Not OC, duh.
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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.
The only ARM Linux device i have is the Raspberry Pi 5.
would be cool to try it out on the PI.Oh, reminds me. Gotta bust out my RP with retropie os on it, is retropie still a thing? My RP is a little older it’s the 1gb cpu with wifi
pretty sure, dont have retropie on mine though.
The RP5 isnt the strongest device ever but im sure some indie games will run well on it. Also with steam pushing native linux and possibly native arm builds soon of games performance will only improve.
good comment, and yeah most 2D indie games work fine.3D is where it starts to struggle.
(with BOX86/BOX64/FEX-EMU ofc)
native,3D works fine.
an arm handheld
Yes, that’s usually what the hand is at the end of.
Did you see the leg football match last night?
After hearing his connection to Musk I am starting to wonder. All is not what it seems.
Steam is a shitty business. They run a gamblibg scheme fo children, they take a huge cut from devs (blabla industry standard blablabla), they make billions and basically employ less people than an indie. The fact that so many gamers would take a bullet to protect this billionaire dude is beyond me. Of course the guy is super right wing, you don’t run that type without being.
Yeah, I am definitely guilty of giving Steam a free pass because I used their service a lot.
who, David Baszucki?
Musk v. Altman lawsuit exposed that not only are Musk and Gabe on speaking terms, but they also share a lot of opinions about AI and brain to computer interfaces.
It is the first crack in Steam I have seen, and if life has taught me anything, where there is smoke there is fire.
t is the first crack in Steam I have seen,
Anyone who really wants to understand Valve should at bare minimum watch the 2 coffeezilla videos:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13eiDhuvM6Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6jhjjVy5Ls
but why doesn’t Valve shove AI down everyone’s throat
I wouldn’t bet on that, but I do hope you are right and they keep AI off the platform.
True
Same reason they don’t make games, they don’t have to.
Everyone else has investors shoving Ai down their throat. No one’s shoving Gabe into doing anything.
Gabe is a billionaire. He collects yachts.
The cracks have been there for years, we just wanted to believe that they weren’t because when we do acknowledge them we’re even more complicit in the parasite class takeover.
You are right, of course. I think modern day media and it’s propaganda has been unbelievabley effective into duping everyone into believing a divided society of haves and have nots is acceptable.
There’s no such thing as a good billionaire. Some are less bad than others, but none are good.
I can get wanting to have enough money to live comfortably. But that line is crossed way before the “billionaire” mark.
They have more money than they could ever hope to spend in 10 lifetimes. So it is a conscious decision they make, to say “Instead of putting everything I don’t need to a good cause, I’m going to hoard it and buy a few more yachts instead.”
hey its me again to shit all over your post, so its not a shitpost when you actually mean the shit you’re trying to convey.
Yours truly
Can someone please explain this guy to me?
David Baszucki, the CEO of Roblox.
thank you!
I mean, yes.
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Steam is a scary monopoly, getting scarier.
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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.
It ain’t a public company. Nothing scary about it.
People don’t change in a dime when you get to gabens age. You tend to become stubborn and set in your ways.
What’s scary is what the guy after gaben will do. But so long as gaben is around and the company is private we are fine.
We did get lucky with the benevolent king, but we might not get that lucky in the future, yeah.
I wouldn’t classify is as “scary” quite yet.
Our benevolent yachtlord for life won’t live forever. Next guy (or group of owners) may not be quite content with simply having a billion dollar yacht, might enshittify for more yachts quicker.
Point being, GabeN is no saint, but he shows restraint with his greed, if you can even call him greedy. Next guy might kill the golden goose and then we’ll all have a fun time because all our games are all on Steam. That’s the scary bit.
I would still wait until we know who the heir apparent is to worry.
I feel like a peasant waiting to find out if the good old king’s son is gonna ruin everything.
Good news is his kids appear to be level headed like him.
As they say wealth never lasts past the third generation. Gaben built it up, his kids understand their father and keep it going. The grandkids are spoiled and don’t get it and run it into the ground.
So we got time.
It’s not. You can still buy from the others if you want to be treated like shit, excepting GOG, in my opinion. Consoles are true monopolies, because you can only choose if you want to buy a console and marry to its store, now that physical media is becoming a rarity.
