- cross-posted to:
- neoliberal@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- neoliberal@lemmy.world
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While the actual monopolies actively making the world a significantly worse place keep getting away.
God I hate steam fanboys so fucking much. There is no such thing as a corporation which cares about you. Every single action is done to keep profits up.
move to linux really paying off then
What maintains Steam’s dominant market position is user lock in, not any policy they enforce or any monopoly laws they violate. The only thing that would break user lock in would be allowing migration of licenses for games between platforms, and making friend/multiplayer/mod-management systems interoperable across platforms.
Valve has made no effort to implement these kinds of systems. BUT NETHER HAS ANYONE ELSE. (Well except gog and DRM free games, but that’s only part of the issue.)
The fact that one privately owned company has such huge control of the industry is a huge risk, undeniably. But breaking up valve wouldn’t solve the problem, it would just let someone else take their place.
I see 2 main points against steam in this comment section.
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Steam is doing price fixing for games: False, this accusation came from Epic Games CEO, but the actual steam policy only blocks the selling of steam keys for a lower price, not the game itself.
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Steam is a monopoly and monopolies are bad: I agree that monopolies are bad, but in my opinion only if they take action to harm the user and the market. From my knowledge steam is pretty known as being pro customer and haven’t taken any monopolistic actions to block other stores from growing.
The reason why the games are not usually cheaper on other platforms is because publishers practice standard prices, so the game publishers take the extra profits from a lower store cut.
I am not trying to be a fanboy, I am just trying to look objectively at the facts, if someone can prove me wrong, I am willing to change my mind.
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Remember when steam introduced the 2h refund policy out of their own volition rather than being forced by multiple governments? Yeah me neither.
Removed by mod
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Being a simp for a multi billion dollar company is never a good thing. It’s not good for you as a consumer and, frankly, is just incredibly cringe.
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No, it’s not, the main point of the lawsuit is that Steam does not let game Devs sell their game for cheaper on any other platform.
So if you don’t like that Steam takes a massive 30% cut of your sales so that Gabe can buy his 27th mega-yatch, and you decide to also put your game on another platform that takes a fairer, smaller cut, then chose to pass on those savings to the consumer, then valve will kick you off the platform and you’ll lose access to by far the biggest market in PC gaming.
Fuck valve and fuck you brain dead fanboys simping for a billionaire and making everything worse for the rest of us because your entire worldview comes from memes.
You’re just simping for a different billionaire out here regurgitating Tim Sweeney’s talking points verbatim…
Supporting consumer rights is basically the exact opposite of simping for billionaires actually.
True, which is why it is so easy to tell which one you are doing. :)
This is a very narrow viewpoint that is borderline disingenuous.
You blame OP for being a simp, BECAUSE OF A MEME, then argue the plaintiff’s narrative without any critical breakdown or context.
You are not any better.
There is a lot of nuance here that you just ignore.
Valve is not using their resources to prevent/undermine competition.
Valve’s percentage is absolutely worthy of debate, but does not make them a monopoly.
I will state that I support Valve when it comes to the big releases, but definitely wish they tiered their fees to support smaller developers.
I get why they do it, but I wish they were a bit friendlier to the smaller developers
If the other companies used a platform that was even remotely close to the ease of use as Steam, I might feel differently, but they don’t
I have lost access to several titles because of these companies’ “competing” platforms.
Valve provides a service that is critical and beneficial. And in a way that these other companies seem incapable or unwilling to provide.
They are not preventing them from doing it in any way.
They just don’t want to get undercut on products that use their service. That is a valid argument.
Maybe if other companies didn’t create such bloated, underperforming crapware, they wouldn’t feel forced to use Steam.
And smaller developers aside, these companies already suck so much money out of the user/buyer as they can and are not passing that revenue to the actual software developer, while Valve does share its revenue with its employees, despite your claim that Gabe is buying his “27th yacht”.
The argument that valve has a monopoly because their platform is just so amazing and all the others is trash is exactly the simping behaviour I’m talking about.
If steam wasn’t already considered the default and valve didn’t have this insane cult of personality around Gabe Newell, steam would be considered mostly on par with other providers.
We as consumers let valve get away with so much bullshit because of “omg lord gaben and his summer sales! My wallet isn’t ready XD” types.
Like valve had to be sued into have a returns policy, they popularised predatory loot box mechanics and pushed an entire gambling based economy on children and made ludicrous amounts of money from it, popularised early access and asset flip slop, caved to the whole MasterCard censorship campaign
So my experience accounts for nothing?
So even though I’ve lost access to multiple titles because other software companies can’t get their shit together and were a terrible experience, I’m not allowed to use that as an example of why Valve has become the standard?
But any argument against your opinion is “simping”.
Do you even hear yourself?
What you are doing is a form of manipulation and gaslighting.
Those things Valve was sued over were also industry standard practices.
Your argument is awash with emotional outbursts which tells the real story here.
You’ve picked a side for one reason or another and just make bad arguments, trying to support it.
Show me a single game company, of that size, that HASN’T been sued. Since that seems to be your metric of what makes a company so evil.
This is accurate and the fact that so few feel this way, really does provide clues as to why the USA has become suck an evil monster.
no it’s not! i have bought games off other services and even from the devs own web site because it was cheaper. you just can’t sell STEAM KEYS which use steams service for cheaper then what it’s sold for in stream.
It’s exactly what Amazon does. Super easy to get around by offering different versions.
I doubt they win against Steam since all of ecommerce does this and Steam is not the worst.
If they do win that would imply Amazon needs to comply and that would be amazing so no way that’s happening.
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alright, lets compare game platforms(this may contain Opinions).
- Steam, probably the only good platform on here(also some stupendous features like a clock/alarm,note taking,browser,etc), but people should remember they are a monopoly(not the worse monopoly i have seen, look at something like Google or Microsoft), and they are still AAA company(Gabe Newell is a billionaire and the 106 richest man according to Forbes).
