- cross-posted to:
- games@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- games@lemmy.world
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Remember when steam introduced the 2h refund policy out of their own volition rather than being forced by multiple governments? Yeah me neither.
Should be NSFW tagged if not trigger warning-ed
you have eyes, just shut them and move along.
my suggestion: takes one second, literally ticking a box or typing ‘TW: Suicide’
Your suggetion: anyone who gets triggered by cartoons of people blowing their brains out should develop psychic foresight and tune into it whenever scrolling through lemmy, then close their eyes when the post in question shows up. estimated training time: 1000 years (nobody has developed such active premonition abilities yet)
look, I’m not saying you’re not entitled to a safe space. you probably have some trauma you’re still hung up on.
that clarified, the internet at large is not a safe space for anyone. it’s not personal. we’re just not responsible for your personal journey through therapy.
just like in real life, you’re going to see shit that will trigger you. hell, every time I see fresh pork I remember all the people I saw blown to pieces along roads and fields. I saw someone get mangled in a thresher even.
again, not our responsibility to ensure that you aren’t triggered. only you have control over what triggers you, take some personal responsibility and deal with your trauma.
One of the most accurate descriptions of this entire beef.
Steam does nothing and just keeps winning.
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.
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.
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.
Steam:
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.
Fundamentally, you are saying “making money bad” which is just a naive and highly uneducated argument to have.
Yup, you missed my point, but I really don’t think I’m capable of better explaining how what is valve doing is possible only because they essentially have PC monopoly.
Valve is winning because they don’t enshittify
Valve is winning because the average gamer doesn’t care much about owning his videogames.
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.
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.
it doesn’t just do nothing,
Valve is a for profit company, one of their main goals is to make money and they work daily to do that. There are people at Valve who work 8h a day on how to boost profits.
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)
I think you are confusing lootboxes with the items market which was there mainly to compensate the free to play model. If you were there i hope you remember too no DRMs and no third party software launchers to run games.
This is why they have steam OS
They have steam OS because microsoft become one of their competitors
“They have steam OS because microsoft become one of their competitors” Lmfao riiigght like Microsoft just got into the video game selling business, jfc.
Valve makes steamOS because windows fucking sucks and there needs to be an alternative OS for running game without a bunch of garbage like Windows or a completely locked down OS like Macs that they could use on their hardware.
running game without a bunch of garbage
Steam is part of the garbage, you don’t really need a third party launcher to run a software.
Microsoft just got into the video game selling business
In the past years microsoft made big and aggressive acquisitions in the videogames industry like bethesda and blizzard. The new xbox portable which is a direct competitor to the steam deck doesn’t have cd anymore, the only way to get games is through microsoft store.
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.
The William Shatner song?
I… what?
There’s a song “common people” performed by a band called “pulp” you philistine, the song is about a real person
I’m familiar, I don’t see how a song about a rich girl wanting to bang “common people” has something to do with a leftwing economist.
I was kidding with philistine bit. I think it’s the girl in the song is just ridiculously out of touch, and the relevancy is probably “birds of a feather” or something
Varoufakis’ wife is Danae Stratou, and as the wikipage points out, it’s speculated she is the focus of the song Common People. Crazy world we live in.
We don’t have Steam Greenlight anymore, but otherwise 100% agree.
In a service business, if you do things right, people think you’re doing nothing.
God?
glad i’m not the only one who caught that
It’s probably my favorite depiction of god in any media. Obviously if you think about it the whole premise falls apart and he’s a huge dick but in the context of the episode it’s pretty cool beans
haha yeah, he/it was kind of a dick
Bender: You know, I was God once.
God: Yes, I saw. You were doing well until everyone died.
That assumes God exists to serve us.
This also applies to IT support.
“everything works fine, why do we pay you people?”
“everything is broken, why do we pay you people!”
Deadlock would like a word with you.
oh, what was the release date for deadlock?
Yes, valve do make some games, for special occasions. They just aren’t making genre defining single player games like some of us want them to… except for HL:A , but who has the money to get that VR setup and spare room to put it in?
To be fair to them, valve have released or kept updating several games recently, CS2 , DOTA2, HL:A, Artifact, and as you mentioned, Deadlock.
It’s just that the stereotypical person that liked Half Life 1, the game, aren’t being targeted as much by valve, and it’s because they want to save that kind of work for pushing new things they develop, which for now, is more hardware or games as a service oriented.
TIL a greek minister of finance is responsible for TF2 hats. Fucking wild.
I might be misremembering the timeline but I think he was brought on board after the market was created because Valve started to see the same economic patterns (and issues) Varoufakis had talked about. He was brought in to make sure the skin economy would have a solid foundation. So he isn’t really responsible for TF2 hats. CS skins however he could be considered responsible.
