And then I see people complaining about Steam having so much of the market cornered. They π don't π pull π shit π like π this
this post was submitted on 05 Nov 2025
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The fact that they don't pull this shit is the reason they have the distribution market cornered.
We have to remember that gamers are not Valve's primary customers. Game devs are. The market you're referring to is the market of distributors available to game devs -- NOT the market of storefronts available to gamers. In the PC space, the market of distributors is cornered by Valve and it allows them to take a big chunk of each sale from the game devs.
Don't get me wrong, I love Steam and I think Valve has done some great things for gaming on PC and for gamers in general. That doesn't change the fact that they are another cost a game dev must pay in order for them to create their goods, in an economic sense. Valve's got the shelf space and devs don't have much choice but to rent it out.
I think you are forgetting the other reason Valve cornered the market;
βOne thing that we have learned is that piracy is not a pricing issue. Itβs a service issueβ¦ The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. Itβs by giving those people a service thatβs better than what theyβre receiving from the pirates.β
Gabe Newell, CEO Valve - Speaking at the Washington Technology Industry Association's (WTIA) Tech NW Conference.
Yeah, no I definitely agree they're good to gamers. I also love how they have a flat structure, and I think Gabe seems like a smart guy. He's given some interesting talks about economics. They've made a great platform for gamers, but it doesn't quite change that their business model is based on taking a cut of the profit of work done by others. In most other scenarios, it's easy for us to recognize when companies do this -- amazon, Walmart, etc, but in Valves case they have such a great reputation among gamers and a fanbase of their own, I think the escape a good amount of warranted scrutiny (game dev side, not gamer side)
"Is based on taking a cut of the product of work done by others."
That seems like a fair trade off for game developers in turn getting to use the platform who's work was done by.... Valve.
I understand why people make this argument but it's really undercutting the value that Valve provides developers who utilize steam for distribution.
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Valveβs fee is more than earned however. Steam as a storefront is highly trusted by users, it has a rock solid reputation that is hard to come by. As a distributor they take a one time fee for each copy sold, then they manage all of the costs from users downloading and downloading again for as long as the platform exists from that one time fee. Meanwhile if a developer were to do that themselves then they pay each time a user wants to download that game.
Sure the developers lose a bit more money than if they sold on another platform. But the higher up front cost to access the larger platform is a very worthwhile trade as can be seen by developers continually coming back.
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When steam came out with the orange box and set it up so that if you already had some of the games in the box, you could gift the other copies to people, I knew they were going to win the war.
I hope gaben lives forever, because I'm terrified of how instantly it will turn to shit when he's not in charge anymore.
π yet
What do you think will happen when Gaben our Lord dies?
You think their successor will be as merciful and follow Gabens vision? Or be blinded by the huge amount of money Steam makes?
Both. Steam is already the market leader in its industry. You just keep doing what you're doing and you win.
When ~~Miamoto~~ Iwata died, Nintendo just had to stay the course. They were never dominant, but they were ubiquitous and everyone enjoyed their products. Now the new guys donβt even play games, and the switch 2 price point is ridiculous, and they never fixed the issue with the joy con sticks, and prices never drop like they used to. You canβt count on new leadership being capable of continuing success, even when all they have to do is keep things on the exact same course.
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Microsoft were already the dominant operating system in computing. Now they're losing market share due to frequent bad decision making.
All they had to do was keep windows ticking over. But instead they looked to milk more revenue from their customer base in the form of advertising and telemetry data. That's because shareholders demand ever increasing profits. Enshittification is always the result of a company going public... Never a question of if, only when; as soon as the passion has died in ownership (usually due to sale or change of management), the only drive becomes profit; and the user experience is stripped to accommodate. The same will be true one day for steam, unfortunately.
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This right here. So much space and energy being used to bitch about Steam that could be used for, oh, I dunno... Sony. Microsoft. Nintendo. Giant players that have held tacit monopolies for years and literally engage in anticompetitive behavior on a regular basis.
If I had room for one more conspiracy theory, I could point to a handful of companies that probably would not be above paying people to bitch about Steam...
(points up ^^^)
I bitch about steam because it has issues. I don't bitch about the others because they have issues severe enough I just don't use them whereas steam is running anytime my laptop is running
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Steam doesn't really have a market cornered? They aren't stopping you from buying from elsewhere. They even let you add non-steam games to your library.
