You must log in or # to comment.
when I was 40 I converted my 401k into real estate deal and the cash flows every month and rents grow over time. Every 10 -15 years the rents grow enough where I can either refinance and pull money out. This is a NON Taxable event and I still own the real estate & the cash flow. Want to learn more join me for training Cardonecapital10x.com
What maintains Steam’s dominant market position is user lock in, not any policy they enforce or any monopoly laws they violate. The only thing that would break user lock in would be allowing migration of licenses for games between platforms, and making friend/multiplayer/mod-management systems interoperable across platforms.
Valve has made no effort to implement these kinds of systems. BUT NETHER HAS ANYONE ELSE. (Well except gog and DRM free games, but that’s only part of the issue.)
The fact that one privately owned company has such huge control of the industry is a huge risk, undeniably. But breaking up valve wouldn’t solve the problem, it would just let someone else take their place.
I see 2 main points against steam in this comment section.
-
Steam is doing price fixing for games: False, this accusation came from Epic Games CEO, but the actual steam policy only blocks the selling of steam keys for a lower price, not the game itself.
-
Steam is a monopoly and monopolies are bad: I agree that monopolies are bad, but in my opinion only if they take action to harm the user and the market. From my knowledge steam is pretty known as being pro customer and haven’t taken any monopolistic actions to block other stores from growing.
The reason why the games are not usually cheaper on other platforms is because publishers practice standard prices, so the game publishers take the extra profits from a lower store cut.
I am not trying to be a fanboy, I am just trying to look objectively at the facts, if someone can prove me wrong, I am willing to change my mind.
-
Remember when steam introduced the 2h refund policy out of their own volition rather than being forced by multiple governments? Yeah me neither.
alright, lets compare game platforms(this may contain Opinions).
- Steam, probably the only good platform on here(also some stupendous features like a clock/alarm,note taking,browser,etc), but people should remember they are a monopoly(not the worse monopoly i have seen, look at something like Google or Microsoft), and they are still AAA company(Gabe Newell is a billionaire and the 106 richest man according to Forbes).
- GOG(why is it not being shown in the meme), Dont like their stance on being Pro-AI(if the LLMS was only used on One banner or smth or it had a fair reasoning, i would have been content with LLM usage.) and subpar features(maybe?),no DRM guarantee is nice.
but i like their program where they make older games Legally playable(IIRC Steam used to do the same?). - Ubisoft store,EA Store,Epic Games Store,Microsoft Store(due to Xbox logo),itch.io. they all have subpar features, and am pretty sure itch.io has more of a focus on UGC content.
- Console(Playstation,Nintendo,Xbox): I personally dont like the Video Game choice, and paying for a sub to play online.
i know there is stuff like DLSite aswell,but i never used them(the only Video Game franchise i know that sells there is Touhou Project)
Which lawsuit is this about?
-
Being a simp for a multi billion dollar company is never a good thing. It’s not good for you as a consumer and, frankly, is just incredibly cringe.
-
No, it’s not, the main point of the lawsuit is that Steam does not let game Devs sell their game for cheaper on any other platform.
So if you don’t like that Steam takes a massive 30% cut of your sales so that Gabe can buy his 27th mega-yatch, and you decide to also put your game on another platform that takes a fairer, smaller cut, then chose to pass on those savings to the consumer, then valve will kick you off the platform and you’ll lose access to by far the biggest market in PC gaming.
Fuck valve and fuck you brain dead fanboys simping for a billionaire and making everything worse for the rest of us because your entire worldview comes from memes.
-
People constantly dooming steam are punching themselves in the face instead of pushing for anything better. If they wanted a more competitive market do two things. Buy games on other storefronts. They exist. There have been digital storefronts since before Steam. Second is direct your complaining to competitors to improve their services. Like go complain on every EGS press release for Linux support and a gamepad friendly interface. Something equivalent to Steam input and remote play that isn’t using third party software like Sunshine/Moonlight. Something like steam curators and other social features. User reviews. The complainers of Steam are pretty much campaigning for Steam to be worse so others can compete without having to improve as much
Capitalism good when valve does it?
When I think of monopolies, I think more of telecomms, of Wal-Mart and their selling at a lose to kill off competition, Microsoft purposely hindering the ability for competing software, and other examples. Unless I’m missing something, Steam didn’t do that, they were just first in the game and built a better product than the others did. Offering a better service that attracted customers. Now do I think it’s too large and would welcome competition, absolutely. But monopolies typically aren’t though just having larger market share with a better product.