Oh, right. Well, I’m editing his Wikipedia page in that case.
I knew I know the name from somewhere, so I checked on my Kobo. He also wrote Technofeudalism
I mean, this meme is not wrong. Valve is a de facto monopoly because everyone else is shit, and user hostile. But, a monopoly is still a monopoly, and we shouldn’t be glazing a billion dollar company, in any circumstances. And it’s not like Valve has never done anything wrong.
It’s ok to like Valve, I like Valve. But we need to hold them to account, and call them out when they do something wrong. And if you really think Valve did nothing wrong in this case, why not let them prove it in court? They have a lot of money, they can afford some lawyers.
Sometimes a monopoly can have so much money that it actually does some very significant amount of innovation. Look at Ma Bell.
The problem is to not let them get so big though. Then you’ve got to break it up and that gets hairy. Look at Ma Bell.
And then they might try to get back together. Look at Ma Bell.
And at the end of it, we might just end up with a duopoly of shit. Look at Ma Bell and Xfinity.
I agree. But I’m also keeping in mind that this is the situation capitalists claim to want: competition for everyone to continually improve. They just missed the part where they were supposed to improve and not make things worse. Aside from that, with all the major sites people think of like EA and Epic, it makes things even more difficult to topple that monopoly. Everyone wants to have their games in a convenient place. Having competition is incompatible with what players would want, because they’d need eight different launchers for games. I’m fully content with cycling itch and steam when I want what one or the other offers. For what I imagine is most people, it’s easier to use just one list/site that already has everything.
Well, everything in one place doesn’t really require a monopoly. The key is interoperability. It would be having a single launcher that can download games from any store. This way the customer can have choice over where to buy games and what launcher to use. It’d something similar to the heroic launcher.
Absolutely. But I doubt companies would agree to even try that. They’d rather compete for the spot of “the launcher everyone goes to” (and fail).
well, government regulations. one can dream…
Valve is a de facto monopoly
Is it, though? I can buy games on gog, on itch.io, on epic (but that would require me to use epic, lol), or maybe on humble bundle (took a quick look, mentioned steam keys, not sure).
I thought that “monopoly” meant that a company has exclusive control in their market which clearly doesn’t apply here.
Either way, it’ll be interesting (and maybe infuriating) to see how the court arguments pan out.
Steam has effective monopoly.
If a game is not released on Steam, it might as well not exist. There are only a handful of exceptions.
And games that do get death threats from Steam fans. Because how dare those developers not release on “the only worthy platform”? Remember the Epic games?
Monopolies are more than just “competition does not exist”.
If a game is not released on Steam, it might as well not exist. There are only a handful of exceptions.
These “handful of exceptions” are the vast majority of the entire PC gaming revenue, though. In 2022/2023 the overall revenue was 45 Billion Dollars, of which Steam made up 8.6 Billion.
30% of 45 Billion is 13.5 Billion.
Of which Valve made 8.6 Billion.
Which means only 4.9 Billion was made by every other PC platform combined. Including the standalone games like Fortnite and Minecraft.
Thank you for proving my point.
I don’t know what you mean with that 30% but 8.6 out of 45 is a sizable fraction but not one that constitutes an monopoly.
I mean we say Google has a monopoly on search, but there are bing, duckduckgo, kagi, etc. You are thinking absolute monopoly.
I don’t even think Google has a search Monopoly. They might have a maps Monopoly. But even Apple competes with them pretty heavily on that. (Before I’m personally given my own goddamn cross to hang from, I hate google)
Google has a search monopoly, that is not in question.
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/department-justice-wins-significant-remedies-against-google
The only thing is, had the case been decided under any other DoJ, Google would not have gotten off as lightly as they did. But even Pam-fucking-Dow-over-50,000-Bondi agreed that Google was a monopoly.
Good comparison. I use DDG for my own search and only rarely switch to Google if I’m not finding something.
At the same time, “You can’t avoid dealing with Google if you want to run a public-facing website” rings true.
I’m less sure about applying the same sentiment to Valve. Can you realistically make a living as an indy game dev on itch.io or gog.com? I’m not sure. Food for thought.
Most devs who shared their thoughts online say that not being able to sell on Steam means a death sentence for their game. There was a case recently about a game who Steam banned from selling and without the media coverage they would’ve never made it, because itch.io sales represent a very small portion.
The game is Horses and they got huge ad campaign out of it. Thing is, game is mid and wouldn’t sell a thousand copies without the shitstorm they’ve built up.
Look. Minecraft originally was not sold on any platforms except directly by mojang and is probably the most famous indie game to date. It is not death sentence unless your product is crap. But it is a certain bonus to be sold on the most popular platform.