They have a big fraction of the market because they are efficient at selling what people want. I don’t like it, I believe Newell, specifically, is profiting greedily from Valve’s situation, but shit, this is not even a natural monopoly.
How is steam a monopoly if they don’t even own the biggest platform they sell games to? And even steam os being Linux has to be fully open to comply with the gpl meaning anyone can modify and install whatever they want.
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.
agreed, i still dislike GOG’S AI take.
GOG’S AI take
What happened, exactly?
All I can find is someone used an AI image for some kind of marketing.
I remember for a job requirement they want The developer to use AI or Smth
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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.
I can also add pirated games to Steam. And with a little fuckery using a simple text file, even get achievements, on Steam, through a pirated game.
Chrome and blink’s not a monopoly guys!
Atleast thats open source
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
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).
Wait, a fifth? My bad, that’s insane. I don’t know a single PC gamer who doesn’t have most of their games in Steam, me included. Can you hook me up with a source for that?Turns out you are the one lying. Everything I find says Steam has 75% ish market share.
Turns out you are the one lying.
You are obviously completely unaware about the concept of citing sources. I did not make that graphic and you did not care to follow the cited sources at the bottom of the graphic.
At the very worst you could accuse me of citing a source that’s 2.5 years old by now because its newest numbers are from late 2023 but then you made up random numbers without even backing up any of it, so my standpoint is still more valid than yours even if the numbers cited by me are not as recent as the numbers cited by @EldritchFemininity@lemmy.blahaj.zone
The “source” is just a name, I was hoping for a link. Again every source I find says 75%.
https://zipdo.co/steam-gaming-industry-statistics/
https://coopboardgames.com/statistics/epic-games-store-vs-steam-market-share/
I’m open to being proven wrong
Where the hell are you getting your numbers? Everything I see says that Steam made a record 16 billion in 2025 while PC gaming as a whole made 43 billion. That would put Steam somewhere around 27% of the PC market.
https://www.gamesindustry.biz/gamesindustrybiz-presents-the-year-in-numbers-2025-year-in-review
https://www.eteknix.com/steams-revenue-surpasses-16-billion-in-2025-new-estimate-shows/
I think the 75% number may be accurate specifically for PC game distribution, not PC game revenue. 75% is the number Gemini gives as Steams’s/Valve’s market share when Googled.
https://www.quantumrun.com/consulting/steam-game-statistics/
I think the 75% number may be accurate specifically for PC game distribution, not PC game revenue.
If that’s the case, free to play games like Fortnite wouldn’t even count despite competing for the same wallets and play time as pay to play games. This also completely ignores the installed base of EGS but that is the second important thing when judging a monopoly.
In a hypothetical scenario where 100 million people have both Steam and EGS installed and fully set up and then 75 million of those people choose to buy where they get better value for their money, Steam would not have a monopoly in this case because all 100 million people have both stores installed and set up. Linking Steam and Epic accounts is possible since many years and there are no hurdles at online matchmaking between Steam and EGS users – Epic themselves provide proof for that in their delisted Steam version of Rocket League.
https://discuss.tchncs.de/comment/25526042
I posted some sources here. I might be misinterpreting how that number is arrived at?
I know you didn’t make this graph, but what was whoever-it-was smoking when they put the line for VR all the way up there? It should be slithering along the bottom right like a snake.
You’re misreading how the graph is laid out. The y axis is the combined total revenue of the entire video game market, with each new piece of the market being added on top of the older ones over time (although arguably arcades are the oldest form and should be below consoles). VR is the newest niche, and so it goes on top of everything else as it adds its revenue to the gross total of the entire market, despite only being a tiny piece of that sum.
In your layout, consoles/arcade would be at the top with everything else underneath them.
Even that don’t make no sense, boss. If that were the case not only should consoles and arcades be swapped, as you say, but also the VR line should be slipped in between handhelds and mobile. Dactyl Nightmare came out in 1991 and certainly wasn’t even the first VR experience, but it was the first commercialized one I can think of — and played myself, believe it or not. I can’t imagine VR as a whole made anything other than chump change until 2018+, but it was indeed there and chugging along quietly.
I can’t imagine VR as a whole made anything other than chump change until 2018+, but it was indeed there and chugging along quietly.
