Valve: Has reasonably priced games on sale frequently
Makes the Steam Deck
Actively supports Linux, both for VR and regular gaming
Has the best customer service out of any competitor
Has the best store experience out of any competitor
I mean…it’s not surprising that they’re a monopoly, but that doesn’t make them a bad one.
I fear for the day GabeN has to pass on the torch 😖
Which one of his 3 mega yachts do you think he’ll pop his clogs on?
Who makes the games? 🤔
Valve has made games. Damn good ones at that.
You know HALF-LIFE Counter Strike Portal Team Fortress 2
and are the makers of the source engine powering Titanfall 1, 2, Apex and a lot more
Oh yeah when did those come out and how much of Valve’s revenue do they account for lol?
If you count only Valve’s own games’ sales, those earned nowhere as much as the steam market trade of TF2 hats and CS skins
Exactly, Valve’s success has been defined by the extent to which they have financialized their few games, stretched their IP, and used that as a games publisher. It’s because they’re a rentier with no games of their own any more that they are a virtual economy monopoly…
Benevolent Dictatorship?
More of an elected monarchy really…
All hail king Gabe!
Not really. You can choose to go somewhere else at any time. Even the Steam Deck is open to installing a different OS that doesn’t even include the Steam store.
I like that their services are so good they don’t even need to make any restrictions to get you into using them. If I installed another OS on my steam deck, I would still install the Steam store…
Why isn’t their cut mentioned? This seems like the most important information.
The owner of the marketplace has the right to charge merchants who sell their goods in a safe place provided by the owner, especially when the market itself is delivering and garunteeing the product works.
So yeah, Valve takes more than other companies, but unlike say Epic Games valve is actually making sure the devs deliver a working product.
… Am I still on lemmy?
The whole thread is a corporate talk andAppleSteam fan mix. Your first paragraph…We’re discussing a monopoly, and all I am reading is how good a product they’re making.
Shouldn’t the discussion also be about their costs, margins?
Is the market difficult to enter by its nature? How much would the users and developers benefit from more competition?And I still dont know their cut.
Steam isn’t blocking anyone from competing as far as I’m aware. It’s just that most customers don’t to switch to a new platform because none of the competition is better than they are and we don’t want to have to juggle multiple launchers. If Steam started being assholes to the customers or developers stopped putting games on there we’d look at other options.
Supposing Steam is a monopoly what remedy do propose that wouldn’t make the user experience worse for their customers?
Be pedantic as you want, steam makes no bones about it being 30%.
And unlike other marketplaces, Steam doesn’t demand exclusivity. If anything they encourage publishers and developers to put their content on other storefronts or other alternatives that are available. Unlike, say Origin, Epic Games or what ever the hell Ubisoft was trying to.
Steam taking 30% may seem steep but they do a lot of support for developers in addition to the largest PC marketplace out there, complete with built in communities around new games where developers can directly interact with players of their game(s.) As long as the game works as advertised, Steam has historically done very little to penalize or inhibit developers on the market place. And nearly every case of it that has come to light has been admitted to be a mistake and rectify, such in the case of Hatred, or has been transparent about a third party stopping short of legal action, such as in the case of the Mastercard censorship scandal.
Compare that to Epic Games, who provides basically no support to developers, no community features or anyway to connect with other people who enjoy that specific game or those like it, and actively spies on users and is somewhat infamous for downloads servers to sporadically go down or corrupt a game require multiple attempts to ensure the product works. All while taking 12%
Steam isn’t perfect, they’ve screwed stuff up and missed a few bad actors in their midst before, but overall they are very pro-consumer and provide an open and fair platform where indie games can get showcased on the front page of the store as much if not more so than AAA games with million dollar advertising campaigns. Many of those indie games never would have seen the light of day without steam.
Steam is basically today what Netflix was in the late 00s/early 10s. A massive collection of content for people to enjoy that actively opposed the idea of exclusivity or preventing other. Where Epic is actively trying to push gaming to where Streaming is today by trying to bribe publishers and developers with better deals and kick backs if they agree to put their game on EGS exclusively for 6 to 18 months if not permanently.
In general, I’m not a fan of steam. I know i know, I’m saying this in THE steam community.
Steam is DRM, its terrible drm that can be bypassed with an easily downloaded crack tool, but drm nonetheless.