If Steam did something like oh, pay developers/publishers to be exclusive to their platform, then yeah you’d have a good argument there.
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”.
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.
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.
-
Everybody else keeps shooting themselves in the foot.
-
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?
-
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.
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.
These comments…
Some day, Steam is going to enshittify, eat game devs for breakfast, and all these Steam fans will wonder how anyone could have possibly seen this coming.
Kind of like a certain online bookstore named after a river.
Not that I don’t enjoy Steam. But I trust them as much as any corporation: not at all.
Gabe still owns Valve not shareholders. It’s after he dies that gets me worried simply because he’s way older than me. I buy GOG these days but mainly because Valve is American and I don’t trust their government to not interfere long term with what Valve can and cannot do or host. The DRM is less of a pain point because I’m a skilled pirate and data hoarder.
Amazon was always publicly traded, so it was always going to get worse. Steam is privately owned by Gabe, and is therefore more resistant to enshittification. Unless Gabe sells or dies, Steam’s pretty safe.
That online bookstore literally started this rule of not being allowed to sell your products cheaper offsite and they will be god damned if gamers think they can fix that through Steam.
They pay the fucking president off.
They are literally the problem yall are complaining about in this thread! Fix that and you fix steam!
Hearing those arguments for how many years now? Right …
The day Gabe is bo longer there things may get ugly, may.
But, Valve is not publicly traded, or has to cater to shareholders in any way. That is the reason they are still who they are.
They run a good service platform and aren’t as greedy as they could be, but they’re still not safe.
Use them, but no fangirling. They’re a business.
I’d be completely in agreement of what you are saying if it wasn’t for the fact that there are so many people acting like Steam is the worst platform in existence every time they get brought up. People are awfully quick to suck Tim Sweeney off for only charging 12% and fill up the comments with whatever the opposite of “fangirling” is.
Just ignore those people and keep the shilling to a min, that’s all I’m saying. No they’re not the worst thing ever, they’re actually pretty good in a lot of ways, but they are a business and they do have a bit of a monopoly going on.
They get a free game and they turn into $2 hookers over it man. It’s insane.
Yeah, that’s going too far, but I understand the reaction to fanning over Valve.
There are a bazillion historical examples of why one should use, not trust, big businesses. They are entities to make transaction with, not people, and they will tighten the screws even if it takes decades.
This is doubly true in the software business.
And if the Valve superfans look at the world in 2026 and somehow don’t see that, I honestly don’t know what to tell them. They’re in such a completely different world than me I don’t know where to start.
It really puts into perspective the importance of supporting free software. Even after Valve goes to shit, their contributions to the ecosystem will live on.
It’s why the average sheep can never see the value in free software; it keeps them dependent on corporations.
So… what? Hate them in advance, so that if they ever turn evil we’d be prepared?
Be prepared.
Don’t hate, but don’t trust Valve. Treat your Steam library like you don’t own it, and it could be enshittified at any time, because you don’t, and it could.
In practice, prioritize DRM-free stores when convenient. Or better yet, 1st party game dev stores. Archive any games or saves you actually want to go back to, just in case. Game like your Steam client install could require a subscription at a moment’s notice.
Exactly. And unlike many other companies there isn’t even any indication they would want to enshittify anyways. Why would they destroy the foundation of their platform? They have actual paying customers paying the bills, not some force-feed ad slop machine.
Well this is just naive. Steam will die, too.
Kinda presumptuous to call it naive when I never said Steam couldn’t ever die, nor do I believe so. I’m saying that unlike other platforms that enshittify, paying customers hold the final say for Steam. Paying customers are why companies come to Steam, paying customers will not spend money on Steam if they even get close to enshittifying. There is no multi billion dollar ad industry in between that pays the bills, that dictates the enshittification because it demands advertisements be shoved down people’s throats.
What do you think will happen when Gabe dies?
Other people will take his place. And you can be sure there are some greedy fucks pining for his role.
Companies do not have to indicate when they are going to enshitify. It can and has happened over night.
You are right, when Gabe dies, that will be a huge point of uncertainty where people’s trust into Steam will need to be re-established to keep going as it currently is. But that’s a point aside.
Companies do not have to indicate when they are going to enshitify. It can and has happened over night.
It can happen, but it’s not the norm by far. Reputation is still to some companies their key indicator of profitability, and Steam is certainly one of those. By that logic you should at any time be expecting loot boxes instead of products in your supermarket tomorrow, but that’s kind of ridiculous because everyone would hop to a competitor immediately, assuming no foul play. As I mentioned, paying customers hold a firm grasp of the value of Steam. If the people stop coming to Steam, the companies do too, and Steam dies.