Minecraft released when Steam was not dominant yet. We still got physical releases when Minecraft first went on sale. Nowadays? Good luck
I feel like a key difference between Google’s search Monopoly and Valve’s is the fact that Google paid off the competition to be the default on basically every browser.
Valve’s de facto monopoly is very real, or at least they absolutely dominate the PC game market (IANAL, no clue if Valve’s monopoly passes the legal bar). But outside of the SteamDeck and a couple gaming focused laptop’s, Steam doesn’t get forced on any user as the default. They personally install it.
You are right. Google is a monopoly, and they are at the same time anti-competitive. Valve hasn’t done anything anti-competitive yet (that I know of, anyways), but they are a monopoly.
I feel people strongly associate being anti-competitive with being a monopoly, which is fair, not many monopolies out there that are not anti-competitive. But there is a distinction.
For me it’s simply about choice. There are so so so so many choices for gaming I could not say there’s a monopoly on it. Especially when I can just turn to the open market: piracy.
monopoly law usually kicks in around 95% market share.
Ok but it’s not a monopoly no matter how much it’s repeated. It’s not. Words have meaning.
So what exactly should be the punishment for doing nothing illegal while all your competitors sabotage themselves?
Obviously break you apart so those same shitty competitors can buy you up and make everything worse!
Oh but the stock market will have a chance to go up a bit. Always look on the bright side.
I looked at the lawsuit details. Steam basically did what everyone else does. Apple, google, EA, everyone.
They charge 30% of the sale. They require that the steam price be the same as an external price.
It’s the most nothing of nothings.
To compare, what MS did when they got smacked with their monopoly lawsuit is bundle IE with the OS and they both made it hard to switch the default and they’d constantly try to switch you back to IE.
But sweeny mad no one lieks epic store
*steam price the same as external price only if the external sale is for steam keys. And you have some time to offer an equivalent sale on steam.
That doesn’t sound as bad
This is the point everyone tends to gloss over, especially with the case brought against Valve from the Overgrowth dev where it’s pretty relevant to their case. Glad to see someone has actually read the friggin’ Steam TOS.
The problem is that, allegedly, there are threatening emails from Valve to developers who tried to sell for lower prices on other platforms (NOT Steam keys). If this is true, then there is actual ammunition against Valve.
I’ll point out, when I went to sell my book on Apple Books, they had this in their TOS as well - I wasn’t allowed to sell the same digital book for less somewhere else. It is not a new or unique agreement.
Anticompetitive behavior is tolerated much more from companies that aren’t the market leader, and Apple Books is far from the market leader.
Amazon started it. They are the market when it comes to books.
They are who you have to go after. And they pay off the president.
The entirety of third party selling on Amazon is under this agreement. This is why i don’t think Steam will lose. Not because they shouldn’t, but because the money and power behind this are not valve at all.
Any of those places charging 30% on a product they’re only publishing electronically is using walled gardens and monopolistic practices to do so.
I’d rather they go after Steam last, but Steam belongs in that group with Apple, Google, and Microsoft. It’s extraordinarily difficult to sell your PC game without Steam. A few large studios can do it, but not many others.
Still notas egregious as Apple, and now Android with their restrictions on side loading.
What do you propose Steam changes instead of 30%?
EA and Microsoft aren’t the bar. Being slightly better isn’t good enough.
Other companies keep suing Steam because they (the other companies not steam) are run incompetent fools. Overpaid executives with no clue or desire to learn anything about their target audience keep telling them that screwing your customers and employees is good actually. When they see a company that doesn’t is able to effortlessly outmatch them they can’t stand it.
Even if Valve’s offering sucked, I still have not seen anyone point out a business practice I would call anticompetitive. They are not buying up studios or publishers, or even paying for timed exclusivity. I have not seen any hint that they are colluding with competitors on prices or fees. I haven’t seen then accused of stealing IP or poaching personnel. They readily welcome Microsoft and Sony to release games on Steam, and they have released their own games on consoles including the Switch. They let you install Windows or whatever else on the Deck, if you want to for some reason.
Billionaires should not exist, and Gabe Newell is no exception. He should be taxed more. I don’t love one company having so much control of this space. But I also don’t want to have a dozen different crappy launchers from different companies to deal with. There are a lot of benefits to the user to having everything centralized in one place.
How do we tax Gabe that much without necessarily watering down his share in the company and ensuring that outside investors enshittify it in the process?
- Taxing those outside investors too
- Taxing Valve as a corporation more, making them less profitable and less attractive to said investors.
- I’m not even convinced this would be an issue at all really. Remember Valve is not publicly traded. I suspect Gabe would hold on to controlling ownership as long as it was profitable, and remember that taxes are usually on profits.
