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Not OC, duh.
It's still a monopoly though. The misconception is that calling Valve a monopoly, is somehow an attack on Valve or blames Valve. It's just a description of Valve's position in the market.
Also, shame on whoever thinks Valve won't ever abuse this position at some point in the future.
Funny meme tho, just being pedantic
People call Valve a monopoly, and they are right but... is it a monopoly because they wanted to become one? Or because the competitors are completely clueless about what do the customers want? Can we blame Valve on becoming a monopoly when they simply are listening to the customers while the competitors (like Epic) keep ignoring users demands?
EA, Ubisoft, Microslop... they all tried to make their own launchers to move away from Steam and they all failed. Why? Because they wanted to make those launchers their way, while actively telling the users to shut up about their demands on what would make the launchers great.
Epic... Epic keeps throwing fortnite money to EGS launcher but keeps ignoring the most basic user demands.
Like, dude? I'm telling you that, for buying your product, it must have A, B and C. But, instead of offering me that, you make a product that lacks specifically A, B and C. And you expect me to buy it?
It is a monopoly, but because nobody else is even trying. And that pisses me off.
I agree that Valve has, in some instances, succeeded primarily because they're not aggressively anti-consumer in a market of aggressively anti-consumer alternatives. However, they are not innocent by any means.
Last I checked, they are still automated when it comes to the majority of their "customer services". Getting an actual human to consider things is expensive and they don't want to spend money on that.
(Edit: Their solution to cleaning up their storefront is algorithms and crowd sourcing. The don't manually do much of anything to filter the selection - it's more algorithms, policies, and crowd sourcing reviews, tags, reports, etc. This prevents them from looking like they are actively controlling the storefront and is waaaay cheaper. They would much rather let influencers publish recommended lists for free than pay someone to find and remove asset flip garbage games. Systems like this are what gets you results like the opaque decision to ban Horses and financially devastate an indie studio without telling them why. It's what gets you massive review bombs from China cratering reviews for great games because Valve isn't willing to spend time working out an alternative method for Chinese gamers to communicate with game developers about games sold on their storefront - because typical feedback methods like discord are banned in China. Valve's solution is to just default to filtering out reviews made in languages other than your own, entirely.)
They are very conscious of the numbers behind their success and the money that their platform and marketplace rakes in. They have worked with literal economists when it comes to their marketplace. Yet they turn a blind eye to concerns like skin gambling with children.
They do sometimes behave like bullies when negotiating with those who want to sell their games on Steam. The proportion of money paid out to devs/publishers is a factor of success and benefit to valve rather than anything else - if your game makes a lot of money (for Valve), you get a discount on the percentage taken. Some of that bullying behavior is also anticompetitive - as has been brought up in lawsuits. Their policies use "most favored nation" clauses.
Finally, they may not be anti-consumer but they haven't exactly been spending a lot of effort on improving the functionality of services that their platform has. The clearest example would be issues with their friends-related services like voice chat that have plagued the platform for a long time, though some have recently been improved. They know they are dominant and don't spend money when they don't need to in order to keep customers.
All said and done, I use them as my default though I've made efforts to be more dev and indie dev conscious. Unfortunately, greed fuels most of the world and makes it hard to do anything that favors anyone besides those with power.
It’s still a monopoly though.
No, it is not. You and the other commentators need to stop repeating that propaganda lie by the true monopolists of PC gaming (Epic, Microsoft,…).
All of Steam combined makes up a fifth of the PC gaming revenue. A fifth! That's a very good percentage but a fifth of anything is not a monopoly and that's not even including mobile and consoles where Valve isn't even competing at the moment.
Fortnite, Rocket League, Valorant, League of Legends, Minecraft, still World of Warcraft, Roblox,… are where all that PC gaming revenue is concentrated but a few mid-tier games sell best on Steam (because the same priced copy on EGS offers worse value) and suddenly everybody keeps repeating the lie of the true monopolists that the company that isn't classified in the EU as a gatekeeper under the Digital Markets Act is a monopoly (but Microsoft is).
The meme I hate is "Valve wins by doing nothing". You cannot be any further from the truth. Valve has won so far by doing many things right, they keep doing many things right. It's like IT or maintenance work, or being God, your work is invisible until everyone dies.
The term monopoly does not apply here. Not only do we lack any evidence of anti-competitive practices, there literally are competitors, they just suck and they are very unpopular.
I mean, yes.
Steam is a scary monopoly, getting scarier.
It's not their fault the industry (minus GOG) comitted mass seppuku.
Both can be true. One can worry about Valve, and use them hesitantly, while laughing at everything else like it's a cartoon.
itch.io seems rather unproblematic
The payment processor thing was a mess, and they really went through and mass delisted a ton of things that did not meet the criteria, including a lot of SFW stuff.
The fact that they complied so readily, and overreacted so much, makes them pretty sus to me.
They used to be right below GOG for me, and I suppose they still are, but I trust them about as much as I trust Valve to not randomly delist things because some Karen in Australia whined.