- GOG(why is it not being shown in the meme), Dont like their stance on being Pro-AI(if the LLMS was only used on One banner or smth or it had a fair reasoning, i would have been content with LLM usage.) and subpar features(maybe?),no DRM guarantee is nice.
but i like their program where they make older games Legally playable(IIRC Steam used to do the same?). - Ubisoft store,EA Store,Epic Games Store,Microsoft Store(due to Xbox logo),itch.io. they all have subpar features, and am pretty sure itch.io has more of a focus on UGC content.
- Console(Playstation,Nintendo,Xbox): I personally dont like the Video Game choice, and paying for a sub to play online.
i know there is stuff like DLSite aswell,but i never used them(the only Video Game franchise i know that sells there is Touhou Project)
People constantly dooming steam are punching themselves in the face instead of pushing for anything better. If they wanted a more competitive market do two things. Buy games on other storefronts. They exist. There have been digital storefronts since before Steam. Second is direct your complaining to competitors to improve their services. Like go complain on every EGS press release for Linux support and a gamepad friendly interface. Something equivalent to Steam input and remote play that isn’t using third party software like Sunshine/Moonlight. Something like steam curators and other social features. User reviews. The complainers of Steam are pretty much campaigning for Steam to be worse so others can compete without having to improve as much
Digital markets are naturally monopolistic. If there are no other barriers in a market, a single solution will rise to the top. Once it has gained enough market share, the “network effect” and incumbancy are often enough to keep it in power, even if the product degrades. Leaving steam is difficult, even when a better solution exists ( like gog) due to separated game libraries and friend groups.
See the following examples: Amazon, facebook, youtube, google, instagram, X
Amazon has many examples of enshitification. Higher prices, worse search, paid promotion of products etc.
Facebook adds, social experimentation and propaganda machine.
Youtube removes the dislike button, more advertisements and recommendation algorithm pushing conspiracy theories.
Hell. Here we are, a small group of people who left reddit because of their anti consumer policies. But lemmy is still no competition, and getting smaller by the day.
Markets are not the solution to monopoly, they are the creator. Its the natural end state of competition.
Gog isn’t a better solution to steam though, the feature set isn’t comparable
Right? Like, I love GoG. If I’m able to get something on GoG I typically will, even if it means paying a higher price to do so. But that’s definitely not because it’s a better platform to use. It’s because I appreciate their stance on DRM and support for keeping old games playable on new systems. I buy from them despite GoG Galaxy, not because of it.
Sensible regulation would target the network effect. That’s the barrier you identified. For example make it possible to use your Steam friends with GOG. Or have some kind of interoperability or standard.
if you want to fix capitalism, participate in the market!
lol okayyy
If Steam is accused of abusing their position, then it’s not the same, like them being accused of enforcing price parity, while they take a higher cut than EGS, so that those same games, sold on EGS, can’t be sold for cheaper
They don’t mandate price parity on other platforms. They mandate that people selling steam keys on different storefronts match price with the steam store. Which is to say, they allow people to distribute through steam’s infrastructure, without paying steam’s vendor fee, but not for a lower price.
Publishers can absolutely choose to sell for cheaper on EGS(or any other distribution platform for that matter), that they generally don’t is not due to some valve policy.
people fellating valve will never get less disgusting. have some shame and self respect.
These comments…
Some day, Steam is going to enshittify, eat game devs for breakfast, and all these Steam fans will wonder how anyone could have possibly seen this coming.
Kind of like a certain online bookstore named after a river.
Not that I don’t enjoy Steam. But I trust them as much as any corporation: not at all.
Gabe still owns Valve not shareholders. It’s after he dies that gets me worried simply because he’s way older than me. I buy GOG these days but mainly because Valve is American and I don’t trust their government to not interfere long term with what Valve can and cannot do or host. The DRM is less of a pain point because I’m a skilled pirate and data hoarder.
Hearing those arguments for how many years now? Right …
The day Gabe is bo longer there things may get ugly, may.
But, Valve is not publicly traded, or has to cater to shareholders in any way. That is the reason they are still who they are.
They run a good service platform and aren’t as greedy as they could be, but they’re still not safe.
Use them, but no fangirling. They’re a business.
I’d be completely in agreement of what you are saying if it wasn’t for the fact that there are so many people acting like Steam is the worst platform in existence every time they get brought up. People are awfully quick to suck Tim Sweeney off for only charging 12% and fill up the comments with whatever the opposite of “fangirling” is.
Just ignore those people and keep the shilling to a min, that’s all I’m saying. No they’re not the worst thing ever, they’re actually pretty good in a lot of ways, but they are a business and they do have a bit of a monopoly going on.
They get a free game and they turn into $2 hookers over it man. It’s insane.
Yeah, that’s going too far, but I understand the reaction to fanning over Valve.
There are a bazillion historical examples of why one should use, not trust, big businesses. They are entities to make transaction with, not people, and they will tighten the screws even if it takes decades.
This is doubly true in the software business.
And if the Valve superfans look at the world in 2026 and somehow don’t see that, I honestly don’t know what to tell them. They’re in such a completely different world than me I don’t know where to start.
Amazon was always publicly traded, so it was always going to get worse. Steam is privately owned by Gabe, and is therefore more resistant to enshittification. Unless Gabe sells or dies, Steam’s pretty safe.
I got bad news for you. Gabe is human and barring a miracle in medical science; he will die. He’s 63, the tables on Age Cohort death aren’t kind after 60. (They’re brutal after 70) Only 1/3rd of men reach 80.
This is something we need to be thinking about now. It could easily take 5-10 years to get competitors working.
That online bookstore literally started this rule of not being allowed to sell your products cheaper offsite and they will be god damned if gamers think they can fix that through Steam.
They pay the fucking president off.
They are literally the problem yall are complaining about in this thread! Fix that and you fix steam!