- Even if outside investors move in and enshittify, the moment they start doing anticompetitive you hit them with antitrust suits. Not to mention the industry can also be regulated even before all this: a lot of governments are cracking down on lootboxes already.
I don’t want to fucking tax them! Fuck that! Do you see who runs this government?!?! Fuck that shit!
Redistribute that fucking wealth right back to us immediately! Don’t let those greedy government pigs take it! I’d rather valve have it!
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I don’t think this would solve the problem. Even if all of the outside investors are restricted to less than $1 billion in capital each, pooling their funds would easily be able to outweigh Gabe if he’s subject to the same restriction.
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If we increase taxes on all companies across the board, the overall appeal of each individual corporation would likely stay about the same. In fact, since Steam is so profitable that might make them more appealing as an investment in a world where corporate taxes are much higher.
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Corporate taxes are usually on profits, but in order to tax Gabe enough for him to no longer be a billionaire the vast majority of those taxes would have to come out of Gabe’s ownership in Valve. I’m not sure why you don’t think this would be an issue.
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This seems pretty unrealistic/idealistic. I guess we are already positing an unrealistic world where billionaries are taxed out of existence, so imagining functioning regulation and antitrust suits isn’t that much more of a stretch. Still, that does seem to support my point that without significant other societal change taxing Gabe so much that he’s no longer a billionaire would likely significantly worsen Valve as a company.
I’m certainly not against taxing billionaires out of existence, but I still think that the question of what that would mean for corporate ownership is a difficult/complex one, and I don’t think your answers here really take that complexity into account.
Taxing billionaires is not some new and untested concept. In the US throughout the 1900’s the highest income tax brackets were often in the 70%'s, reaching into the 90%'s at times, and we did not see what you are suggesting.
Increasing the taxes on Gabe Newell’s profits from owning Valve would not suddenly cause him to lose money, just to gain less money. If corporate taxes and income taxes were increased across the board, then it is not as if he would benefit from selling Valve stock to invest elsewhere, and Valve would not be a more or less attractive place to invest relative to other options either. I am not sure why you think this would cause Gabe Newell to back out or investors to jump in. Heck, these rates have all changed pretty frequently within Valve’s existence and have not had a significant impact.
Also just to say, there is also the matter of jurisdiction as he lives in New Zealand while Valve is a US based company.
In the US throughout the 1900’s the highest income tax brackets were often in the 70%'s, reaching into the 90%'s at times, and we did not see what you are suggesting.
We did not see what I’m suggesting because that’s an income tax, and in order to abolish billionaires we’d need a wealth tax.
Increasing the taxes on Gabe Newell’s profits from owning Valve would not suddenly cause him to lose money, just to gain less money.
Yes, but if you slow the income of a person who is already a billionaire, you get a billionaire who is still getting richer, only more slowly. This does not get rid of billionaires, and everything I’ve been saying was based on your initial comment that Gabe is a billionaire, and billionaires should not exist.
In order to take someone who is already a multibillionaire and make them not a billionaire, you have to take away property that they already own until their net worth falls below a billion dollars. In the case of Gabe, since most of his wealth is tied up in Valve stock, in order to make him not a billionaire you’d need to make him sell some of his stock in Valve, which would dilute his ownership and control over the company.
Do you understand the problem now?
Again, I want to find a sensible way to eliminate billionaires - I’m just not sure how to do so without throwing corporate ownership into chaos. I’d love to hear other recommendations if anyone has any.
You’re just proposing a much more drastic and rapid change than I am. I agree that a wealth tax would be a more immediate effect. It is also much more drsstixnand far less tested. The idea is interesting and I am neither opposed to it nor calling for it. I do not think it it necessary.
Increasing income tax rates and corporate tax rates would be a much slower approach. I didn’t mention them, but I would also add in property tax rates and capital gains. Luxury sales taxes, inheritancd taxes. In the US, make OASDI a progressive instead of regressive tax.
For existing billionaires, there are plenty of laws they’ve already broken to get where they are that just need to be enforced. Wage theft, antitrust, union busting, fraud. The SEC should have buried Musk in a dungeon years ago. So I see the answer to eliminating existing wealth being fines rather than taxes.
Of course, there is also room to increase the minimum wage and minimum benefits. That would hell redistribute wealth too.
I don’t know Gabe Newell, or even anyone who works at Valve personally, but every account I have ever read about Valve is that they usually treated and paid their employees well. Investigate all of these megacorps and prosecute appropriately.
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Being anticompetitive is far from the only way a company can be shitty.
Steam had to be sued by the Australian government into following the law regarding refunds for faulty products.
They have always been at the forefront of shitty gambling mechanics in video games, with their random loot boxes and tradeable skins.
And until recently, the hyper-consumerist FOKO-inducing structure of Steam sales was pretty awful.