If a game I want is on GOG I will gladly get it there over buying it on steam.
the only reason i favor steam over gog is their stellar linux support
Not all Steam games use it as DRM. Many Steam games you can simply launch the executable without Steam installed and it will work.
Still, GOG is much better on that front.
But even games I buy on GOG, I often launch through Steam to take advantage of tools like Proton and Steam Input. Steam’s dominance stems from unwavering commitment to building a good user experience, and I’m not ashamed to reward that with my wallet vote.
I’ve been seeing a fair amount of discourse lately that Gabe Newell might be the only reason why Steam is a benevolent monopoly, and it’s why I only buy games on Steam when there’s no other option, when they’re not otherwise available on GOG and Itch.io.
Because Steam says for now that they’ll have a failsafe in place to make our games playable even if the company goes under. Steam doesn’t nickel and dime people, for now. Steam is doing important work for Linux, for now. Our profiles are fun and customizable like the internet used to be, for now. Steam’s DRM is so light it hardly exists, for now. But what’s going to happen to our huge libraries when Gabe retires or dies?
I hate that I even have to think this way, but I for one don’t want to have all my eggs in one basket, especially when the competitors’ policies are doing more to protect users right now.
Yeah.
I have enjoyed many happy years with steam and for now things are still okay, with Gabe keeping the enshittification at bay. They’ve done great things for the industry, and have my respect for that.
Yet we can’t simply trust the platform will remain as benevolent as it always has been.
If history tells us anything, it’s that nothing remains the same forever.
Remind people that a monopoly isn’t illegal. Abusing a monopoly to prevent competition and using a monopoly as a means to create unfair market conditions in other categories - Windows and web browsers in the past or Apple’s monopoly on iOS software distribution.
Consoles are even more restrictive than an iPhone is still in the US and was in the EU. Complain about Steam all these devs and people want, unless it can be proven that Valve is using their market share to stop other companies from competing well, it’s a moot point calling them a monopoly. That Wolfire lawsuit when I read the initial court filings they put out was a joke. It was citing Twitter posts and blogspam articles citing anonymous forum posts
Steam was not the first PC digital distribution store. It wasn’t even great until like 2006/2007. In the early days Impulse could have been competitive but Stardock sold it to GameStop who in dumb move of the last 2 decades did nothing with it. Desura did not improve. GFWL was terrible. Windows Store used to have issues with making storage unreclaimable without a reformat of the drive. Direct2Drive never improved. GamersGate just stayed a key seller. GoG was never going to grow without regular day one games which wasn’t going to be competitive as DRM free. Humble Store stayed a key seller.
Amazon and Epic’s idea was to just give away games. Ubisoft and EA stores barely even had games they didn’t publish. So sparse I bet they didn’t have self publishing tools. Those 2 puzzlingly regularly had issues maintaining login sessions persisting over time. PC gaming is dieing was the mainstream meme until like 2015. Epic on Android doesn’t even have a library of owned games view and it’s been almost a year since that released.
Valve didn’t make Amazon, Microsoft, Epic, EA, Ubisoft, Stardock+GameStop, Direct2Drive, … all under invest and/or mismanage their PC game store platform efforts. It’s not up to Valve to stop making the platform more appealing. EGS is 7 years old. Those other companies have been doing PC game stores for much longer. I remember buying and downloading PC games from Amazon before Prime gaming. It was just like Direct2Drive. Since 2004 Direct2Drive was always a storefront for any publishers game whereas Steam didn’t start listing 3rd party games until 2005.
If any service was comparable to like end of 2013 Steam, that would easily be second best store platform. Instead every store is at best like 2010 Steam with nicer animations, bigger buttons. And today there’s way more resources to make a competitor. More cloud service providers with mature onboarding tools. NPM install. A lot more open source databases. Kubernetes. Git. Etc. Should be able to do better than 7 year old Steam in 7 years from these companies that were far larger than 2002/2003 Valve when they got into PC game distribution. The big publishers were probably all wealthier than Valve up to like 2015
It’s not Sony and Nintendo’s fault that since the Kinect on the 360, Microsoft hasn’t been able to manage their studios to be competitive with Nintendo and Sony studios
Absofuckinglutely. Being a monopoly happens when your product is just that good. What you do when you are a monopoly, that’s a different matter. And Valve is doing OK so far, yeah, not perfect, but that’s how these things go.