They already take 30% on each game. It’s huge, considering they didn’t spent a dime on these games. That means they will take most of the profit margin on a game, if any, while a studio has to pay for dozens or hundreds of employees, tons of hardware, workspaces, etc.
They spend money on each game uploaded to their store. How could you seriously think they aren’t spending any money?
You’re more making an argument that games are too cheap now.
You don’t think valve has employees and hardware to maintain?
Do You have any idea what the hosting infrastructure, steam works, and traffic costs?
Also, valve is giving massive contributions to open source from those 30%
Do You have any idea what the hosting infrastructure, steam works, and traffic costs?
Yeah, not 30% of all PC games. It’s how they turn out absurd profit.
That absurd profit is really from that digital trinket store/gambling bs.
30% for a digital storefront? Cheap for what they provide. Y’all really need to understand how bad it is out here. Go look at what Amazon takes from authors. eBay takes 30% from me sometimes! That’s a real physical product i have to ship!
30% to valve for what they offer? Yes, absolutely a good fucking deal. They will market my game and make it look as best it can on their storefront. That is absolutely worth the cost.
Never said that. But what is better for the dev? Using those services or run their own?
And I am fine with Valve making absurd profits, after all, they have put at least 500.000.000 USD into open source (Around 100-200 external oss devs on payroll for projects like Mesa, SDL,…).
Will I leave steam and call valve out if they get toxic? Yes! Are they evil or the enemy right now? To the contrary.
Using those services or run their own?
If they could have still images and text on the Steam store and a link to their external site for everything else, it’d by far be running their own.
It’s the exposure that Steam has an effective monopoly on.
Not everything has to be black and white. I appreciate Steam, but 30% is absurd. They’re absolutely raising the price of games and taking money away from developers.
With Amazon and eBay fees for physical products being nearly that high it just doesn’t feel that absurd to me.
Games haven’t risen in price, ever. Gamers should be paying $100+ for most games now. That’s the truth. The amount of man hours, time, etc etc to make a game? Fuck that no wonder why games suck now! I’m a full time 3D artist and I would absolutely never put a game out unless it was a passion project because gamers don’t want to pay what these things are worth anymore!
Why do you think there’s so much bullshit nickle and diming in this industry? Because they can’t raise the fucking price! So they found the worst way to do it through login incentives, monthly seasons, and garbage dlc that should have been in the game to begin with.
The amount of man hours, time, etc etc to make a game? Fuck that
And 30% of the purchase price doesn’t go to those people. It goes to Gabe’s yacht.
GOG takes 30%, most publishers take 30 to 50%, apple app store takes 30%, as does Google.
Is this to high? Maybe, I don’t publish games. But at least it is not absurd in means of industry standards :(
GOG’s fee is flexible, as are publisher contracts, which have no relevance to the discussion, as it’s in addition to store fees and involves major investments. Google is changing its fee to 20%. Epic’s is currently 0%. Microsoft Store’s is 12%, itch’s is adjustable. In the PC market, Valve is pretty much the main outlier at this point.
What would be better for the dev is a 9% platform cut and just a slightly smaller megayacht for Gabe.
So, Apple and other companies that charge 30% to host apps: BAD
Steam changes 30% to host games: GOOD
I’m not saying this is your argument, necessarily, but it’s funny to hear that “30% is good actually!” in the tech space because the last few years it’s been “Apple and others who charge 30% are taking too much! All they do is host and manage the traffic for apps!”
And I’m not trying to say Apple is good or anything. It’s just funny.
So you’re not really saying anything at all then. Got it
Then you need to read better.
They are calling out the hypocrisy of those criticizing Apple but worshiping Valve using the same argument for both.
Exactly.
No one needs to worship Steam. Gabe will never let you on one of his 50 yachts.
Valve is one of the most profitable company in the world.
I mean, just look at this thread and see how much free propaganda they get from gamers. That’s a lot of free labour just to defend a billionaire that profits from gambling for kids.
Everyone in here is just choosing a different flavor of billionaire to get behind, though.
Epic is not a co-op, lol.
What exactly is this the answer to?
Yes, they make a shit load of money. But assuming you want to distribute a game directly, how much of would that cost you, and let’s ignore the whole visibility shit for a second.
You can litteraly watch 45gb movie instantly over torrent these days.
Because p2p … How exactly does this apply to content distribution? Torrents are not always a reliable option…
There’s tons of options to host and share files, torrents are just one.
Steam, like spotify and other platforms is just convenient, and in this era of me, myself and I, it’s only thing most people care about.
Anyway, I’m done with the steam fanboys and their cognitive dissonance. Just remember you are directly creating the enshitifcation of gaming, because at the rate studios are firing people, you will soon enjoy only AI stuff, the only way to make profit from games.
Honestly not that much. The biggest thing Valve brings to the table is advertising and access to customers.
Hosting doesn’t cost that much. If you were that desperate for bandwidth (no one is), torrents exist as an option. Blizzard used to have torrents built into their downloader.
The infrastructure is a nice afterthought.
My day job is designing complex IT platforms.
And the cost goes massive down with size.
So. If your game sells badly, you will most likely spend more. Oney in hosting and distribution then you would make profit.
For example, assume your game has around 50gb. You sell 100 copies of it. You can easily calculate 1-2$ per download.
Add your own personal on top of it, someone has to run that stuff, and licensing and more for statistics tooling and more.
Platforms like valve allow indie devs and small studios to avoid all those costs upfront.
“Not that much” depends on the view
They help market the game as well on their storefront, and im sure all the analytics around the steam pages for the game.
They could just let you rot in obscurity.
They provide forums and a place for mods to work as well.
They provide chat/friends
There definitely is some amount of expenditure by valve. I don’t know if its 30% worth. For multiplayer games they provide a server/client DDOS protection and traffic optomization service though it is opt in by the developer through an api. The other option for this tends to be a “contact sales” priced product from cloudflare. There is also some of proton’s development, some linux graphics driver work, and workshop support though I suspect hosting and content moderation expenditure there is fairly minimal.