I also don’t want to have a dozen different crappy launchers from different companies to deal with. There are a lot of benefits to the user to having everything centralized in one place.
I wonder if there’s a future where every game marketplace uses open standards/APIs that 3rd-party launchers (like Heroic) can consume for downloading games, checking DRM status, tracking achievements, friends, and so on. DRM is probably the hardest part of that, though maybe there could be closed-source blobs downloadable to enable a store’s DRM. It’s obviously not in the interest of companies solely focused on profit and dark patterns, but I wonder if Steam would ever consider using its weight to do it anyway.
Many things can be true at once. Is it true that Steam controls a dominating share of the PC gaming market? Yes. Is it true that when a company enters such a market position, that they can use that position to engage in anti-competitive and anti-consumer behaviour? Yes. Has Valve actually engaged in such behaviour? No.
Well aside from the CS skin black market.
All launchers mustdie and devs need to go back to selling their games directly.
Cool, now tell me how you update the game without every game shipping it’s own crappy updater/launcher?
Say it with me now - P-A-T-C-H-E-S, like they do via launchers anyway…
The update could occur in game like it did before launchers were common. When you would enter the online/multi-player portion of the game it would inform you to update your game in order to use the online services. The game would then download and install the update with the game open then it would restart.
If you’re saying that all games would ship with a launcher because that’s the norm then I agree completely lol.
And literally all, say, MMOs come with their little custom updater/version check/file integrity things anyway, but they don’t run in the background.
By adding a new version to your download page.
I lost access to my googe account and with it my Steam account with 400+ games on it.
Tried to get it back through support but they won’t allow it because I can’t tell them the credit card details that were apparently used to buy a game once.
I have never owned a credit card so I have no idea what they’re on about and they kindly told me to get fucked.
Maybe a friend bought you a game with their card at some point?
Or you used your parents’ card if you were younger?
For 400+ games I imagine you already thought of those possibilities though
That’ll be the same problem in steam.
But i agree with you.I lost access to my PSN account because they want me to do third-party verification with an authorization app that I apparently had linked to it like a decade ago, but don’t know what it was.
Their alternative verification is to verify purchase histories on my PSN account, which is hard to do when the whole problem is I can’t access my PSN account.
Do you know any of the payment methods you used?
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.
Exactly, this is the clear sign that Steam is providing actual value to both developers and players. The PC ecosystem has always had the guaranteed threat of an open platform, so you could cut out any middleman. Which is why it’s such a hostile platform to predatory middlemen. The fact this isn’t being done to Steam demonstrates them as an example of a (relatively) good middleman.
Best example of Steam being left out and still succeeding on PC - Minecraft launched in a time when Steam was already around and just said “nah, we’re good” (citing the 30% cut and concerns over monopoly status) and just went it’s own way. There are still plenty of games being created on PC without Steam in the mix, itch.io, self publishing. Steam just makes it a lot easier so many people legitimately want to use them, others don’t and can do so. And that’s how it should be!
Yea but in the end sure he didn’t fund steam he just became another shitty billionaire with way way worse opinions. Cool. That’s not winning… at all…
…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.
LOL SPOKEN LIKE SOMEONE WHO HAS NO IDEA!
You get no fucking reach on socials now. None. It’s all pay to play! I’m speaking fully from experience i do this full time!
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.
I’m no steam fanboy, we’ve been at odds ever since they decided to stop supporting Windows 8 and 7 and deliberately breaking the client so it stops working with those old systems, but there’s no denying that Steam does a bunch of things right.
All these Monopoly charges are just bitter competitors envious that they can’t just walk in throw some money and start getting market share from the PC market, they would actually have to put in an enormous amount of effort to to even approach all the functionality and feature set covered by Steam.
The PC is an open platform, you’re not obligated to anything, there are multiple storefronts which you can decide for or even go at it without using storefronts. Tell me again what are the alternative storefronts on the Xbox, PS, Nintendo, Apple and Android ecosystems?
And for the “if you’re not on steam you might as well not exist” crowd, isn’t that, like exactly that, the value that Steam brings to the table? You only need to decide if that’s worth the 30% cut they ask in return, like with any other purchase or contractual decision you make in your life.
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”.
The reason I’m not crazy worried about steam, and I don’t even think it’s a monopoly per-se (although I’m not referring to any definition, just a vibe) is that steam has a lot of the “market share” of video game purchases, sure, but if steam shut down tomorrow, or did something heinous enough to warrant a boycott, I am able to move. The epic games store and GoG both exist at the very least.