Does this mean Steam is guaranteed to always be equally good? No.
Does this mean Steam is an evil monopoly right now? No. At the moment they are just a monopoly as people prefer them over the competition.
100% agree to everything. Steam is monopoly. But they implement policies for gamers in mind, not money. If anything, devs should praise Steam for decreasing gaming piracy. Things that Valve do for gamers is incomparable to whatever EA, Ubi, Epic do.
But they implement policies for gamers in mind, not money
- sucky currency conversion rates they refuse to update
- they take 30% cut
- they are banning games on behest of Mastercard and Visa
So, no. It’s enshittification.
they are banning games on behest of Mastercard and Visa
They literally have no choice, this was under threat of being essentially cut off any banking system. It’s fucked up, no questions about it, but it’s a societal problem that needs to be addressed legally, as any single company is powerless against that. Even Apple would not survive being banned by visa & MC
sucky currency conversion rates they refuse to update
This goes one way or another, some countries benefit from the unchanging conversions
they take 30% cut
I don’t know how expensive it is to run Steam, and they certainly could afford to lower their cut with how much infinite money they have, but with how much Steam offers to developers and the potential cost of bandwidth, it doesn’t really seem that bad?
they are banning games on behest of Mastercard and Visa
The alternative is to be cut-off from those payment processors and only take money through some other means
That’s the problem of the monopoly (or large dominant market share) - Steam doesn’t have to compete for us with anyone.
Well, since I use Linux, Steam is the only platform that cares about my money. The competition chose not to support my system.
Heroic Launcher works for GOG, Epic and Prime games.
Yes but that is a third party solution to those platforms refusing to support Linux. Good on the people developing Heroic, but Steam has native support.
People misunderstand the issue with monopolies. Monopolies, by themselvs, are non-issues. It’s what they do in their position of monopoly that can be illegal, through anti-competitive behavior. Steam does none of that BS
This. So much this. Monopolies are often evidence of an unhealthy/stagnating market, but they’re more symptom than cause. Trusts/cartels, price-fixing, and anticompetitive behavior are the actual abuses of market power, and are much more problematic.
I’m not going to claim that Valve is perfect (they’re not, e.g. see issues regarding DRM) and I’d love to have more choices about where I buy my games, but I can’t think of any instance of them abusing their position in the market to prevent new entrants or claim an unfair advantage. From what I’ve seen, they appear to be a very fair and honorable competitor in the space. However, if anyone is aware any examples to the contrary, I’d love to hear about it and update my opinions.
Yes, but by pushing back on monopolies in the first place, you ensure that there are other options if one turns sour. Steam is great for now in a lot of ways. That can change - and if it does, we only really have GOG to fall back on, and their platform isn’t nearly as mature as steam.
Steam is naturally the only platform gamers care about because they’re the only platform that acturally targers gamers, all other platforms target devs (except GOG who targets gamers that specifically want offline copies without DRM)
all other platforms target
devsshareholders
Steam has a monopoly: yes. Steam, like apple, takes a cut from all payments in the store, and micro transactions. Considering how Steam is a company, and could just be evil, and bad, like Google, it’s:
-Contributions and implementation of the opensource software Proton-Ge, which lets me just download a windows game and play it, off steam, and is also available, free & opensource on other platforms like Lutris. -Regular deals which make it the best place to buy games, if you choose to do so. -Steamdeck
Make it a (mostly) positive force, imho. However, a billion dollar company being able to do discounts below any small game distribution companies, is bad.
Plus, who knows what the next CEO after Gabe retires will have in mind?
FYI: Proton-GE is a fork of Proton. The Glorieus Eggroll (GE) version is not affiliated with Steam/Valve
In this one case, I’m okay with its monopoly as long as Gabe is in charge. I have bought tens of thousands of dollars in games on the platform and it’s crazy I can still hit download on games over 20 years old in my library AND have my save game data imported from that time.
So far, Valve has been fair to their users. Hell, they heard concerns over gambling and just took a sledgehammer to the CS2 skin market. I don’t think any other company would devalue their digital assets to a tune of -3 BILLION dollars. Valve is the GOAT.
10s of thousands? HELP
Being the most attractive platform doesn’t make them a monopoly. It does however irritate me anytime I have to use a different platform that often functions much worse, like EA or Blizzard.