They already take 30% on each game. It’s huge, considering they didn’t spent a dime on these games. That means they will take most of the profit margin on a game, if any, while a studio has to pay for dozens or hundreds of employees, tons of hardware, workspaces, etc.
They spend money on each game uploaded to their store. How could you seriously think they aren’t spending any money?
You’re more making an argument that games are too cheap now.
You don’t think valve has employees and hardware to maintain?
Do You have any idea what the hosting infrastructure, steam works, and traffic costs?
Also, valve is giving massive contributions to open source from those 30%
Do You have any idea what the hosting infrastructure, steam works, and traffic costs?
Yeah, not 30% of all PC games. It’s how they turn out absurd profit.
That absurd profit is really from that digital trinket store/gambling bs.
30% for a digital storefront? Cheap for what they provide. Y’all really need to understand how bad it is out here. Go look at what Amazon takes from authors. eBay takes 30% from me sometimes! That’s a real physical product i have to ship!
30% to valve for what they offer? Yes, absolutely a good fucking deal. They will market my game and make it look as best it can on their storefront. That is absolutely worth the cost.
Never said that. But what is better for the dev? Using those services or run their own?
And I am fine with Valve making absurd profits, after all, they have put at least 500.000.000 USD into open source (Around 100-200 external oss devs on payroll for projects like Mesa, SDL,…).
Will I leave steam and call valve out if they get toxic? Yes! Are they evil or the enemy right now? To the contrary.
What would be better for the dev is a 9% platform cut and just a slightly smaller megayacht for Gabe.
Using those services or run their own?
If they could have still images and text on the Steam store and a link to their external site for everything else, it’d by far be running their own.
It’s the exposure that Steam has an effective monopoly on.
Not everything has to be black and white. I appreciate Steam, but 30% is absurd. They’re absolutely raising the price of games and taking money away from developers.
With Amazon and eBay fees for physical products being nearly that high it just doesn’t feel that absurd to me.
Games haven’t risen in price, ever. Gamers should be paying $100+ for most games now. That’s the truth. The amount of man hours, time, etc etc to make a game? Fuck that no wonder why games suck now! I’m a full time 3D artist and I would absolutely never put a game out unless it was a passion project because gamers don’t want to pay what these things are worth anymore!
Why do you think there’s so much bullshit nickle and diming in this industry? Because they can’t raise the fucking price! So they found the worst way to do it through login incentives, monthly seasons, and garbage dlc that should have been in the game to begin with.
The amount of man hours, time, etc etc to make a game? Fuck that
And 30% of the purchase price doesn’t go to those people. It goes to Gabe’s yacht.
GOG takes 30%, most publishers take 30 to 50%, apple app store takes 30%, as does Google.
Is this to high? Maybe, I don’t publish games. But at least it is not absurd in means of industry standards :(
GOG’s fee is flexible, as are publisher contracts, which have no relevance to the discussion, as it’s in addition to store fees and involves major investments. Google is changing its fee to 20%. Epic’s is currently 0%. Microsoft Store’s is 12%, itch’s is adjustable. In the PC market, Valve is pretty much the main outlier at this point.
It’s the exposure that Steam has an effective monopoly on.
See OP image. It’s an effective monopoly because the competition have dumped billions into squandering decades of consumer goodwill.
So, Apple and other companies that charge 30% to host apps: BAD
Steam changes 30% to host games: GOOD
I’m not saying this is your argument, necessarily, but it’s funny to hear that “30% is good actually!” in the tech space because the last few years it’s been “Apple and others who charge 30% are taking too much! All they do is host and manage the traffic for apps!”
And I’m not trying to say Apple is good or anything. It’s just funny.
So you’re not really saying anything at all then. Got it
Then you need to read better.
They are calling out the hypocrisy of those criticizing Apple but worshiping Valve using the same argument for both.
Exactly.
No one needs to worship Steam. Gabe will never let you on one of his 50 yachts.
They help market the game as well on their storefront, and im sure all the analytics around the steam pages for the game.
They could just let you rot in obscurity.
They provide forums and a place for mods to work as well.
They provide chat/friends
Valve is one of the most profitable company in the world.
I mean, just look at this thread and see how much free propaganda they get from gamers. That’s a lot of free labour just to defend a billionaire that profits from gambling for kids.
Everyone in here is just choosing a different flavor of billionaire to get behind, though.
Epic is not a co-op, lol.
What exactly is this the answer to?