The graph specifically calls out the Oculus Rift as the start of what it considers the VR segment.
I would consider things like the Virtual Boy as VR to some extent as well, but I do see the logic as to why they only started the line with the Oculus. Before that it probably wouldn’t even show up as the money there was a drop in the bucket of a tenth of a percent of anything else, but it’s also widely considered that the Oculus and the Vive were the first really viable commercial VR headsets that started the VR game niche/genre. Before that, VR could probably be considered as niche as eye and head tracking hardware for sim games, and I don’t think that I’ve ever heard somebody mention those when talking about money in the games industry. Or even mentioned them in general outside of conversations like this. I don’t think most people even know that that kind of stuff even exists.
I know you didn’t make this graph, but what was whoever-it-was smoking when they put the line for VR all the way up there?
From what I’ve learned from buddies who are into VR, it’s a really weird subculture of super high end headsets, sometimes even full body suits with force feedback, and other shit. Honestly, wouldn’t be surprised if all that revenue is A) real and B) relying on a few big spenders.
That’s not the issue. The issue is the callout on it says the VR market is only $5 billion at its peak, which is well below mobile, which the gold VR line is drawn above, correlating with the position of being greater than $180 billion on the Y axis on the chart. Which is not how line charts work.
Damn, handheld virtually nonexistent since 2020
Only because they don’t count the Switch as handheld. Nintendo was pretty much the entire handheld market.
Only because they don’t count the Switch as handheld. Nintendo was pretty much the entire handheld market.
I don’t know what would be left by how they lay out the numbers. Switch (2) is console, Steam Deck is PC. The Chinese “boutique” handhelds by Ayaneo, Ayn,… use existing game ecosystems (either PC or Android).
I guess Playdate and whatever Atari sells these days. Can’t think of any other dedicated handheld with its own ecosystem.
Microtransaction-laden cell phone games very infamously oozed in and ate that entire market’s lunch. It turns out for short duration video game adjacent distraction on the go, people would much rather use the device they already have with a “free” (only up front) option rather than pay for a Gameboy/DS/PSP and games to go with it.
Square discovered this the hard way when they tried to release their various Final Fantasy remakes on smartphones in the early days as if they were regular games, i.e. pay $4.99 or whatever and have access to it in theoretical perpetuity and to the nearest decimal point, no one bought any of them. It turns out consumers respond much more positively to downloading a game for “free” and then coughing up several times more in microtransactions over time than buying any given title outright would cost, and/or being incessantly bombarded with ads as they play. Obviously the industry has figured this out and now everything you can play on your cell phone is feemium pay-to-win microtransaction hell built around slot machine mechanics, but it doesn’t matter because it apparently prints money.
You are on lemmy, a decentralized and open source platform, nobody here think microsoft is good. If a bunch of evil corporations control the entire videogames market that still count as a monopoly, all of these are shit including Valve.
They also lied, it’s not a fifth, it’s 3/4
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.
Microslop… they all tried to make their own launchers to move away from Steam and they all failed.
Microsoft didn’t fail. They bought Minecraft and Blizzard / Battle.net, two things that are money printers outside of Steam.
Microsoft ACTS like they fail because they demand higher profit margins from their gaming division to fund their AI investments.
Epic… Epic keeps throwing fortnite money to EGS launcher but keeps ignoring the most basic user demands.
EGS has an insane installed base because of Fortnite and Rocket League alone. League of Legends and Valorant are also available there but not Steam. Same with Genshin Impact and Honkai Impact.
It’s just that these games drone out the other games on EGS and that’s why they sell better on Steam. And what is that droning out usually called? A monopoly.
Doesn’t matter. Monopolies are bad and should be dismantled.
No, not automatically.
You only go around punishing people that do bad things, not everybody that finds themselves in a random situation.
Doesn’t matter. Monopolies are bad and should be dismantled.
Then start with actual monopolists:
Yes, we should dismantle all actual monopolies.
Valve is also an actual monopoly.
Monopoly means it’s the only seller in the market. This isn’t true for PC gaming. You have GoG, Epic, Itch.io, Battle.net, Origin, Uplay, Rockstar smaller websites that host different kinds of games. Steam is the biggest player on PCright now, but there’s nothing about Steam that prevents any other type of competitor from getting into the market and possibly de-throning it.