30% is the industry standard though, and Valve’s contributions of distribution and discovery infrastructure, its audience, and expanding hardware initiatives are not nothing. If you’re not pricing a game to give yourself a healthy margin within the 70% or your development model doesn’t make that viable, that’s really on you.
Industry standard doesn’t mean reasonable. It’s renter class bullshit, profiting off of other’s labor. Pretending creating a distribution and discovery platform is seriously deserving of 30% of the value of the hard work of game devs is not reasonable. If it was reasonable, gabe wouldn’t be a billionaire.
I never called it reasonable. I just don’t think it’s especially egregious. Honestly, I would price the value of Valve’s contribution (which is definitely not zero) at maybe 15% to 20%, but that’s just a gut feeling.
I mean, Spotify’s model is the industry standard, and it still suck big time and doesn’t give a shit about artists.
Anyway if I’ve learn anything over the past 10 years, it’s that it would probably be easier to convince a room full of maga to vote for Hillary Clinton than the average gamer to admit that steam sucks. So keep kissing this billionaire’s ass because he really does care about you, and remember Ubisoft and Epic (12% cut) bad.
I’m not saying the standard doesn’t suck, just taking issue with the implication that anyone using it is uniquely bad to do so.
But yeah, you’re right that getting me to admit Steam (overall) sucks would be nigh impossible. I genuinely don’t believe it does, so there’s nothing to admit. Maybe you could convince me to lie about it though? Lol.
I do admit there’s a few places it sucks, the gambling stuff being the biggest, but their positives eclipse those for me. I also acknowledge I’m in a privileged position being able to enjoy Valve’s efforts in VR, Linux compatibility, etc. directly and that I might have different opinions if I was on the outside looking in. I imagine that’s not quite the admission you want though.
Challenging biased views, half truths, or having your own opinions isn’t kissing some billionaire’s ass. I don’t want billionaire’s to exist. Gabe shouldn’t need to be a billionaire. But all of this is absofuckinglutely irrelevant to whether or not Steam is a good platform, unless Gabe was wielding Steam in a way that would promote a billionaire class, which he isn’t.
Oh, I didn’t know you were a personal friend of Gabe, my bad.
Anyway I don’t care about people like you, you are the problem. I care about people looking for solutions to have a healthy and fair industry.
I use to make a decent living out of music and sound design, 15-20 years ago. Then spotify came along and nobody lives from selling music anymore. Now I teach and if I was honest with my students, I’d tell them they are wasting time. Even here in Montreal, with hundreds of studios, there’s basically no more job in audio because the only way to make profit out of game is with AI and sound banks. So yeah, enjoy the enshitification of games, you’re directly promoting it.
You really need to take a good look in the mirror, because you are reading things that aren’t there and embarrassing yourself and the industry you claim to care about.
Lol. blablabla steam is good blablabla good billionaire blabla
If we could collect only 10% of the energy gamers spent on kissing gabe’s ass, we could solve the energy crisis forever.
Think of me in a few years, when you complain about studios releasing only AI stuff. And if you have kids, I hope they don’t become gambling addicts because I do care about that.
I’m not gonna say Steam sucks. It’s a nice organizational tool that enforces some standards.
I’d rather have a drm free game that’s 20% cheaper though. The devs can pocket the other 10%.
The “30% is the industry standard” claim is not even true anymore. Epic currently takes 0% to expand its catalog, though from what I remember, it estimated that it needs to take 7% or so to be profitable. Microsoft takes 12%. Itch allows to adjust. GOG’s fee varies from deal to deal. Ubisoft (and EA) no longer sell third-party games, so they’re out of scope here.
The only way I’ve seen people try to counter this is by referring to the mobile and console store fees, but going by the Epic v. Google trial where the jury was asked to define the market and defined it as Android, there’s just no way that argument would hold water. Still, console manufacturers produce at a loss, so they need to make up for that. In the mobile market, Google is already changing its fee to be 20% or less.
Edit: lawsuit->trial
Yea we are talking about platforms that sell vs platforms that are desperate to sell.
Do you buy games from fucking Microsoft of all companies?!
It’s a joke to think that Microsoft is doing this for any other reason besides they have to to trick idiots into investing into their platform (again after giving it up the first fucking time!)
Gog and itch are fine but itch is definitely a particular gamer market. Gog is easier to use for pirated games.
Brick and mortar stores take 50% of revenue usually. The profit margin for the manufacturer applies after that
You comparing a store with a digital storefront? Anyway enjoy the library you don’t own, at best it will die with you because you can’t even transfer it, that’s if steam doesn’t change their buisness model for whatever reason.
It really puts into perspective the importance of supporting free software. Even after Valve goes to shit, their contributions to the ecosystem will live on.
It’s why the average sheep can never see the value in free software; it keeps them dependent on corporations.
So… what? Hate them in advance, so that if they ever turn evil we’d be prepared?
Be prepared.
Don’t hate, but don’t trust Valve. Treat your Steam library like you don’t own it, and it could be enshittified at any time, because you don’t, and it could.
In practice, prioritize DRM-free stores when convenient. Or better yet, 1st party game dev stores. Archive any games or saves you actually want to go back to, just in case. Game like your Steam client install could require a subscription at a moment’s notice.
Exactly. And unlike many other companies there isn’t even any indication they would want to enshittify anyways. Why would they destroy the foundation of their platform? They have actual paying customers paying the bills, not some force-feed ad slop machine.
Well this is just naive. Steam will die, too.
Kinda presumptuous to call it naive when I never said Steam couldn’t ever die, nor do I believe so. I’m saying that unlike other platforms that enshittify, paying customers hold the final say for Steam. Paying customers are why companies come to Steam, paying customers will not spend money on Steam if they even get close to enshittifying. There is no multi billion dollar ad industry in between that pays the bills, that dictates the enshittification because it demands advertisements be shoved down people’s throats.
