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While the actual monopolies actively making the world a significantly worse place keep getting away.
We ever going to do something about Visa? Because that shit is getting spooky.
One of the most accurate descriptions of this entire beef.
Steam does nothing and just keeps winning.
it doesn’t just do nothing, it sticks to its core idea : we can’t do as much as the community can when it comes to making games, how do we maximise the community’s possible output?
People love to shit on valve working on lootboxes, but I was there to see how it developed. It was there as part of a way of getting money back to the people making stuff, which is why a shitload of the TF2 hats came from the community and steam workshop. The system came from a left wing greek economist, before , you know, he BECAME Minister of Finance for greece (for half a year)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yanis_Varoufakis
This is why they have steam OS, steam greenlight, SFM, etc etc.
Valve doesn’t make games anymore, because they know hobbyists can make shitloads of more games than them, they need a platform to shove them into.
Also, the other goal is to improve and extend the PC gaming space, which is why they are working on SteamOS, the deck, and all the other shit they are working on. Because of the work they put into making steam work to make game distrobution better than piracy (LITERALLY said by Gabe), PC releases became synonymous with “Steam”, which is why whenever you have a game announcement, you get “New game : Available on (XboxLogo : PS5Logo : SteamLogo)”
Valve is doing stuff. Just not, you know, making HL3 or nothing.
In a service business, if you do things right, people think you’re doing nothing.
This also applies to IT support.
“everything works fine, why do we pay you people?”
“everything is broken, why do we pay you people!”
I’m baffled that I didn’t already know that lootboxes were created by the husband of the woman that the Pulp hit Common People was most likely written about.
Steam:
Steam is a great example of how a privately held company can out compete publicly traded and venture capital funded corps.
It can take greater risks and can fund initiatives that won’t pay out within the current quarter. The steam deck is a great example of that. A device that no other corporation thought that we wanted and that required like a decade of working with open source linux projects to make happen, that isn’t something that EA would have been able to manage.
Seriously, we need more companies doing nothing and taking 30% fee, becoming super rich corporations making more money than any other company per employee, while devs wonder if they’ll break even
“doing nothing”
Global distribution of exabytes of data, handling the entire e-commerce side and offering great toolings with steamworks while requiring onyl 100 dollars upfront is now considered “nothing”. Yeah, we should definitely go back to a time when steam wasn’t a thing and indie devs were required to have a publisher to even get their games into stores, and those publishers often took 80% of the entire profits. I’m sure indies had a much better time back then when they didn’t have to pay steam!
You missed my point. I’ll repeat it.
30% cut was fine when infrastructure was just not there yet, but 64GB HDD no longer costs 100€ and internet is not metered in megabytes. Like I said, they’re making more money per employee than other corporations. If you genuinely think Valve and Gabe’s fleet of Yachts is not monopolistic squeezing/pricing, then keep on defending corpos.
If they’d have an ounce of fear against competition, they would be lowering that cut to Epic’s levels (which is also not a shining beacon, but you get my point, they clearly enjoy their status and everyone is paying for it)
30% cut was fine when infrastructure was just not there yet, but 64GB HDD no longer costs 100€ and internet is not metered in megabytes.
Steam isn’t just storing stuff and letting people download it. They’re an entire distribution network. There’s not just the tech (which is already expensive in itself), but also the entire legal stuff. Invoicing, legal compliance, fraud prevention, chargeback processing, the customer support (which actually got fairly helpful in the last 2 years) etc.
If you genuinely think Valve and Gabe’s fleet of Yachts is not monopolistic squeezing/pricing
It’s not. Valve has not adjusted their pricing once, at least not upwards. They have reduced the pricing for extremely high-grossing games, but other than that, the price has stuck at 30%. How is that squeezing? Wouldn’t that make them INCREASE the percentage point instead of leaving it where it is?
Also, it’s funny that you talk about “monopolistic”, because epic has probably engaged in more monopolistic behavior with the EGS than steam ever has. And if we compare the features of the EGS (which didn’t even have a shopping cart for the first year of it’s existence) with the feature set of steam, I can absolutely see that a 30% cut is fine.
