this post was submitted on 26 Sep 2024
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Man, I don't like the Steam monopoly on principle, but I have to admit I do struggle to pay attention to Epic exclusives. It's simply the launcher I open the least after GOG and Steam. I've though "hey, wasn't that Ubi Star Wars thing out" like two or three times and forgot about it between remembering that's an Epic thing and deciding whether I wanted to buy it.
But hey, since we're going multiplat again, I could use some newer Ubi games on GOG, too.
Valve is just one shite CEO away from going from PC's blessing to its curse.
GabeN will name twelve disciples who will spread His word and continue His work.
They'll strap him to a chair and sacrifice 1000 2fort snipers a day to keep him alive.
If you think about the fact that he's taking enough profit from every sales to pay his employees more than the industry average and to be a multi billionaire while his clients can barely afford a house or can't afford one at all then the current CEO is already shit...
Fuck all billionaires.
Wow that's deep!
Title of your sex movie.
It’s a good monopoly, for now and hopefully for a long time.
The fact that Valve went out of their way to make gaming better in Linux, says a lot imho.
I like Valve, but I will point out what's been said before - Valve has a stake in making Linux gaming better, since it enables the Steam Deck to exist and prosper. They could've chosen other options that don't help the community, but they didn't choose this entirely selflessly, since they reap the benefits from not just their own work, but also that of the open source developers.
I don’t doubt that, but Steam was available for Linux, a long time before the Steam Deck and even SteamOS, as far as I remember.
I hope you've read the news that two Volvo devs are speeding up the Wayland development. :)
The only good monopoly is one where the profits goes back to the population or the customers.
It’s a private company, so you could argue that the profits go towards the employees and the customers in the form of improvements. Not shareholders.
One employee is a multi billionaire, so no, it's not a cooperative where the profit is split fairly between employees or redistributed to the customers/members.
You mean the owner?
Well, that and the several billion dollars in Gaben's bank account.
Private companies are still corporations, guys.
It says (pretty explicitly, if you go back and read interviews), that Gabe Newell really doesn't like Microsoft in general, that the feeling is mutual and that the fact that his multibillion dollar empire is stuck as a Windows application MS may try to muscle out at any point has motivated him to bring PC gaming out of Windows from very early on.
Granted, MS has been sucking at attempting exactly that for a long time, but that's the ultimate motivation here. That's not a particularly disputed fact.
It's tough for any public companies to compete because they keep setting off their own footguns, ensuring they don't succeed in the space. As long as Gabe is around I'm okay with this one (1) monopoly, as a treat.
The weirdest thing is that steam doesn't have a natural or self reinforcing monopoly. It wouldn't take much for another company to copy their business model, and provide a competitor. In practice, however, they all fall flat on their faces.
Steam's model is to give up short term gain for a smaller long term gain. Over time, this has snowballed into what we see now. Gabe is happy to get ever richer from his golden goose laying away. The competitors get started, then try and gut the goose for a quick buck.
It kind of does.
You get user lock-in as users buy more games, making it so Steam is always a store to buy from. You can't deplatform from Steam. At that point, you can't replace Steam with another DRM platform to pay existing games. That creates a large customer base which becomes a must add for vending new games.
It isn't a hard monopoly, but it helps create a soft monopoly.
I'm on the same page as you, it's tough. I have no idea how any other platform can really achieve competitor status with steam, and this is a big problem for us consumers and for developers.
All Epic had to do was build a good store front with similar features as Steam provides. They didn’t. Their store sucked from the beginning and it also blows now. Relying purely on exclusives and freebies was a losing game - they needed to back it up by making the service worthwhile beyond that, and they utterly failed to do so.
Aside from all the (other) obvious options replicating Steam, theres always the tried and true option of offering lower prices. To my knowledge, no one has been willing to try that yet.
Lower prices was a promise by Epic. We take a smaller cut from the devs so the savings can be passed down to the customers.
Didnt happen, buying on Epic is just getting a worse experience and giving the devs more money for it.
Lower distribution costs (in exchange for less marketing and a worse product) are not lower prices though. If Epic had spent half the time and money they spent negotiating for exclusives on negotiating for lower prices, Im sure they easily could have. For example, Epic advertises a 12% fee on sales, but if they instead took 10% (maybe spent less on exclusives to account for this) and then required prices be 5% lower than MSRP on other stores, then suddenly its a lot more appealing to customers - the ones actually providing the money - while still offering a much better deal than Steam. Similarly, Epic could have just passed on the saving more directly, like I said, with a rewards program or similar. Epic had plenty of ways to actually lower prices for their customer rather than just their buisiness partners. They just chose not to.
Frankly, Epic is pretty irrelevant to this point considering how significantly they chose to burn the bridges with their customers right from the get-go anyway. Unless you're studying how to lose consumer trust or goodwill, they're not really a good reference.
That's something that Steam doesn't allow, which means the only way to have lower prices is for Epic to pay for an exclusivity deal. Because who's going to move to Epic if the only way is to lose out on Steam?
From my understanding, thats only for selling Steam Keys. As long as you're not using Steam's infrastructure, you're fine. You often can find better prices off Steam as it is, on platforns like Epic, GOG or esspecially Itch.io.
That's on publishers though, if Epic gets a smaller cut and the price is the same, the money is going somewhere.
I think part of the Steam contract for publishers is that they can't sell their games cheaper elsewhere. So anyone wanting to compete with Steam on price needs to sell games that are in demand but not already on Steam. And Epic is really the only company with the pull to get that to happen, but the only way for them to do it is to get exclusivity, which gamers hate.
From my understanding, thats only for selling Steam Keys. As long as you're not using Steam's infrastructure, you're fine. You often can find better prices off Steam as it is, on platforns like Epic, GOG or esspecially Itch.io.
I thought it was the opposite, that they can't sell lower on other marketplaces, but they can do what they want with their keys.
Information is limitted as the contracts used for developers aren't shared, but the general understanding is that this only applies to Steam keys.
The one exception is the wolfire games lawsuit, which includes one alleged instance of Valve asking a developer not to distribute the game for free on their Discord when it is a paid product on Steam. Given the lack of detail, the single anecdote for evidence, the existence of other games where they are priced lower or free off Steam (I.E. Dwarf Fortress), its certainly not a widespread problem, almost certainly not in contract, if it did happen exactly as the anecdote suggests, may have been a misstep on the part of one employee, and may not have happened at all.
Of course, if Valve does do this, nonetheless mandated it, its an issue, but given that no one else has challenged them on what would be such a blatent anti-trust case, esspecially given how everyone else in the industry has been trying to take Valve's place for years, I think its unlikely.
I was gonna comment about epic giving games away for free, but I think I got your point. You mean like the same releases, but subsidizing, say, 10% of the price?
Yep, although there are a ton of other ways to do it as well such as a good rewards points system, or a raffle system with bonus games won when purchasing, or similar. As long as you don't spend years antagonising your customers first, I don't expect game stores would struggle to compete offering better prices than Steam, even at the cost of features.
Yeah, if it isn't it will be. If you extrapolate their current moves to a world where PC gaming is entirely controlled by them, maybe even from the OS level downwards, and there is also a set of console-like standalone platforms on handheld, set-top and VR segments.... well, that's a level of control over a massive media industry that I don't think anybody has had before. Especially not a private company whose ownership is two cheeseburgers and/or an unfortunate knife sharpening accident away from changing overnight.
As long as they stick with Linux as their target platform for the future, then I think the hardware side of this is safe. The problem is if their storefront goes to shit. People have pretty much their entire hobby reliant on one company on a platform that's supposedly meant to have open competition as a benefit.