It would be a pain for me because I have a lot of money poured into steam, but not for anyone just getting into gaming who doesn’t have cache with steam. I didn’t pour it into steam because it was the only place for me to go, it was the best place for me to go. Idk, a big difference in Steam’s “monopoly” is that they don’t own a scarce physical commodity like oil or land, and they don’t have anything exclusive except maybe Valve games. Also unlike a monopoly there are many similarly functional competitors easily accessible on the Internet that offer an almost identical service.
Steam “locks you in” to their ecosystem. But only for each individual game you choose to buy on their platform. If you didn’t want to hitch all your games to Steam for fear that they shut down or break bad Steam does not mind if you install GoG and buy physical copies of games to diversify your portfolio so to speak.
The steam lock in is a feature, anyways. I don’t want to chase down updates off dev sites or worse the dev shuts down. Which will happen far far far more often than Steam, anyways.
Nothing lasts forever. Steam included. Yes people may lose games they bought but you lose cars you bought too. You’d lose the game eventually either by the disc breaking or the developer dying. Etc etc etc
Things die. Nothing is forever. This includes software.
I mean, they just don’t at all seem like one. When i buy games i rarely use steam to do it. I have one choice for internet. One for power. One for gas. Millions of storefronts for games. I just don’t see it.
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”.
Absolutely this. I’m glad you were able to convey it in a way people understand.
Steam is a blackhole for PC gaming/gamers from a marketing perspective. They’ve capitalized on so much of the market, that once a person buys a game on Steam they are unlikely to buy the same game and/or even future games from a different but similar platform. It is in a sense, locking the consumer in and so many consumers are locked in. Nobody competed with Steam in the PC gaming market for an eternity and it’s not Steams fault at all.
Even if Steam went to absolute shit in the next 20 odd years they’ve pretty much guaranteed that I’ll be coming back to play all the games I’ve ever bought on there. Even if EGS or GoG improves their interface to compete with Steam, I’ve no reason to buy elsewhere (though do support GoG please).
Now to pose a question: How does a competitor even compete with Steam to capture even a % of the market?
Lemme knock out the obvious: Better UI and stronger community / community tools. I think these are a given. That being said, I do think EGS is going the correct route by investing in games / unique games and locking them into their platform. Everybody like free market and availability, but to compete against the goliath that is Steams marketbase, you gotta be the only place where to get some things. It sucks, but that’s what I can’t think of a better, to the point method for anyone to capture a similar market for growth, but what do you think?
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?
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I think the point is they’re not trying to be a monopoly. It just ended up that way naturally because all their competitors killed themselves.
If my neighbor finds a bazooka rather than buy one, he still has a bazooka.
yeah its like if you were in a race and you said your opponent cheated because you broke your leg and they didn’t
Only beef I have with steam off the top of my head.
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Make it so I OWN my games if a dev isn’t okay with that they can sell somewhere else.
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Reverse you decision on steam account not being transferreable/inheritable
Probably others but those are the two I think of.
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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?
They basically take away most of the profit margin of games created by studios. 30% is a huge cut for a virtual storefront. A single medium studios usually employ more people than steam as a whole.
Don’t Sony, MS and Nintendo take the same 30% cut from third-party games sold on their platforms?
Whataboutism. The fact that someone is a POS doesn’t justify you being one. But if you really want to compare, they all have major studios under their wing and thousands of employees (sub 300 for steam). Epic also only takes 12%, and GOG let’s you actually own your games, DRM free (your steam library dies with you). I’m not defending any of these stores, just pointing out that steam isn’t the good guy gamers think they are. They care about profit, that’s it, yet any critisism is met with an army of gamers ready to give their life for capitalist selfish business.
That is not a whataboutism. The claim was “30% is a huge cut for a virtual storefront”. The only way to qualify that comparison is to look at other virtual storefronts for games. If you have other cases of comparison to give apart from Sony, MS, and Nintendo, I’m open to look at them. Epic, so far, is a bit of a standout with its pricing.
Yeah let’s ignore Epic, just because .
And let’s also ignore the kid gambling epidemic created by Valve.
And let’s ignore the fact that you don’t own your steam games, but people have send death treath to Ubisoft for saying the same.
BTW, Sony, MS and Nintendo all suck, but at least they create jobs for devs.
Epic made it very clear from the start they were trying to undercut Steam, not by being better, but by paying out developers to create exclusive games for the Epic store, something extremely hated on PC. Even on Steam you can still sell your games elsewhere too.
Steam also controls the larger markets share of PC gaming. Of course they’re going to have to price themselves competitively. Because why would you pay more for a platform that has way less users and a bad reputation?
You can actually just pay an almost 0% cut by delivering directly to your customers, but that’s exactly why you use a storefront to sell your game. You go where the customers are, and they are at Steam.
BTW, Sony, MS and Nintendo all suck, but at least they create jobs for devs.
