violence is the same thing.
If you have to use violence constantly to survive and thrive, violence is your only tool. Once the bully is defeated, the victim will begin bullying, continuing the cycle of violence. This is no different.
Dear PC gamers, please stop bitching about installing a second games launcher
No.
Don’t force me to install a garbage dump that runs like shit and isn’t even close to feature complete to play a game.
Or do and I won’t pay, either way works lol.
Edit:
Noone is a fan of exclusives but Epic’s behaviour was explicitly to try and break Steam’s entrenched monopoly and they legitimately offer far more favourable terms for developers.
What a surprise, an epic defender that thinks that monopoly means store do good. There are plenty of competition against steams store, they just don’t get market share because they’re not feature complete or they just suck.
Nah, I saw that piece of shit in theaters and still wish I would have walked out. I know what he was going for, but like every other roth movie I’ve seen (doubly for anything he’s written), it’s just not well done outside of the cinematography. And frankly, well shot porno and gore scenes don’t make for a compelling movie on their own.
Oh, I know. I got exactly 1 free game from EGS, which I promptly bought on stream myself once I realized that EGS had no offline mode (so the game I had been playing refused to launch during an Internet outage).
And that’s one of the many reasons EGS isn’t able to get a significant market share, because as I said initially, EGS fucking sucks. If they spent half as much on improving the store as they do for timed exclusives and trying to lure people in with free games, they might actually get somewhere.
Epic poured billions of Fortnite money with little to show for it.
Yes, Into fortnite, not EGS. The eggs spent all their money on timed exclusives instead of a better product, and that’s why they failed to make a steam competitor.
Ok, so then handle all of that yourself at cost. Which will lead to the death of your studio faster?
Seriously though, a $15 game selling just 100k copies is still $1m to you (before taxes) and has no upkeep. You do all that steam does yourself, you’re going to drown in operations costs and upkeep time.
Competition isn’t possible? EGS is an active competitor that only takes 12% and they still can’t get fucking anywhere because their store fucking sucks. GoG exists and also takes 30%, their store/launcher are ok, but they don’t offer nearly as much for that 30%, but they make up for that with drm free games. There are other minor players out there, so competition is definitely possible, but not one of them offers a comparable product.
The only way steam would lower their cut is if someone came along and made a game store that actually offered a significant portion of the services steam offered and was about as good but also had a lower cut of sales. But good luck finding someone who can do all of that and also takes less than 30%.
It’s actually pretty easy to argue it’s fair once you look at everything. Steam offers a shit ton of resources for that 30%, including hosting, distribution, patching, workshop, etc. And that’s not even getting into the fact that the dev can get all of that AND get steam keys that they can distribute themselves (meaning valve doesn’t get a cut of that) that still utilizes the same infra.
I wish I could find it, but I recently saw a video of Thor (@piratesoftware, does his own game dev and used to work for Blizzard) talking about this and going into even more detail than I can remember at the moment.
I love doom 3, but I also have a vivid memory of a sleepover at a buddy’s house in high school where we made a friend play it then we scared the bejesus out of him during one of the early locker scares that we saw coming and he didn’t.