What do you think will happen when Gabe dies?
Other people will take his place. And you can be sure there are some greedy fucks pining for his role.
Companies do not have to indicate when they are going to enshitify. It can and has happened over night.
You are right, when Gabe dies, that will be a huge point of uncertainty where people’s trust into Steam will need to be re-established to keep going as it currently is. But that’s a point aside.
Companies do not have to indicate when they are going to enshitify. It can and has happened over night.
It can happen, but it’s not the norm by far. Reputation is still to some companies their key indicator of profitability, and Steam is certainly one of those. By that logic you should at any time be expecting loot boxes instead of products in your supermarket tomorrow, but that’s kind of ridiculous because everyone would hop to a competitor immediately, assuming no foul play. As I mentioned, paying customers hold a firm grasp of the value of Steam. If the people stop coming to Steam, the companies do too, and Steam dies.
Amazon was toxic from day one, anticompetitive, borderline illegal, definitely corrupt as hell. It is what Epic Games Store would have been if it had been long before steam lol. The amount of shit that they bankrupted into the ground with cheap Chinese copies off the backs of VC funds while making tons of loss and then removing their storefronts…
But as soon as GabeN dies, steam will become shit probably as the vultures close in.
Amazon enshittified with their one-click-shopping patent, though. They were never good.
That’s a fucking patent?!
Yup. The US Patent office isn’t very good at it’s job.
Mandatory preface to prevent angry fanboys stinking up the replies: I like Steam. I use Steam. And just to be sure, democrats and republicans are not the same.
Some folks in this thread are using American case law to argue that Steam is not a monopoly, or that Steam is a good (??@#!?!?) monopoly. They look at other cases, like Microsoft, and point out how far Microsoft had to go before it was considered a monopoly by American judges, and then point out that Steam is not as bad. There are two problems with that line of reasoning.
The first is that monopoly law has been absolutely gutted by Reagan, and worsened by every administration (dem and rep alike) up until Biden. In the Biden admin, Lina Khan has made some very small steps to tighten up monopoly laws a bit, but obviously Trump happened (although Harris was pretty much the same as the dems before Biden, so not much hope there either). The bar for being a monopoly is unreasonably high, and American monopoly law is an absolute joke.
Secondly, this line of thinking conflates legality with morality, or being good (enough) for society. I hope I don’t need to convince you that this idea is false. Slavery was legal.
The argument here is not that Steam is, in the current flawed legal American sense, a monopoly, but that it is a monopoly in the sense that it has cornered enough of the gaming market that it could do very serious harm.
Note that “they’re not currently doing harm” is not a great counterargument here. When my neighbor buys a bazooka, I won’t be satisfied by “don’t worry I’m not currently using it”.
I mean, they just don’t at all seem like one. When i buy games i rarely use steam to do it. I have one choice for internet. One for power. One for gas. Millions of storefronts for games. I just don’t see it.
Let me ask you this. What are steam doing to try to be a monopoly?
Because the way I see it, Nintendo at one time took distinctive actions to ENSURE they remained a monopoly. Then Sega threatened that.
Then Sega a few years later shot themselves in the foot with confusing console stratagy. 32X, and the SegaCD were absolute failures because everyone knew the Saturn was around the corner. Then they shot themselves in the foot AGAIN by just dumping the Saturn on retailers doorsteps, in some cases at 3AM when nobody was even at the stores, with no prior warning. Just dump it at their door and hope for the best. Well, CONSUMERS didn’t even know they were in stores. And even people with preorders didn’t know. This was just in the early days of the internet, and long before social media. So it’s not like if this happened today, everyone would know when they check their social media. Nope. It was said that some customers just didn’t know for months, simply because if you weren’t physically in the store, you didn’t know. Some stores took phone numbers for the preorders, the majority did not. A lot of pre-orders were cancelled over this.
Nintendo shot themselves in the foot by partering up with Sony to create the Nintendo Play Station. (Two words). It was to use Sonys CD technology, and be a massive upgrade in storage. Well after reading the contract, Nintendo lawyers discovered that Sony could not only create their own games, but they could liscense the technology to other 3rd parties with zero control over who gets to release software for it. Worst of all, Sony, not Nintendo, would recieve all money from software sold on the Nintendo Play Station. So they backstabbed Sony, and tried again with Phillips. Phillips was to create a Super Nintendo addon. Sega had the SegaCD, and Nintendo felt left out. So they tried creating the Super Nintendo version of the SegaCD. It went very poorly. The end result of this ended up being the Phillips CD-i, which was less of a Nintendo console, and more of a Phillips console liscensing Nintendo characters. To this day, Nintendo has never reclaimed their monopoly, due to trying to kill Sega, they created Sony’s Playstation.
Sony created a monopoly by including a dvd player in the PS2 during a time nobody had a dvd player. It worked. But that was the only thing they did to create the monopoly. It’s not like Nintendo in the 80s, when they told 3rd parties they could either put a game on Atari, or they could put one on the NES. Sony lost their dominance with the PS3 by charging $700, at a time the Xbox360 was charging $400.
And Microsoft lost their dominance by just not having anything exclusive worth playing. Then they had the “everything is an xbox” campaign, which totally backfired.
But Steam? I don’t see them as doing anything to create a monopoly. I see them as a simple software store that sells all PC games. They’ve entered the console space in recent years with the steamdeck. But it’s nothing that creates a monopoly. Personally I find the steamdeck to be overpriced. The thing that gives them a monopoly is that they offer crazy deep sales, but publishers have to agree to those sales. Steam can’t mark Factorio down to $2.00 without the publishers consent (which in that case they do NOT consent to sales).
All I see Steam doing is offering quality products, at reasonable prices, without bullshit.
Epic games is FULL of bullshit in their customer service.