They’d be public if they only cared about profit. It might be 99.9% of what they care about but private businesses do have things they do that aren’t as profitable but they do them to make something better. Or because they want to see it in the world.
It doesn’t really seem to be publicly verifiable, but if this article is to be believed, then yes. Would be kind of weird if they wouldn’t either, since selling games is their business too, and they have to compete with Steam / PC.
This isn’t really a problem though, more a consideration or trade off. If Valve’s services are worth that 30% cut, because you reach more people or don’t have to make other costs that would dwarf the cut, it’s worth it. Nobody’s forcing companies to sign up with Steam, other than indirectly because it turns out doing so is a sensible deal.
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.
The narrative of 4 massive sales per year and constant smaller sales in between is prettay great, let me just say.
Those sales are on the devs.
Whoever they’re on, I like 'em.
Then be grateful for the devs, not the platform!
Alright bud, my bad.
I also like the narratives of continuous game support, easy updates, being able to install games any number of times forever, making a fantastic handheld gaming device that can be hooked up to a TV that is easy to update and modify, convenient ways to communicate and play with friends, reviews, and basically everything except for the forums (which should be moderated by the game publishers).
The only complaints I recall people making about steam are losing their account because they forgot their password and valve being thorough in not just giving it to someone or that easy streaming killed physical games. To be honest, the first sucks but isn’t valve’s fault and the second is just convenience and reliability being more attractive than physical media. I have played and have had continuous access to far more games since steam than prior because I don’t have to manage physical media and the benefits outweigh the negatives of not really owning the games. Everything is a tradeoff, and I chose to get rid of old consoles because they were too much work compared to using online games services like steam.
I also did use several of the other ones in the meme and dropped them because they offered only downloading games and weren’t even very good at that.
ur right, ever since steam came out, games have been getting less expensive
What are you talking about?
Allowing and Promoting child gambling for example.
They are still way better than the other megacorps but they also have some skelletons in their closet.
That singular example is certainly valid. Is there anything else?
Not allowing games to be sold at a lower price on other platforms. (Not steam keys)
This is not even slightly offensive. Consoles have games that are entirely exclusive to them. It’s a license/publishing agreement…
Also there were honeymoon periods for Google, Elon Musk’s companies, even Microsoft during Windows 7.
First you’re grateful for quality product. Then society will force you to be grateful for them giving you “potential job opportunities”, and you must treat some underpaid and infuriating job like it was free money.
Here’s what I don’t understand… Say we all agree they are a monopoly, what do you do about it?
It doesn’t seem feasible to break them up into smaller companies, how would that even work? What are the dividing lines between what portion of the company goes where? Does that even solve anything?
Force them to charge less money? Okay, now they charge the same as Epic (or even less). Basically every other store is now being undercut by the biggest player on the scene. There is now even less reason to use a storefront that isn’t Steam. It doesn’t feel like that solves the problem either.
It seems like all the courts have tried to do so far is charge them money for existing, not get them to change what they do, which seems a lot less like the government trying to stop the big bad monopoly and more like the government wanting to get their cut. What does “stopping the monopoly” even mean? Are we happier and better off as consumers if Valve is forced to shut down Steam entirely? Is that the goal?
Monopolies aren’t issues per se, it’s policies and practices that create and maintain said monopoly.
So is Valve engaging in anticompetitive behaviour? The fact GOG went from an abandonware site to Galaxy says wat. And also that isn’t a monopoly.
What is and isn’t a Monopoly varies from country to country, and always turns into the same circular debate every time it comes up anyway. That’s why I was trying to avoid getting bogged down is “is it or isn’t it” and focus on “if it is, then what?” because I’m not sure a lot of people have thought that far ahead. Myself included.
OK which fucking country thinks valve is a monopoly? Bonus points if they allow Amazon to operate unimpeded.
that’s why it’s always better to focus on anticompetitive behaviour. I mean if you’re the only one that came up with PeeSchweeps, then a natural monopoly forms. But do you undercut and sabotage competing products to maintain it?
The interesting thing about Steam being a monopoly to me, is that the complaints are always that they charge too much… They aren’t undercutting all of the competition in order to maintain massive market share at all. The biggest complaint seems to be “they charge so much money, but I have to list my game on their platform or else I will get basically zero sales and visibility to my game!”
Yea, Steam is huge. The eventual total enshittification of Valve terrifies me, but not enough to just nuke them today and hope a better alternative materializes out of thin air tomorrow. From what I can see, their market share is purely a factor of offering a better product, so smashing them to bits just sounds like being forced to use even worse products.
Nationalize it. The public now owns it and it pays for utilities for the public.
“Nationalize it” is easy to say, but I honestly think even Microsoft would do a better job with steam than the US government would.
Well I also seriously doubt they would nationalize anything.