Now, could they lower it? Probably. But 30% is still worth it for any indie dev and significantly less than any other entity with the size and reach of steam would take for all their services.
Also, it’s funny that you talk about “monopolistic”, because epic has probably engaged in more monopolistic behavior with the EGS than steam ever has
This is stupid. Valve telling developers “you can’t sell your game cheaper on other platforms than on steam” is taking the cake away alone. Textbook anti-trust lawsuit (which might be already happening?)
You somehow keep ignoring the fact that valve makes more money than any other corporation per employee. They are clearly over-charging and you cannot argue against this. Stop defending megacorporations. Or just close your eyes and go gamble on valve games
This is stupid. Valve telling developers “you can’t sell your game cheaper on other platforms than on steam” is taking the cake away alone.
First of all, that’s not entirely true - valve is demanding price parity, meaning long-term undercutting steam is not allowed (something absolutely normal in almost any larger e-commerce scenario btw), but they have no problem if you have sales or value-added offers on other platforms. Now, you can think about price parity what you think, I’m not the biggest fan of it either, but it’s a very common practice, not exclusive to steam and has nothing to do with anti-trust.
You somehow keep ignoring the fact that valve makes more money than any other corporation per employee. They are clearly over-charging and you cannot argue against this
I ignored it because it’s a retarded metric. Yeah, guess what, if you automate a lot, you’re going to need less employees. I have no clue how that has any relevance in if a product is worth it or not. I’m pretty sure the v-servers I’m renting from hetzner involve nobody, it’s all automated, from purchase to setup - should I get it for free now? Would it be fine to have a 30% cut if valve employed like 1000 more people or what is the logic here?
Stop defending megacorporations.
I’m not defending megacorporations, I just don’t agree with you at all. Fundamentally, you are saying “making money bad” which is just a naive and highly uneducated argument to have.
You mean like those paid mods they were trying to introduce together with Bethesda?
Valve does not always win. Users are just more tolerant towards Valve than any other platform because of the cheap games they can buy during a sale. Nothing more.
It’s funny that they tried to get indie devs paid for their contributions to these games (and therefore incentivizing more great mods) and gamers were like FUCK THAT SHIT! Typical, honestly. So now there’s no legal way to charge for mods and you get to do it only for fun asking people for coffee tips.
Imo this was Bethesda more than valve, anyways, and while it would make both of them too much money doing that it would have gotten regular people paid, too. Which they deserve, by the way.
They introduced a feature, the community didn’t like it, and they canceled it a few days later because of that feedback. What exactly is the problem? Making a mistake and rectifying it within days is not a bad thing at all.
Users are just more tolerant towards Valve than any other platform because of the cheap games they can buy during a sale
If that was the case, people would be extremely tolerant towards the epic game store which regularly throws out games for free, but they aren’t.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Capitalism good when valve does it?
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.
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.
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.
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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.
Wrong topic but I feel the same about online age verification. All my friends and family and everyone I know say it’s good for the children and I’m here like wtf
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.
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.
So my experience accounts for nothing?
No, hence why I never said that.
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?
I’ve lost access to titles on steam.
But any argument against your opinion is “simping”.
Again not what I said. I’m saying that people ignoring all the negative shit valve has done and continues to do out of pure fanboyism, are simps.
What you are doing is a form of manipulation and gaslighting.
You are both hilariously overdramatic and just deranged.
Those things Valve was sued over were also industry standard practices.
Nope. And this is what I was talking about, you can’t even say “yeah that was a shitty thing valve did” you instead have to fervently defend every shitty practice anyway you can to protect your favourite multi billion dollar company.
Your argument is awash with emotional outbursts which tells the real story here.
Projecting in 4k. Or is yelling that I’m “”“gaslighting”“” you by saying Valve isn’t a good company just pure cold logic, lol.
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.
My guy. Are you honestly illiterate? Or are you so hopped up on fanboyism that it’s altering your basic perceptions of reality?
Either way I’m done wasting my time listening you do this.
If I wanted to spend my time interacting with people like you, wanting to argue over disrespecting your lord Gaben, I would have gone to Reddit.
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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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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.
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.