And GOG isn’t full of bullshit, but their library is limited, and always will be limited to publishers who consent to them selling drm-free games. For this reason alone, gog can never compete with steam.
So, yes, Steam HAS a monopoly, but I see it as a result of two things.
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Everybody else keeps shooting themselves in the foot.
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On consoles you keep the game for that console. When a new console comes out, MAYBE you get backwards compatibility for 1-2 generations. Usually 1 more. With Steam, you could have bought a game 20 years ago, and bought 20 new PC’s since then. Your purchases will still work.
In either event, I don’t see this as Valve being malicious at any point to create a monopoly. It can easily be taken away from them by someone else doing the same things they did. Offer a generous library, complete with modern releases, regular sales, and supurb customer service. It just so happens that everybody else is too greedy and/or stupid to attempt this.
So in your words, what is Valve doing wrong that makes you think they’re creating an unfair monopoly?
Let me ask you this: does it matter? Whether my neighbor buys or just happens upon a bazooka, he has a bazooka, and I don’t feel safe.
If that’s a bazooka the damn electric and Internet companies have nukes.
There have been reports of Valve telling developers they can’t sell their game cheaper elsewhere (such as on a platform with a smaller cut than Steam’s 30%). But I think that was refuted.
It’s steam keys you aren’t allowed to sell cheaper elsewhere. Which makes some amount of sense: sell your game 30% cheaper elsewhere? None of their business. Sell a steam key 30% cheaper elsewhere? You’re using their download servers, infrastructure, social features, etc without giving them their cut.
From what I’ve heard, steam does not charge for the generation of steam keys. So every steam key sold off platform is a loss of sales for them. Restricting the price of keys sounds perfectly reasonable in this case.
It’s a nice thing for us that they don’t really enforce it at all
Didn’t see it being refuted. I heard emails were leaked
Supposedly it was actually about someone wanting to sell Steam keys off Steam for cheaper, but I cba to find the proof right now so it could also be fake news.
In practice having a game on Steam is even superior to having a DRM free copy. My DRM free copies of games are on some old hard drive in a drawer. My steam library is right there. Removing and installing games is super straightforward.
I like and use Steam. I agree that their dominance is mostly due to the lack of quality competition. They haven’t done anything super shady or anti-consumer.
But don’t expect that to last. It’s a story that’s been repeated countless times now. We know how this goes. One day something will change - probably ownership - and the enshittification will begin.
That’s what DRM free is about. You are in control of your DRM free games even after the developer, publisher, and the store you bought it from have all gone to hell. They also run better years from now when old DRM schemes no longer play nice with OS changes. DRM free is extra insurance that you’ll always have that game and be able to play it.
Too bad I don’t have the hard drive space to store my entire library. One day I’m going to be very sad right alongside everybody else.
I just fucking pirate in that case. That’s a simple fix. I’m not buying games from dev sites directly and I’m not putting up with bs. I’d rather never play a game again if it got that bad. It’s like YouTube, barely anything is worth the hassle. Make it worse and I’m done entirely.
Maybe the difference is effort versus objective reality.
You and OP are concerned with whether or not they became a monopoly maliciously when I think the previous commenter is concerned with whether or not they simply are a monopoly.
In my view they are a monopoly and they have abused that. I’m thinking of their loot boxes and silent support of skin gambling.
We should be mistrustful of institutions with this much power, regardless of if they’re actively abusing it.
How are their lootboxes a Monopoly? They suck and should be banned in any game/platform because gambling is Bad… But is Fifa or overwatch a Monopoly because they have lootboxes? The silent Support of skin gambling? Didnt they make it harder to trade skins to combat These sites? What could they even rly do to stop the gambling sites? Because as long as you can trade skins the sites will remain.
Loot boxes are not a monopoly.
Its a bad thing they did to abuse their monopoly stance
??? This doesnt make sense… How did they abuse their Monopoly stance with lootboxes?!
I have a near complete control of a market segment.
I want to monetize that control further.
I release slot machine mini games into my most popular games.
I have contributed to the gambling epidemic that plagues modern society.
I am not a trust worthy entity.
I am Steam
Does that make sense?
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The argument here is not that Steam is, in the current flawed legal American sense, a monopoly, but that it is a monopoly in the sense that it has cornered enough of the gaming market that it could do very serious harm.
Note that “they’re not currently doing harm” is not a great counterargument here. When my neighbor buys a bazooka, I won’t be satisfied by “don’t worry I’m not currently using it”.
Absolutely this. I’m glad you were able to convey it in a way people understand.
Steam is a blackhole for PC gaming/gamers from a marketing perspective. They’ve capitalized on so much of the market, that once a person buys a game on Steam they are unlikely to buy the same game and/or even future games from a different but similar platform. It is in a sense, locking the consumer in and so many consumers are locked in. Nobody competed with Steam in the PC gaming market for an eternity and it’s not Steams fault at all.
Even if Steam went to absolute shit in the next 20 odd years they’ve pretty much guaranteed that I’ll be coming back to play all the games I’ve ever bought on there. Even if EGS or GoG improves their interface to compete with Steam, I’ve no reason to buy elsewhere (though do support GoG please).
Now to pose a question: How does a competitor even compete with Steam to capture even a % of the market?
Lemme knock out the obvious: Better UI and stronger community / community tools. I think these are a given. That being said, I do think EGS is going the correct route by investing in games / unique games and locking them into their platform. Everybody like free market and availability, but to compete against the goliath that is Steams marketbase, you gotta be the only place where to get some things. It sucks, but that’s what I can’t think of a better, to the point method for anyone to capture a similar market for growth, but what do you think?
I’d sooner sell my pc than give a penny to egs. I won’t even take their free games. EGS will 109% become the evil monopoly you are all so scared of if it gets a chance at all. Fuck that they already have a weird monopoly on game engines (which is making gaming boring as it is).