Valve is also an actual monopoly.
No, a fifth of the PC gaming market is not a monopoly.
Market share is not the only determinant, and also yes holding 20% of the market can empower an actor to exert monopolistic power. Maybe learn a little bit before you open your mouth; you sound as stupid as the FTC.
Maybe learn a little bit before you open your mouth; you sound as stupid as the FTC.
No arguments, only insults. Pathetic.
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.
They are very conscious 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 the skin gambling issue.
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.
- Basically if you want to benefit from Steam, the dominant marketplace, you have to offer Steam customers nothing less than you offer customers anywhere else. No discounts on another store or your website. No bonus content or service that might make a non-steam purchase feel better than a purchase on Steam.
Finally, they may not be anti-consumer but they have exactly been spending a lot of effort on improving the functionality of services that their platform has. Issues with their friends-related services like voice chat 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.
is it a monopoly because they wanted to become one?
Valve is a for profit company, one of their main goals is to make money.
It is a monopoly, but because nobody else is even trying. And that pisses me off.
It is a monopoly because they hooked everyone to their own proprietary third party software launcher, you should be pissed of about not owning any of your games
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.
Valve just shipped a controller that only works in steam 🤣
No it can already work with anything that accepts SDL input (which is a bunch of software and most modern games steam or not). They upstreamed support for it before the controller even launched.
Shhh, you will crush their whole world
There is mild vendor lock-in. If all my games are on steam, why would I buy my games elsewhere. Not to mention the steam client contains the steam store and advertisements for games in said store, so anybody in the steam ecosystem is incentivized to stay there. Games bought in Steam aren’t trivially launched without launching Steam.
All of that is true, but I still think “monopoly” is not the right word. It’s a bit of a unique situation. Ideally we’d have laws that make Steam provide a downloadable copy of the game that can work without Steam… but we’re so far from that.
fair enough, no point arguing about definitions anyway
A monopoly […] is a market in which one person or company is the only supplier of a particular good or service[1]. A monopoly is characterized by a lack of economic competition to produce a particular thing, a lack of viable substitute goods, and the possibility of a high monopoly price well above the seller’s marginal cost that leads to a high monopoly profit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly
A monopoly is just an observation of the market landscape. Doesnt require ill intent or anti-competitive practices. Steam is just a benevolent monopoly. Until its not…
I think the issue is there is the economic concept of monopoly and there is the type of monopoly defined and banned by regulation. They are similar but not the same
There is competition. And the term “monopolize” is used as a way of saying someone took action to stomp out the competition so I would say that 99% of people would assume intent whether or not it’s technically a part of the definition, because 99% of the time a monopoly exists it’s not by accident. But again, importantly, there IS competition.
A monopoly […] is a market in which one person or company is the only supplier of a particular good or service
So like Epic in case of Unreal Engine and Microsoft in case of Windows. Steam makes up a fifth of all PC gaming revenue and EGS has a wide installed based because of Fortnite, Rocket League etc. People just choose not to spend their money there for games that are available elsewhere. That’s different from EGS not being able from supplying goods and services because they were pushed out.
is steam really over 95% of the market? i think that’s where the limit is
It’s 75%. It’s not crazy far up on the monopoly scale, but IMO enough to be called one.
But there is no “limit”. If you are the only vegetable seller on the market, you have 100% market share. But as long as anyone else can set up another shop and compete equally, I wouldn’t call it a monopoly.
is steam really over 95% of the market? i think that’s where the limit is
No, 8.6 billion out of 45 billion dollars. That’s a fifth.
well… that’s it then. case closed.
That’s the entire gaming market. Steam commands 75% of PC gaming.
No, 8.6 billion out of 45 billion dollars. That’s a fifth.
The graphic literally says PC games revenue is $45 billion. What are you getting at?
Even at 100% of PC gaming, that would be a small part of video games in general. A bit disingenuous to call that a monopoly.
The entire gaming market is closer to 200 billion on that graph.
I don’t really know where they got one fifth from, look it up and you will find three quarters.
PC was 43 billion dollars in sales in 2025, Steam was about 17 or 18 billion. The graph up this thread was an earlier year where Steam’s market share was smaller. Neither figure is 75%.