Lol gog with the propeller hat in the corner
No shit. It kills me when people play on console. I mean I get the simplicity and all, but they try to use the "it's cheaper" angle and yeah, bullshit. It's initially cheaper, then you're paying what $20 a month to just play online, then games are $10 off at most on their respective stores and then you get to rebuy them when a new console comes out.
Steam games are like 50%-90% off constantly, and Epic has free games like every week. I've had games for over 15 years through steam. So yeah I paid $1,000 for my PC but after 3 years console owners have spent $1,500+ after monthly fees and buying games.
It doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me to ask "are other companies bad?" when trying to determine if a company is a monopoly. One thought experiment I like to do is pretend the CEO dies and is replaced by Satan. How much damage could he do? If it's a lot, then probably you've got a monopoly.
Suppose Gaben dies, and he's replaced by Satan. Could he do damage to the gaming community by doing something exorbitant, like charging a 30% cut of game sales from the folks who actually develop the games? Could they do anticompetitive vendor lock stuff like only allowing you to purchase DLC through steam? Only time will tell. And it will, because at some point Gaben will die, and he will be replaced by someone less magnanimous and angelic than him.
They do have competitors, they competitors just aren’t very popular. There is the colloquial definition of monopoly, and a different legal bar for being declared a monopolist under US law.
To be declared a monopolist requires that a company already has destroyed or is actively seeking to destroy competitors through anti competitive behavior. Even if people mix terms, the general idea is that they’re not doing anything unreasonable and anti-competitive to gain their position in the market. They have competitors, they’re just not popular, and steam has not done anything to make them unpopular.
The real danger is that if steam decided to suddenly start being externally anti consumer, like many of it’s competitors already are, it would be difficult for people to migrate away due to a lack of interoperability between services. Users can’t transfer licenses to play games between services, nor can they easily interact with social features on other platforms. But that’s not really steam’s fault, that’s how all the competitors (for the most part) work as well.
I get that we shouldn't be happy about any type of Monopoly but Steam occupies the PC gaming space similar to how Linux dominates the server space.
You can't really complain that almost every server running Linux is a bad thing. Granted Steam is not open source, but you have to imagine how little effort it takes to not make a shitty marketplace/platform as a competitor.
The fact that such a low bar cannot be surpassed by multi billion dollar companies is all you really need to know, especially when GOG successfully exists.
ow Linux dominates the server space.
Linux is free. Free cannot be monopoly. Bad comparison here.
Steam is a closed source market place blob that takes 30% middle man tax. Valve however has understood FOSS, and the contributions they are making are immense.
When a true FOSS project is dominating this means the people are in control of it. Not corpos nor is it a monopoly. People have voted by donating work for it to be the most successful thing in its applicable area. Dominating FOSS projects also suck up and integrate a lot of innovation greatly reducing duplicated effort.
FreeBSD is alive and well, and it even benefits from Linux's DRM GPU drivers.
Although the drm gpu drivers are mostly of a corporate effort, we are seeing an occasional interventions by the people "no, not like that" to keep the sometimes shoddy quality up.
/
Both Sony and Nintendo have been consistently posting record revenue numbers in the past few years. Neither are that far off Valve.
Regardless, this whole Steam circlejerk reminds me of the early days of Android, when people still believed that Google wasn’t “evil”. Let’s hope I’m in the wrong here.
Google isn't privately owned. It's hard to be on the stock market and not be evil. I think Costco is the only one that has managed it for any appreciable length and that is under threat of death from one of the co-founders.
In fairness Google was just becoming evil at that point. It was a fantastic company when the founders ran it.
Once steam goes to shit we will all sail the seven seas but multiplayer will suffer
GOG just sitting in the corner waiting for people to notice them.
GOG just sitting in the corner waiting for people to notice them.
And they can keep sitting there while they're not actively supporting Linux, despite all that Cyberpunk/Witcher money (and according to their statements the funding got even better after their sale). To play their games on Linux, I have to go through all the steps to get Heroic and its terrible GUI, go through its WINE settings,…
Meanwhile 90% of the Steam games: Hit "Play" and it just works.
Me playing steam games on an arm handheld right now cause you can just install an arm build of the steamos frontend on any arm linux device and with a little tweaking my games just work. Its actually amazing, modded terraria, trackmania, schedule 1, etc just work.
an arm handheld
Yes, that's usually what the hand is at the end of.
Did you see the leg football match last night?
Competition actually exists, GOG, Epic, itch.io. More used to exist but they were shitty, inferior products and died out because of that. Steam grew up to being the standard it is now and we come to expect it. It'd take same or better to unseat them.
It's not being a monopoly that is illegal — if it were then all of "big tech" would be screwed. It's using a monopoly toward anti-competitive ends and enshittifying everything that is illegal...which is funny, because even that really doesn't seem to be illegal when you look around these days.
The law only matters if it's actually enforced.
Fun fact for those of you who stream from a gaming pc to laptop/steamdeck/whatever: you can add 3rd party games (like those off GOG) to steam and stream them without buying them on steam.
There's also Sunshine/Moonlight and you don't have to buy your games at all.
None of the competitors have great linux support and great gamepad support. I have no love for steam, for me it just happens to be the best platform from a technical point of view.