Maybe, but EGS is also the driving force behind Unreal Engine 5, which despite everyone hating it really is a good engine.
Valve doesn’t even lease it’s engine out to other devs. I don’t even know if they’re still developing their game engine.
So I do give props to EGS for pushing game engines forward and making them available.
The EGS app is so poorly built that Heroic, a third party app made by volunteers, runs faster, has a nicer UI, and has more features. EGS are not a serious competitor.
That being said, I do think EGS is going the correct route by investing in games / unique games and locking them into their platform.
I strongly disagree. I quit consoles because of the exclusivity nonsense, and EGS guaranteed I will never buy anything from them by doing that shit. I won’t even redeem free games on their platform via Prime Gaming, just on principle.
You compete by giving devs and publishers a better cut, or convincing them to do deeper sales on your platform. You compete by providing a better service to users. You do not compete by literally not competing.
You’re describing how you would compete in a normal competition, but Steam has already had a decade to lock in it’s following. The competition is/was over.
I say that as a Steam user, there’s absolutely nothing a competitor can do to convince me to start buying / keeping my games on a platform outside Steam. Steam just has it all AND that’s where all my existing games already are. No amount of UI/UX improvements will convince me. No amount of sales will convince me because Steam will have the same game. Better cuts to developers doesn’t bring in repeat customers.
Like, Steam would need to take a nosedive in quality and care and I just don’t see that happening.
I’ve turned around and bought games they were giving out for free on egs. I won’t even install that bs.
Well, exclusive games is the only thing Nintendo really has going for, and it’s working. And those games being first or third party isn’t really making much difference for the final user.
Only real difference is hardware lock in.
I don’t particularly like the direction that Nintendo has taken in recent years, but are you willing to ignore that they were the only company in the market for handheld gaming until very recently? It’s not just game exclusives.
They were not. They killed the PSP and the Vita. Even before the N64 and the GCube had massive exclusives.
The only “recent” failure was the Wii U, which had only one or two great exclusives.
I quit consoles because of the exclusivity nonsense
Nintendo was included in that statement.
But you’re not the market. So this not working for you doesn’t mean it’s a bad strategy, and Nintendo is an example of a company who pulled this off.
Lemme knock out the obvious: Better UI and stronger community / community tools. I think these are a given.
OK. With you, there.
That being said, I do think EGS is going the correct route
…and, you lost me.
I work in UI, outside the game industry. It’s plain to me very, very few publishers care about developing good UI or community tools. Epic is no exception. Perhaps that wasn’t what you meant, but if it’s a venue they intentionally ignore, it fits the OP picture perfectly.
I also think there are other features on which Steam has failed to compete, and an inventive competitor could investigate. Things like better game integration, better curation, promises against censorship to publishers of adult content, or creative uses of AI to improve player experiences, are all options. But I think that between the attempts of Google, Amazon, and Epic, it’s seemed that simply throwing money at the game industry without knowledge of what’s valuable to gamers, has not worked well.
Those points are valid, but do you really think having better UI/UX is going to win them over customers when compared to Steam? Like, Steam is such a behemoth. Hypothetical, but if I was still a kid, and my brother had his whole library on Steam, where do you think I’d end up buying most my games? I think good UI/UX is only half the battle in this kind of competition.
You’re right, in that you do need a “hook” - but that needs to be on top of nailing the absolute basics. UI is definitely one of the more basic elements. The key here is, good UI is not something that needs millions of dollars of investment - it’s generally sort of the opposite. It needs fewer managers over-designing things and finding the best ways to “marketing push” all the high-value product items.
To webpage developers, this motherfucking website is the best site in the world. It loads instantly, and barely requires any coding experience to make. Launchers are not websites (unless you want to bundle 800 MB of Chromium, as many sadly do) but some of the same principles of basicness apply.
The reason I’m not crazy worried about steam, and I don’t even think it’s a monopoly per-se (although I’m not referring to any definition, just a vibe) is that steam has a lot of the “market share” of video game purchases, sure, but if steam shut down tomorrow, or did something heinous enough to warrant a boycott, I am able to move. The epic games store and GoG both exist at the very least.
It would be a pain for me because I have a lot of money poured into steam, but not for anyone just getting into gaming who doesn’t have cache with steam. I didn’t pour it into steam because it was the only place for me to go, it was the best place for me to go. Idk, a big difference in Steam’s “monopoly” is that they don’t own a scarce physical commodity like oil or land, and they don’t have anything exclusive except maybe Valve games. Also unlike a monopoly there are many similarly functional competitors easily accessible on the Internet that offer an almost identical service.
Steam “locks you in” to their ecosystem. But only for each individual game you choose to buy on their platform. If you didn’t want to hitch all your games to Steam for fear that they shut down or break bad Steam does not mind if you install GoG and buy physical copies of games to diversify your portfolio so to speak.
The steam lock in is a feature, anyways. I don’t want to chase down updates off dev sites or worse the dev shuts down. Which will happen far far far more often than Steam, anyways.
Nothing lasts forever. Steam included. Yes people may lose games they bought but you lose cars you bought too. You’d lose the game eventually either by the disc breaking or the developer dying. Etc etc etc
Things die. Nothing is forever. This includes software.
I do exactly that. I have complementary libraries on GoG and Steam, although Steam is obviously bigger.
I think the point is they’re not trying to be a monopoly. It just ended up that way naturally because all their competitors killed themselves.
If my neighbor finds a bazooka rather than buy one, he still has a bazooka.
If all your neighbors shoot themselves in the face, it’s not your fault they did that.
It’s more like all the neighbors attempted to build larger worse more dangerous bazookas and failed and are now telling you that the one left with a small working bazooka should be crippled so they have a chance to build their bigger weapons of mass destruction.