Gaming as a whole was 200 billion in sales last year. Half of it was mobile.
Will they? Probably. The thing is the others already did, and they even tried to hurt Valve in bad faith. The meme is good, but they took their shots at Valve before shooting themselves in their faces. I just hope GOG wakes the fuck up with Linux support, so I can buy more from them.
Has valve ever done anything to stifle the competition?
agreed, i will just hope they dont abuse the monopoly like Google or Microsoft. (this will be wishful thinking)
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.
Don’t be a bastard, and do the right thing. That’s hard to do apparently.
I fear for my game library the moment Gabe dies.
Valve is truly one of a kind company, their marketing has been so effective that they managed to create a culture of idiots that go around the internet defending their products
their marketing
Their what?
They just released Half-Life 2 in 2004 and that was it.
Sounds like you have no idea what the company even does.
Valve does no marketing of Steam.
Their marketing is so successful that you believe they do none.
I remember being absolutely fucking pissed when I bought Skyrim and got a steam key instead of an actual download.
I remember there being more concern about being forced to use a platform to install/play your games back in the late naughts/early 2010s.
Has valve even done any form of marketing or advertisement outside their store?
As far as I’m aware they are just really good at keeping their mouths shut.
Marketing isn’t just buying television ads. Loot boxes and reward systems are also a form of marketing.
i guess yeah if by “reward system” you mean they run steam pretty well
fyi you linked a short article about candy crush, and it barely explains what that game does, i don’t see how is that related to steam
A game mechanic is marketing?
For profit companies who’s goal is to make money also use game mechanics for marketing, yes.
Can you define the term marketing for me?
Once steam goes to shit we will all sail the seven seas but multiplayer will suffer
multiplayer will suffer
Good. It’s a cesspool.
Just playing with friends might get harder
Back in my day we used Hamachi and multiplayer was just fine.
Ugh it was a pain to setup
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.
Gog is no longer part of cd project red
don’t forget the GenAI for marketing.
How’s multiplayer on gog ?
am probably gonna rebuy all my video games on alternative platforms, or imma play open source games instead.
i can also take the games outside of Steam.I mostly play mmos tbf but I want to download and safely store a copy of wow classic servers and clients and mods in case we have an apocalypse event lol
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.
yeah i know,but i feel like Steam’s competitors are inferior.
(personal opinion though)Save for Epic the other two set out with what they intend. GOG wants you to buy games without DRM that you can download installers for whenever you want to install them. Generally more consumer choice.
ItchIo wants to be a place for small, indie developers to get a spot in the market without having to rely on Steam. Smaller games and media for consumption that I don’t think takes a big of a bite out as Steam does.
Steam has some legitimate criticisms to it certainly, and Gabe is part of the class of people I don’t like. But certainly not a monopoly.
They don’t allow ads in games. Support Steam.
really?
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 also free unless I’m missing something?
Steam is gratis to create an account, it is not free. All game purchases have a 30% tax, and you don’t own the games you purchased.
Thanks for clarifying
Not tax, it’s Steam’s cut.
It’s more accurate to call it a commission for marketing, advertising, and distribution services. Steam isn’t doing nother, they are providing a service to their customers.
They mean free as in freedom / free speech (libre), not free as in free beer / free robux (gratis)
Linux is libre, Steam is not libre, both are gratis
Oh okay, thanks for clarifying.
Free can still be a monopoly. There is still a controlling group that decides the direction of linux and then entire ecosystem moves with that direction.
None of that is a monopoly. Ecosystems have fragmented before because of decisions and Linux wouldn’t be immune to it. Alternative forks of entire ecosystems happen.
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.
/<this is a bit too high effort post.>
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.
And in most cases you can’t mod your games at all on console, which is basically a free way to vastly increase the shelf life of any title.
PC forever.
I just bought a Switch 2 and am playing Pokemon Champions lol. Consoles are not horrible
Pokemon Champions, the game that was supposed to be the definitive PVP pokemon game but only launched with 186 out of 1028 pokemon? That game?
Yeah it’s fun
Did you even read the entire comment or are you just here to provide a random fact about yourself and contribute nothing?
They bought a Nintendo product.
Do you really have to ask?
Nintendo is the worst offender here.