Yes, they make a shit load of money. But assuming you want to distribute a game directly, how much of would that cost you, and let’s ignore the whole visibility shit for a second.
You can litteraly watch 45gb movie instantly over torrent these days.
Because p2p … How exactly does this apply to content distribution? Torrents are not always a reliable option…
There’s tons of options to host and share files, torrents are just one.
Steam, like spotify and other platforms is just convenient, and in this era of me, myself and I, it’s only thing most people care about.
Anyway, I’m done with the steam fanboys and their cognitive dissonance. Just remember you are directly creating the enshitifcation of gaming, because at the rate studios are firing people, you will soon enjoy only AI stuff, the only way to make profit from games.
Honestly not that much. The biggest thing Valve brings to the table is advertising and access to customers.
Hosting doesn’t cost that much. If you were that desperate for bandwidth (no one is), torrents exist as an option. Blizzard used to have torrents built into their downloader.
The infrastructure is a nice afterthought.
My day job is designing complex IT platforms.
And the cost goes massive down with size.
So. If your game sells badly, you will most likely spend more. Oney in hosting and distribution then you would make profit.
For example, assume your game has around 50gb. You sell 100 copies of it. You can easily calculate 1-2$ per download.
Add your own personal on top of it, someone has to run that stuff, and licensing and more for statistics tooling and more.
Platforms like valve allow indie devs and small studios to avoid all those costs upfront.
“Not that much” depends on the view
There definitely is some amount of expenditure by valve. I don’t know if its 30% worth. For multiplayer games they provide a server/client DDOS protection and traffic optomization service though it is opt in by the developer through an api. The other option for this tends to be a “contact sales” priced product from cloudflare. There is also some of proton’s development, some linux graphics driver work, and workshop support though I suspect hosting and content moderation expenditure there is fairly minimal.
Brick and mortar stores take 50% of revenue usually. The profit margin for the manufacturer applies after that
You comparing a store with a digital storefront? Anyway enjoy the library you don’t own, at best it will die with you because you can’t even transfer it, that’s if steam doesn’t change their buisness model for whatever reason.
Those studios are paying Valve how much for tailored marketing throughout the game’s lifespan?
30% of all their revenue throughout their entire lifespan.
Precisely.
30% is the industry standard though, and Valve’s contributions of distribution and discovery infrastructure, its audience, and expanding hardware initiatives are not nothing. If you’re not pricing a game to give yourself a healthy margin within the 70% or your development model doesn’t make that viable, that’s really on you.
Industry standard doesn’t mean reasonable. It’s renter class bullshit, profiting off of other’s labor. Pretending creating a distribution and discovery platform is seriously deserving of 30% of the value of the hard work of game devs is not reasonable. If it was reasonable, gabe wouldn’t be a billionaire.
I never called it reasonable. I just don’t think it’s especially egregious. Honestly, I would price the value of Valve’s contribution (which is definitely not zero) at maybe 15% to 20%, but that’s just a gut feeling.
I mean, Spotify’s model is the industry standard, and it still suck big time and doesn’t give a shit about artists.
Anyway if I’ve learn anything over the past 10 years, it’s that it would probably be easier to convince a room full of maga to vote for Hillary Clinton than the average gamer to admit that steam sucks. So keep kissing this billionaire’s ass because he really does care about you, and remember Ubisoft and Epic (12% cut) bad.
I’m not saying the standard doesn’t suck, just taking issue with the implication that anyone using it is uniquely bad to do so.
But yeah, you’re right that getting me to admit Steam (overall) sucks would be nigh impossible. I genuinely don’t believe it does, so there’s nothing to admit. Maybe you could convince me to lie about it though? Lol.
I do admit there’s a few places it sucks, the gambling stuff being the biggest, but their positives eclipse those for me. I also acknowledge I’m in a privileged position being able to enjoy Valve’s efforts in VR, Linux compatibility, etc. directly and that I might have different opinions if I was on the outside looking in. I imagine that’s not quite the admission you want though.
Challenging biased views, half truths, or having your own opinions isn’t kissing some billionaire’s ass. I don’t want billionaire’s to exist. Gabe shouldn’t need to be a billionaire. But all of this is absofuckinglutely irrelevant to whether or not Steam is a good platform, unless Gabe was wielding Steam in a way that would promote a billionaire class, which he isn’t.
Oh, I didn’t know you were a personal friend of Gabe, my bad.
Anyway I don’t care about people like you, you are the problem. I care about people looking for solutions to have a healthy and fair industry.