We make their practice of forcing game companies to charge the same on Steam as other platforms illegal. If they could charge less on other platforms (due to the lower cuts of the other platforms) they would, and it would loosen Steam’s artificial hold on being the de-facto place to buy games.
Sure let them sell cheaper on gog or epic. But what about the Free steam Keys they get? Those should still be the same price or will steam change it to non Free Keys and instead Charge the 30% they take so that These Keys can be sold at any price any where? Tbh even If the game is 60$ on steam and only 45$ on epic… I should still buy on steam… And i suppose most others aswell
I would pay $60 for a game on Steam before a free one on epic. I don’t want 1000 launchers. Bad enough these individual companies have them now.
Then they would just simply stop giving out free steam keys for off platform purchases. Depends on how many people buy from publisher site because they get to keep their games in a single library, it might end up with the game publishers getting less revenue overall.
Their policy is not that you aren’t allowed to sell your game cheaper on another platform, their policy is that you can’t sell Steam keys on other platforms cheaper than you are selling the game on Steam. Basically, you can’t use Steam’s infrastructure when undercutting “Steam customers”. Games that are on Steam go on sale on other platforms when they are not on sale on Steam all the time currently.
They’re not even a monopoly. We can always pirate the games, or more ethically, buy used cds with old games or open source games etc, even if steam enshittifies, it’s not gonna affect me.
They aren’t even close to a monopoly though
Try releasing your game on a different platform. It might as well not exist.
And the fanboys that do know about your game will give you death threats for not releasing on their favourite platform.
the best selling game of all time isn’t even on steam
We’d mostly all go straight to piracy and we all know it.
It doesn’t seem feasible to break them up into smaller companies, how would that even work?
It is a shame how uncreative we as a society have become to deal with monopolies.
Remember when Microsoft almost got divided over bundling a browser with their OS? 'Cause Pepperidge Farm remembers 😅
Uh, Microsoft got in trouble for making their browser an unremovable part of the operating system, and aggressively trying to force you to use it as a browser. Not remotely accurate to say the problem was just including a web browser. And in the end, they got barely any punishment for it.
The central issue was whether Microsoft was allowed to bundle its IE web browser software with its Windows operating system
They even had the same shit going on some 15 years later in the EU.
I don’t care if someone oversimplified it that way in a wikipedia article. That doesn’t make it the full story. Notice the modifier “central” in any case.
No, m$ got a fist up their arse for anticompetitive behaviour
What’s your point?
Are you saying that Microsoft being split up made no sense? If so, what would you suggest instead?
Or are you saying since they “almost” did it to MS, then they could do it to Steam? If so, where do you make the split that effects any change? You could split Valve the game dev company from the Steam platform, but I don’t think that makes Steam any less monolithic in their space - they don’t get their market share from the games Valve has made.
You could split Valve Dev from Distribution from Hardware. But that is a shitty split, I’m with you.
You could also just say: you have three years to split distribution into, idk, 4 subsidaries which are then “released” as own companies.
You could split geographically, and down the line those companies might compete with each other.
That’s what I mean with creativity. A lot of shit could be possible. But here we are and are told “it makes no sense”, “there is no alternative”, just crippling our own imagination before even using it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
To better explain the issue, I think, usually monopoly claims come from someone dominating multiple threads or connected elements of an industry. So, they don’t just own all the wheat fields; but also some of the best grain transport companies, as well as all the best bakeries - such that anyone offering wheat, transport, or baking, can’t compete with their integration.
That’s when a company would be divided. But in this case, Valve is just one thing; it’s the bakery. They choose to bake with flour and wheat because they’ve been baking for years. Everyone else is pouring billions into trying various mixtures of sawdust to cut costs, and no one is cutting into that industry as a result. Nothing has prevented them from building their own infrastructure from scratch, except for the fact that it’s a long-term investment, and the stock market hates those.
Because Steam is simply not a problem when we have so many places to go!
Our utilities don’t have options AT ALL! Yet that isn’t being fucking fixed?!
Amazon owns ecommerce/distribution practically!
Because “fixing” steam while leaving the rest in tact will fuck us all over worse!
Isn’t there a difference between public and private companies?
There might be. But back tn the day we just knew that monopolies are shit for everyone (except the owner). So maybe we should sharpen that tool of law once again. But who am I kidding, not gonna happen.
I mean, it definitely isn’t going to happen in the US anytime soon… We haven’t had any teeth behind our anti-trust laws in decades. In my lifetime we have basically seen Bell Telephone get rebuilt under AT&T.
Any monopoly that is too big and important to be broken up needs to be nationalized.
I’m not sure how important Steam is.
Sure, we all like video games, but I don’t think people are going to die if they start overcharging for them and we have to go outside to buy them in a store again.