Libraries should host a digital store front for the people’s games.
They don’t have a monopoly. They just have the best platform. It offers a lot of quality of life features along with the games and rarely causes issues. I can’t even recall them ever doing anything anticompetitive. There are other platforms available to purchase from if you don’t like steam. GoG for instance. Or Epic if you want to support assholes.
Boo fucking hoo. Market can try and compete instead of using shady ways to agitate players to join their subpar service.
Nobody hates on Steam being a monopoly. Devs should thank Valve that their policy decreases piracy drastically.
If all monopolies would be like Steam, we would have no arguments against monopolies.
Nobody hates on Steam being a monopoly
That’s the problem imho. Right now they are “benevolent monopoly” for most of it’s users, except:
- currency conversions (famously Poland has the highest game prices on Steam in the world because Steam does not want to update the currency rates).
- innovation (Steam does not innovate Steam, they r&d othe products)
- accessibility (no way to make fonts bigger) (Those are my issues with it, there’s definitely more)
We know since at least 70’s, that when a company hits 4% market share, it stops innovating and competing with other companies, because buying the competition out and increasing the market share is safer and higher return (every 5% increase was 10% increase in profit, because they have to compete less).
- innovation (Steam does not innovate Steam, they r&d othe products)
But do they not?
Proton is a clear innovation they’ve implemented into their store front.
They have new lab experiments every so often, currently there’s a release calendar.
Family sharing.
Game recording.For some of those you could argue it’s an already existing concept, but even so. The implementation is certainly novel. And they are certainly continuing to improve a store front unmatched in features by any other.
There was vr/gaming handhelds, but the Index and Steam deck made huge waves in the tech world…
Embracing Linux, opening up most of their UI to the people, allowing projects like Decky Loader, which has among other crowd sourced addon projects: CSS Loader which then has its own collection of crowd sourced addons, including two or three that could likely solve their font problem.
Those trading cards tied to achievements (ok, I have no idea what it’s for… but I like that it’s there, lol)
I can’t see how OP so strongly formed their opinion.
edit: grammer: comma conservation
Proton
I stand corrected
I find it fascinating that Lemmings suddenly turn off their critical thinking skills when it comes to Valve. We really need to study this.
What criticism of Valve do you have?
Aside from fostering and enabling a gambling addiction in millions of children?
Well they are being criticized for this in every relevant thread so I wonder if there’s something else for your critical thinking claim.
If only this was true.
Is it not?
100% this
But they’re my favorite treat seller 🙁
I love Steam, but I don’t like how their rules seems to biased against Japanese games.
There are plenty of JP games outright refused by Steam despite have zero have adult content, and perfectly fine on being released on GOG, (edit: and also Nintendo!) or other digital platform.
Especially with visual novels and games with psychology theme.
Idle speculation: maybe it has to do w/ the nightmare of their copy write/distribution laws. For instance Sony (yuck) has contracted Japanese VAs for dialogue in certain games(helldivers 2) but won’t allow anyone outside Japan to even purchase the option.
Those are entirely different thing.
It’s just classic case of Sony doesn’t want to pay additional license of Japanese voice for non-JP release.
Whenever Japanese VA is available, the option are presents on every single game release on Steam except of Western big budget AA or AAA-developed games.
That’s a nightmare minefield you’re insisting on as the meaning of art can be skewed. Does the Triumph of Will count as a film or a propaganda film? Does the Wolf Warrior series count as propaganda? Steam probably doesn’t want to be dragged into another legal issues like in Australia so that’s the choice they’ve made.
And it’s not like you cannot get it anywhere else. There are plenty of other places like GOG as you said or Dlsite or others I wouldn’t mention.
Oftentimes, niche genre only can survive on platform with huge reach.
Releasing it only on DLsite or GOG means either they have to drive up the price to even cover the development cost. This often happen on niche Nintendo games or big budget R18+ on DLsite.
Some big budget games on DLsite can reach around 70USD, while when it gets released on Steam it’s only 20-40USD.
I’m curious what the Japanese devs think might be the problem with Steam in this case. I know dlsite has been the main place for trying to sell their own indie stuff
I remember several conversation on Twitter from Japanese dev. They already consider Steam as monopoly, especially as Japanese PC game scene itself has already several competing store, from DMM, DLsite, Getchu, Melonbooks, Booth.pm, and so on.