Playstation would as there are no other way of installing software without modding
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What do you call the business strategy where you just aren't a huge assholes to your customers to milk maximum profit and your competition keeps shooting itself in the foot?
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How the fuck is this even legal?
I mean, if they generally advertise a specific price or discount, then bait and switch on you, it isn't. But they can always give different discounts to people on whatever conditions they want. Like stores giving employee discounts, senior discounts, military discounts, student discounts, repeat customer discounts, partnership discounts, new customer discounts, etc. You can even get a discount on an individual basis by haggling. None of that is illegal, or really even deceptive in itself. The slimy part here isn't the different pricing as a promo to entice a new customer, or even that two people in the same household would be treated differently (military husband, civilian wife; senior parent, non-senior caregiving child, etc.), but in the lack of transparency/the deception as to why they are priced different or even that they are given a different price unless both go to look specifically.
Now that you put it like that, yeah, it really is completely normal to have "discriminatory" discounts (as a student I personally regularly make use of them), and for a moment I even wondered why it would bother me at all, why I even thought it is problematic - but as you say it's the fact that it's covert is what's problematic.
I would say itβs not even that itβs βcovertβ but that itβs at least seemingly arbitrary.
All those other ones itβs clear what condition you may fulfill to get the discount or understand why you didnβt. This one is just a vague βthe algorithm said so.β
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I wouldn't buy rockstar products anyways, they are terrible and intentionally break Linux support.
Microsoft is societal cancer.
This is Playstation...
My age is showing, every plastic box used to be a Nintendo now it's an Xbox.
Of course, everything's an Xbox!
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He was just stating a fact π
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Have your wife buy it and gift it to you.
But yes, this sort of price discrimination is weird and deadly for any sort of free market.
I know Pokemon Go did something like this as market research. They wanted to see what price would people buy at (in the coins you can earn without money, or buy with money).
Still yucky, so yucky. I would contact them with the screenshot and tell them you will buy it for the lower price on your account.
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The future we are headed towards if we don't start caring about privacy and where we hand out our data.
Obviously Playstation has their own data, but stuff like this is gonna start being way more obvious in other places because they can so easily buy data on you through data brokers.
Websites you visit saying they share your data? Yes they sell it and it's directly going to have an effect on other parts of your life just like this.
So you won't just "pay with your data", you'll pay with your money too in a less direct way (prices on other sites shooting up because x website sold your data to y and they know you need this product so they price gouge you).
Not only will this occur for gaming stores or web shops, it can become a thing in banking (maybe they give you a worse interest rate on a loan, etc) and worse.
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I'm the sort of person that likes proof before I decide to be angry about corporate gouging. So the first thing I did was to look for other sources that discuss this. Vice is reporting on this screenshot and the OG reddit post, there have been no comments from Sony. Insider Gaming is also reporting on this screenshot and OG reddit thread, in addition to discussing an earlier instance where someone reported going onto their browser to look up Astro Bot on the PlayStation Store while being signed out. It was $59.99. when signed in, it appeared as $44.99. Sony likes to call this bullshit dynamic pricing. This means that as you play, Sony is harvesting data about what games you play, how long you play the games in question, along with data in your library which gets fed into an algorithm to determine what price you should pay. This garbage is fucking reprehensible. This is the type of stuff that made me drop consoles and turn to the loving embrace of PC gaming. If I saw shit like this via my digital distributor, I would absolutely stop using them and look for other ways to legally purchase the game, or turn to piracy.
Been sailing recently?
I'm not a huge fan of pirating games, but shit like this gets me there real quick.
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This is something travel agent websites do too.
If you're logged out, they'll show you a price that's really attractive. But if you log in with an account that's got some history, they'll suddenly say that price is no longer available now you need to pay the higher price.
Agoda.com I'm looking at you
Wow, this is pretty dystopian, but I guess it's just the natural extension of supply and demand applied to the individual. Free market at its finest... The next step is to use your demographic data in calculating the price, like insurance companies already do.
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What is the difference in price based on? Are they offering an extra discount due to lack of activity? Just random A/B testing? Demographics?
I remember hearing some time ago that mobile games give you progressively cheap "special deals" to make you buy anything from them, as that makes future purchases way more probable
I imagine it's similar here - "Oh, you didn't buy any games recently? But what if they went on sale?"
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