Their audacity to pretend that the switch 2 is a different console than the original switch is fascinating. They cut corners on hardware when they released the original and now Nintendo is charging you again to buy slightly better hardware that will still underperform.
I get that non nativ ports can have performance problems, but even Nintendo originals run under 30fps with mediocre graphics. You get better performance if you run the switch games on a steam deck via an emulator.
Personally not in the market so I can’t verify that, but damn - just how awful you and your fanbase have to be to release a product that performs worse than your direct competitors on your own originals ground. Steamdeck is already an underperformer in terms of hardware, and how much longer has it been produced than the Switch 2? 3 years?!
this is the reason why i dont like Consoles, If you ignore Video Game choices.
(if you want to know Video Game choice: TF2 Is not on Console for example, ik it used to be but not anymore,but its one of my favorite multiplayer game, no multiplayer video game i found is like it.)Also backwards compatibility. I can buy a new shiny modern PC and nearly all the games I bought in the past 3 years will run.
Oh true, like Windows 98/95 Video Games.
I paid $1,000 for my PC
What year was this?
I mean, to be fair, consoles are being jacked up to insane levels as well.
To be fair is you’re into something like Ubislop it is really the only way to go, the integrated excessive DRM on a console keeps you from dealing with a terrible launcher, three layers of DRM, anti-tamper, and rootkit KLAC crap.
It kills me when people play on console.
As a PC and console gamer, consoles are easier to buy once and play a round of games for a number of years. PCs, on the other hand, are much better especially for certain game types.
Each has its role, but I was almost exclusively a console gamer for a couple of years because:
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You can sit back and relax and play on your TV after a long day of work
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If I buy a console, I can expect that almost all games will play correctly on it without having to upgrade mid-cycle
It’s quite a bit more complicated to try to figure out which video games your current graphics card can and cannot play, when you should spring for an upgrade, and when you need to do a complete re-build. To add to that I do not like windows and so I’m a member of the linux gaming club (there are dozens of us, DOZENS) and that makes things more complicated as well. With a console, they’ve worked out the licensing, the performance, and most fiddly bits and I can just sit on my couch, buy a game and play.
When I was younger and had more time to deal with things like the above, I gamed exclusively on PC. But with everything else going on with work and life, I find it much easier to just pick up a controller, plunk down on the couch, and play for a couple of hours.
Both have their pluses and minuses. I would say I like console gaming better because it usually happens in the living room and doesn’t feel as anti-social.
But to your point…cost savings isn’t really the primary reason to game on a console IMO.
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I call it accepting a negative, voicing opinions against it, while also not interfacing with it.
The pricing behind PS+, when considering all the Netflix-style games available, is decently generous. Less so for Game Pass, but it used to be better. I think most people are upset that it’s a gatekeeper for online play, but begrudgingly accept it as part of that wide game service.
I’m generally with you that pricing is better, but I have had occasions where a deal price on PlayStation beat out the lowest historical price of a Steam key.
If you were to claim you should never accept a platform with negative behaviors, I would point at Steam’s Counterstrike skins market, which can even encroach on you should scammers wish to sell to you, or steal your account to get a high “user reliability score”. I’d rather it didn’t exist. I still support Steam even with it there.
30% of your gross income for advertising and hosting is a scam. It’s a scam when Apple does it, when Google does it, and yes, when Steam does it.
There’s a reason Gabe can afford that yacht without breaking a sweat.
Just because Steam is the best of the software monopolies doesn’t exclude it from the group.
Platform monopolies need to be abolished. It’s got all the economic problems of rentiers.
You really think you can independently afford high speed localized 24/7 file hosting all over the world for potentially millions of downloads for less than 30% of your sell price?
Steam games can be cheap because steam offers all the expensive things cheaply. No one is going to download your game off of a shady MEGA link. No one is going to go to fucknuts.biz.co.uk.nz to your shady site straight from squarespace templates to then crash your filehost by trying to download your game at the same time as 500 other people. No one is going to trust you with their bank details and crypto is a scam and paypal also takes a high cut.
If your goal is to do gaming more than a thankless, pay free hobby you need:
Marketing Trust Payment Provider Global CDN And ease of use.
