While the actual monopolies actively making the world a significantly worse place keep getting away.
Jesus fucking Christ in blue skirt, y’all have your nose full of Gabe’s juice gagging him so much.
I truly enjoy all of you morons cicle jerking “eat the rich” but bending over Valve and paying for the lube.
“But think of how much he did for Linux gnagnagna”. Fuck that shit. Wake the fuck up. Torvalds does not own a 500 millions yacht.
Lemmy is truly going full retard and speedrunning Reddit clusterfuck as fast as possible.
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.
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.
One of the most accurate descriptions of this entire beef.
Steam does nothing and just keeps winning.
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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.
2 is false. It only applies to steam keys.
It only applies to steam keys.
A steam key is the receipt that you paid for the game. It is ridiculous that companies get to skirt laws by saying, “It’s on a computer.”
Imagine you buy a car. Years later you go to resell it for less and the manufacture claims you can’t because the sales receipt that proves you are the legitimate owner is a “Steam Cars Inc key” and therefore all existing laws do not apply.
Yeah that’s not what they’re preventing. It’s to stop someone with rights to generate keys, i.e. the developer, from generating a lot of Steam keys and then selling them on their own site at a discount, which is basically leeching off of the Steam infrastructure & ecosystem while sidestepping the storefront. Which is fine as long as they don’t undercut.
The EULA for any software you’ve ever paid for is what forbids resale.
It’s to stop someone with rights to generate keys
If it was only about developers then consumers could have the right to resell their game at whatever price they wanted.
EU countries wouldn’t have to sue Steam for consumer rights:
https://blog.igv.com/steam-freedom-equality-and-game-resale-steam-vs-france/
Again that is a separate issue from the no undercutting clause. Prohibition of resale is ubiquitous in the software world because for decades the ploy has been to sell you a license, not an actual product.
Of course I’d love that to change but it’s a core precept of how digital ownership works and has worked for most of it’s existence. Steam is not the main force behind that.
Steam is not the main force behind that.
Steam started it! You must be too young to remember the uproar in the gaming community about HL2 being the first Steam game and requiring Internet authentication to play with the ridiculous restriction of not being allowed to resell the game you bought at the store. It was years later before they eased selling restrictions but still never to the amount that consumers enjoyed before Steam existed. Gabe was the original techbro: “Hey I know it’s illegal but what if we do it anyway. Then we use the profits to pay the lawyers to make it legal.” It’s why France sued Valve to require them to follow the laws that exist for everything else. https://www.videogameseurope.eu/news/video-games-europe-welcomes-french-supreme-court-decision-on-the-resale-of-digital-video-games/
Steam was like Walmart moving into a new territory- with the added consumer hostility of adding restrictions to purchases that consumers used to enjoy. It was because of Steam’s success that other businesses realized that consumers would take abuse if it meant they could get their entertainment conveniently.
You’re conflating DRM with software licensing. DRM is digital enforcement of license terms. Steam was by no means the first form of DRM, but it is a DRM platform (though there are some DRM-free titles).
I am not too young to remember Steam being a highly controversial topic because it was basically launched as the DRM for Half-Life 2. The backlash against the normalization of DRM led to the creation of Good Old Games, still the premiere DRM-free vendor on the market.
However, software licenses have been in use since the 70s. The practice of selling actual copies of code as opposed to licenses to use the code was already rare by the 90s. If you bought a CD or floppy disks in a store, you were buying a license to use the code on the disks, but you were explicitly denied the rights to resell or copy it, at least for most commercial products. Most people just never read the very long terms of usage.
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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
Sorry, you are correct. I didnt mean to say gog is straight up better than steam, though it does sound like thats what i meant. Writing a thoughtful rant on the toilet is difficult.
But in some ways, gog is better. Not all ways. Also the competition in this space has forced steam to do better. The retun policy was really only implemented due to competition for example.
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”.
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?
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.
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.
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Valve does a lot of things pretty badly, it’s just that they and the fans control the narrative.
Apart from running gambling for children (pretty hefty thing to put aside, but still), what do you mean?
Quarter machines and Pokémon cards are gambling, too. Parents are shitty. Their kids shouldn’t even be on steam until older and then why do they have credit cards? Parents are crap.
Parents have nothing to do with a company that designed and implemented a gambling machine into your kid’s favourite game about killing people.
All launchers mustdie and devs need to go back to selling their games directly.
Nothing stops them and yet they mostly don’t. There is no good way for a dev to put a game before your eyes, so they have to have some kind of store to do it.
…yes there is - fucking socials. Make a cool trailer, that they do anyway, and use interns to spam it to gaming groups and just tag the hell out of it.
Shit like that could work 10 years ago, not anymore. Not that it worked reliably 10 years ago. You essentially want people to spend all the money and time making a game, and then gamble on the algorythm and that Zukerberg will allow anyone to see your shit. And if you lose the gamble, enjoy your 7 buyers and no shot to get anything in the future.
No wonder nobody actually does that, and people publish on Steam where there are oodles of mechanisms to connect people with money who want a game and people with a game who want money.Or pay MORE to Steam to promote your upcoming game? Please.
Yes, pay more to Steam to get people buying it and also enjoy other Steam perks. Or, pay (presumably) less and receive nothing and not get your money back.