Meanwhile, you’ve got the keys to the entire kingdom so you don’t even need to be in the neighborhood to get hit by a bazooka, anyways. (Go pirate ffs)
yeah its like if you were in a race and you said your opponent cheated because you broke your leg and they didn’t
When I think of monopolies, I think more of telecomms, of Wal-Mart and their selling at a lose to kill off competition, Microsoft purposely hindering the ability for competing software, and other examples. Unless I’m missing something, Steam didn’t do that, they were just first in the game and built a better product than the others did. Offering a better service that attracted customers. Now do I think it’s too large and would welcome competition, absolutely. But monopolies typically aren’t though just having larger market share with a better product.
If Steam did something like oh, pay developers/publishers to be exclusive to their platform, then yeah you’d have a good argument there.
Microsoft purposely hindering the ability for competing software,
Nope. MS was declared a monopoly because of marketshare and therefore had to add support for competing software.
Offering a better service that attracted customers.
Monopoly is from marketshare. How it is obtained doesn’t matter. Once you are the biggest company you need to have restrictions placed on you so that smaller companies have a chance to compete.
Nope on Microsoft. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v./_Microsoft_Corp. It was restricting the web browser market.
Point two, it’s if they also hamper competition or capabilities to compete. Steam, as shown in this thread and how it operates, hasn’t done that. Now you can give a good thumb of the nose at Epic for their paid exclusives, but that didn’t get them anywhere toward dominating a market. Also, competition exists in various forms as well. It’s not monopolized.
I hate monopolies and no friend of big companies, but come at them with the right cudgel, not made up dross.
Steam has had monopolistic policies. There just so benign compared to other monopolies of the current time, that they seem pedestrian.
Im not anti steam, but i try to never be pro any company.
Gabe Newell is still a billionaire and thusly a piece of shit. Just that one the list of billionaires he’s on the lower end of ones needing rectifying.
Valve bans developers from selling their games cheaper on other platforms. So if those services want to take a smaller cut than valve does, so Devs can sell their games cheaper on their platform, they can’t or they lose access to steam, by far the biggest platform.
This is blatant monopolistic bullshit.
Valve bans developers from selling their games cheaper on other platforms
I’ve just checked their steamworks partner documentation. This only applies to steam keys.
https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/keysYou should use Steam Keys to sell your game on other stores in a similar way to how you sell your game on Steam. It is important that you don’t give Steam customers a worse deal than Steam Key purchasers.
(…)
It’s OK to run a discount for Steam Keys on different stores at different times as long as you plan to give a comparable offer to Steam customers within a reasonable amount of time.That, imho, is quite reasonable, because Valve provides these keys to the developer free of charge, i.e. the developer does not have to pay 30% commission on these keys.
Developers are free to sell their games on other storefronts (like Epic or GOG) for a lower price than they do on steam, permanently. Or at least, I was not able to find such a clause in their docs, the only clause that talks about something like a price parity I could find on the keys page, i.e. selling steam copies of the game on other storefronts.
It’s funny because last I heard this argument in real life it came down straight from GameStop corporate who were afraid (this was like 20 years ago when I was a gm) of Steam so they went hard on crying about Steam being a monopoly and bad for gamers then banned Steam games from the store.
Fuck all billionaires. Steam is not a concern I have ever, though.
Steam’s policy is to, if a gamedev company gets a better offer in another store that doesn’t add the 30% markup that Steam adds to the price of games and shares that with their customers by selling their games cheaper in the other store, Steam will take their games down from the Steam store.
Now, if Steam was just one amongst many small games stores, the gamedev could just ignore that, but Steam has such much of the Market of digital game sales that gamedevs cannot ignore having their games taken down from the Steam store.
Oh, by the way, this applies to Indies as much as it does to the rest, so we’re not just talking about widelly hated AAA publishers here.
Steam absolutelly is using their dominant market position to shaft both gamers and game devs, including Indies.
Which is why simping for Steam is so, so sad.
Steam’s policy is to, if a gamedev company gets a better offer in another store that doesn’t add the 30% markup that Steam adds to the price of games and shares that with their customers by selling their games cheaper in the other store, Steam will take their games down from the Steam store.
Does anyone have a source on that? I couldn’t find that clause in their docs, all I could find that is in this: https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/keys
You should use Steam Keys to sell your game on other stores in a similar way to how you sell your game on Steam. It is important that you don’t give Steam customers a worse deal than Steam Key purchasers. (…) It’s OK to run a discount for Steam Keys on different stores at different times as long as you plan to give a comparable offer to Steam customers within a reasonable amount of time.
To me, that reads that this is only about selling steam copies of the game on other storefronts (like humblebundle for example), developers are free to sell non-steam copies of the game on other storefronts (like GOG or epic) for cheaper.
So all of the major ecommerce players do this. I’ll get banned from Amazon if i sell my own products i manufacture on my own website cheaper than Amazon.
So we get around it with a different sku.
That’s all you have to do on Steam.
Now I’d love for this to not be the case but no way anyone wins this case against Steam because it’s not about Steam. It’s about all of ecommerce, and they pay (bezos etc) the fucking president off.
I looked at the lawsuit details. Steam basically did what everyone else does. Apple, google, EA, everyone.
They charge 30% of the sale. They require that the steam price be the same as an external price.
It’s the most nothing of nothings.
To compare, what MS did when they got smacked with their monopoly lawsuit is bundle IE with the OS and they both made it hard to switch the default and they’d constantly try to switch you back to IE.
*steam price the same as external price only if the external sale is for steam keys. And you have some time to offer an equivalent sale on steam.
That doesn’t sound as bad
But sweeny mad no one lieks epic store
Any of those places charging 30% on a product they’re only publishing electronically is using walled gardens and monopolistic practices to do so.
I’d rather they go after Steam last, but Steam belongs in that group with Apple, Google, and Microsoft. It’s extraordinarily difficult to sell your PC game without Steam. A few large studios can do it, but not many others.
Still notas egregious as Apple, and now Android with their restrictions on side loading.
What do you propose Steam changes instead of 30%?