Unless your game is so incredibly niche AND so incredibly good that you can get away with shunning all of those things, you will need those to make enough money to even make a minimum wage salary after a year. Starsector and dwarf fortress are the only ones that come to mind, and the latter went to steam after Tarn decided to actually go full time and needed a real income to cover hosting and salary that couldn’t be found in donations.
Data centers are expensive. And yes profit is built in to steam’s cut because they know most players aren’t going to repeatedly download any given game over the lifetime of their steam account. But doing it yourself means either you do not offer repeat download to players, or you run out of money in two years because people stop buying the game but people will still download it again and again.
You really think you can independently afford high speed localized 24/7 file hosting all over the world for potentially millions of downloads for less than 30% of your sell price?
Absolutely, yes, 1000%. And why does your download need to be local? Have you heard of The Internet?
You’re not really making an argument against a monopoly when you say it can’t be done without Steam.
It can’t be done without MONEY.
“Absolutely, yes, 1000%.”
Then do just that? Unlike with Sony, Nintendo, Apple, MS ecosystems, the PC is an open platform, you don’t have to ask anyone’s permission to just start selling your stuff for it over the internet.
Your indie game won’t sell if you can’t advertise it on Steam. They have a monopoly.
…So to educate you, locally hosted servers, which all CDNs use, allow for greater download speeds and less overall network strain and complexity, which reduces the chance for failed downloads via lost packets.
Every single download and major content service you have used in the last 15 years has used this, and this is why your downloads rarely if ever say ‘download failed’ like they did pre-2005.
This is also very expensive, hosting a server in every major country/download area and then replicating files across those disparate servers is expensive.
Let’s say you want to host your 2GB game, and only that, in the US and Europe. Well the US is a giant place but the core infrastructure is good enough that you can get away with a single location, so that’s two servers. Each will probably be $50/month or so per 500GB traffic (since it’s just file hosting we don’t care about stats, but you’re not getting above 10Mbps for less than that at that traffic limit).
That’s 250 times that can download your game. In America. And 250 in Europe. Let’s say you get the ideal sales numbers and 500 people buy your game.
If you’re selling your game for $5, that is one download per person for their lifetime that you can afford(assuming 30% or less goes to hosting) If you increase your price to $7.20 you hit that 30% cap but those 500 people can download it any time for a year. Or, if we assume we get 6,000 people (the theoretical maximum number of people that can download your game at that price) you can have a salary of $25,920.
But lets be honest, most indie games off steam never make it to 6,000 sales. And the ones that do take years of basically hosting for free as a passion project.
So make your game cost… $21? Well you’ve cut off any chance of anyone outside of the US and Europe of ever buying your game, but you can now host for 3 years for those 6,000 sales and you’d even have a decent enough salary to pay tax… which for a small business in the US will take another 3rd of your costs, and you still haven’t paid for marketing or your payment provider fees or their taxes or sales tax or VAT for Europe…
Or. You pay steam that 30%. They handle hosting, which already cost you 30%, and everything else, and the admin overhead of selling to 190 countries like calculating (and already paying out of your cut) tax.
Do you stack your dishwasher like this?
Download speed is highly relative to latency (bandwidth/delay product). If you have global users and you actually want them to download dozens (if not more) of gigs of data, then yea…they should be distributed.
Fuck for as much hate as cloudflare and akamai (and Amazon and Google and all the others too, but CDN is their bread and butter) get, the internet could not be nearly as fast and efficient if not for CDNs and their massively scalable infrastructure.
Unless you think we should all go back to hosting websites off of an old Pentium in the garage. Which…okay yeah we should do that too, but it’s not at all functional for game distribution.
Download speed is highly relative to latency
Tell that to my USB stick.
*Six yachts, apparently.
Saying its 30% of gross income for advertising is pretty disingenuous. They also handle the distribution and payment systems which is very much not insignificant along with other more insignificant things.
I have serious issues with some aspects of Steam,and if its creating billionaires theres obviously a problem. But taking a cut of game sales isnt those issues. We can argue about the exact % that would be reasonable, bc some amount definitely is. But thats not the actual issues with the platform.
![Steam competitors be like. [Extended?]](https://thelemmy.club/pictrs/image/8d2d46eb-234c-41bd-b7c1-fb9c4c9f2508.webp){kind=link}