I use to make a decent living out of music and sound design, 15-20 years ago. Then spotify came along and nobody lives from selling music anymore. Now I teach and if I was honest with my students, I’d tell them they are wasting time. Even here in Montreal, with hundreds of studios, there’s basically no more job in audio because the only way to make profit out of game is with AI and sound banks. So yeah, enjoy the enshitification of games, you’re directly promoting it.
You really need to take a good look in the mirror, because you are reading things that aren’t there and embarrassing yourself and the industry you claim to care about.
Lol. blablabla steam is good blablabla good billionaire blabla
If we could collect only 10% of the energy gamers spent on kissing gabe’s ass, we could solve the energy crisis forever.
Think of me in a few years, when you complain about studios releasing only AI stuff. And if you have kids, I hope they don’t become gambling addicts because I do care about that.
I’m not gonna say Steam sucks. It’s a nice organizational tool that enforces some standards.
I’d rather have a drm free game that’s 20% cheaper though. The devs can pocket the other 10%.
The “30% is the industry standard” claim is not even true anymore. Epic currently takes 0% to expand its catalog, though from what I remember, it estimated that it needs to take 7% or so to be profitable. Microsoft takes 12%. Itch allows to adjust. GOG’s fee varies from deal to deal. Ubisoft (and EA) no longer sell third-party games, so they’re out of scope here.
The only way I’ve seen people try to counter this is by referring to the mobile and console store fees, but going by the Epic v. Google trial where the jury was asked to define the market and defined it as Android, there’s just no way that argument would hold water. Still, console manufacturers produce at a loss, so they need to make up for that. In the mobile market, Google is already changing its fee to be 20% or less.
Edit: lawsuit->trial
Yea we are talking about platforms that sell vs platforms that are desperate to sell.
Do you buy games from fucking Microsoft of all companies?!
It’s a joke to think that Microsoft is doing this for any other reason besides they have to to trick idiots into investing into their platform (again after giving it up the first fucking time!)
Gog and itch are fine but itch is definitely a particular gamer market. Gog is easier to use for pirated games.
Amazon was toxic from day one, anticompetitive, borderline illegal, definitely corrupt as hell. It is what Epic Games Store would have been if it had been long before steam lol. The amount of shit that they bankrupted into the ground with cheap Chinese copies off the backs of VC funds while making tons of loss and then removing their storefronts…
But as soon as GabeN dies, steam will become shit probably as the vultures close in.
Amazon enshittified with their one-click-shopping patent, though. They were never good.
That’s a fucking patent?!
One of the most accurate descriptions of this entire beef.
Steam does nothing and just keeps winning.
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.
In a service business, if you do things right, people think you’re doing nothing.
This also applies to IT support.
“everything works fine, why do we pay you people?”
“everything is broken, why do we pay you people!”
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.
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.
I knew I know the name from somewhere, so I checked on my Kobo. He also wrote Technofeudalism
Oh, right. Well, I’m editing his Wikipedia page in that case.
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
Other way around? Steam was Microsoft’s competitor back in the day. Steam killed them once already.
“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.
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.
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.
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
The William Shatner song?
We don’t have Steam Greenlight anymore, but otherwise 100% agree.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
No matter how good or bad steam was and is for gaming industry, they made gaming on Linux not only viable but great, and hence made completely ditching windows an achievable thing with little effort.
I’m grateful for that, even though I boycotted them from day 1 (until left4dead came out) for destroying physical and used games.
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?
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.
We lived it, babe. We were literally there when it happened.
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)_/¯
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!
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.
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.
Yea we fucking should, but steam is not a monopoly.
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.
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.
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.
I never said it was too big or too important to be broken up. I’m saying I don’t see how to split it up that actually solves the problem. I don’t think people are scared of Valve the Game Devs, maybe the hardware section but there were tons of other options on the market almost as soon as the Steam Deck took off. It’s the store that people take issue with, so how do you separate to make the store not a problem? Regionally? Have Steam NA, Steam EU, Steam Asia, etc. etc.? I suppose that is possible, but I’m unsure if I see how that actually solves the problem (even assuming you can get around people just buying from a different region’s Steam).
As for nationalizing it… I just don’t have any faith in the US government to not turn it to absolute shit on day one. Unfortunately, at this stage, I trust Valve and it’s Billionaire CEO more than I do the government. I hate to just resign myself to trying to make the most of the dystopia we’ve been given but… :(
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.
Other platforms sucking is not a monopoly. That’s the opposite of one.
the best selling game of all time isn’t even on steam
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
