People don’t want their library split on multiple stores. There’s always going to be a monopoly because of that, unless we start having multiple exclusives on different platforms. For videogames it’s accentuated by the fact that people want to be able to interact with friends, so they need to be on the same platform. Steam came first and had the best features, so they won.
Music? Spotify is in front of everything else
TV/Movies? This is the exception, as in this case there’s a lot of content that can be available on a platform and not the other. Netflix is still first, but if you look at the numbers the gap is lower.
I used to buy everything on gog, now with the steam deck I went back to steam. Yeah I know, I can use gog there too, but using steam is easier for sync etc. So, you see, steam made something amazing, the steam deck, and everybody copied it, but they were still the first.
If gog made a steam deck client with easy management I’d gladly go back to them. They still take a 30% cut but I’m happy to support DRM free games. Itch is also nice but they don’t have a lot of games (I do play 99% Indies).
IMHO there are no good or realistic solutions:
- lots of exclusives
- interoperability between stores, like the fediverse (this would actually be really cool)
- everybody sell games directly
- everybody goes back to buy physical
Can anyone overthrow Steam on PC? “As long as Valve is independent and not a publicly traded company,” analyst says it looks impossible
overthrow the king? perhaps it is…
how about an ai-powered wrecking ball to the castle instead?
Valve admits Steam has an AI slop and cloning problem, but says ‘we don’t want to be gatekeepers telling developers which tools they should or shouldn’t use’
Microsoft GamePass was serious competition and they ruined it, for now. They had managed to build a system where there was no reason for folks not to buy in, people got nearly unlimited games and then often paid for DLC and cash shop items for games they didn’t even own. It was converting the average gaming market to an a la cart style cash shop which as much as 2010 me would consider this offensive, today it is often better for gamers without money.
The only other thing that would seriously compete with Steam would be a marketplace that had tradeable games but I think the game makers don’t want this so no developer would sign up for it.
Itch.io exists and it does a fantastic niche gaming distribution job so I don’t see how a new competitor can do better than what is already out there.
Microsoft GamePass was serious competition
It never was. There was no chance that a service like that would be profitable in the gaming world unless the monthly costs become astronomical per user which would automatically lose most subscribers.
That’s an interesting rewording of "If you’re a PLC, you can be harpooned at any time. It’s almost like investors are useless.
Steam could be assholes.
They are not.
Best argument for no public trading of the company.
Public trading results in short-sighted planning because investors can always buy/sell stocks and move on to whatever is profitable moment to moment. Private companies plan longer term because the investors benefit from the company’s long-term success. Their profits come from the company’s profits, not the value of the stock.
Make no mistake, Valve is in it for the money. They’re as greedy as anyone. But they operate under a corporate structure that values the long-term viability of its platform.
And they’re still assholes. They are all about lootboxes, DLC, etc. And they take a massive cut of sales. Do Sony and Microsoft and Nintendo do the same? Yeah - but they also provide the hardware platforms. Does Best Buy and Gamestop charge similar fees? Yeah - but they have the overhead of the retail locations. Steam makes stupid money off a download platform and game launcher.
Gabe is a billionaire yacht collector, not your friend. His greed just takes a longer view than that of someone looking to sell their shares from minute to minute.
The biggest thing these days is that they are not hostile towards their customers. The bar is that fucking low.
Their assholery isn’t customer-facing, but it ABSOLUTELY impacts customers.
Yeah they could be 10x cooler by just being slightly less greedy, but they want lots and lots of money, so
At this point in time I care way more about Valve’s investment in Linux gaming than I do about Sony/Microsoft/Nintendo working on their next closed proprietary PC with custom controllers.
So Gabe is a billionaire asshole who is not your friend. But unlike other billionaire assholes that aren’t your friend he doesn’t choose to go out of his way to fuck over his customers and his products for a few pennies more. There’s gotta be a term for that.
successful.
Public traded companies are short sighted because they give the CEO et al large amounts of stock, making them stock holders, aligning their interests with making the stock go up.
you do not want Gabe Newell answering to a bunch of cunts who want to enshittify for a quick buck.
including getting bought-out by a company that is (microsoft, ea, sony, etc)
One one hand, I’m glad Steam isn’t abusing their market position and treats customers well.
On the other hand, why are our rules and laws setup such that it is impossible to compete with a company which has a de-facto monopoly on a service.
But they don’t have a monopoly…they just provide a superior product. Anyone can open another marketplace up, a lot have. There are no laws saying they can’t and valve has never tried to suggest they can’t.
They’re still a de-facto monopoly.
Windows is a de-facto monopoly, and there are stuff where Windows is still better than Linux. I actually worked with Linux API, and while the base Posix stuff are okay-ish, others make you appreciate the COM interfaces on Windows.
“Oh, just use SDL!” SDL abstracts away a lot of things.
because this is how capitalism has evolved. it’s always this kind of shit.
These guys are so privileged they think they are entitled to success without innovation.
THERE WAS NOTHING LIKE STEAM AT THE TIME.
If they want what Gabe has they need to do what he did: INNOVATE.
His innovation was to create the modern online verification bullshit that plagues the industry. Before Steam, you bought a game, put in the disc, and played it. If it HAD and online component, you may have had to type in a CD key.
No extra launcher to access your library. No having to reconnect to the internet to renew your license. I had a dedicated gaming PC that didn’t even have a modem. And no mandatory updates. It’s unacceptable that any time I want to play a single-player game I have to hope there hasn’t been some 140 gig patch that I have to install because the multi-player suite I’ll never open added a new $30 outfit to a character and they just make everyone reinstall everything.
If Half Life 2 had come out a year earlier, I wouldn’t have been able to play it because I didn’t have internet connected to my gaming PC until college.
God I remember raging at having to go online and install this “Steam” bullshit thing just to play a game I bought from the brick and mortar store in my town.
All of those problems are easily avoided by not playing AAA slop
If you’re installing a game through Steam, you’re dealing with DRM, a third-party launcher, and online verification, and Steam is taking a 30% cut to insert those features into the process. It doesn’t matter how “indie” your game is.
Valve will take the cut from the sale no matter what of course, but the DRM and even the in-game Steamworks integration is actually optional. You can publish DRM-free files on Steam which do not require Steam to run at all if you want. People might get grouchy if you skip achievements and save sync or whatever, though.
ETA: https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/The_big_list_of_DRM-free_games_on_Steam
In some industries and markets, copycats can come along and undercut the original without actually improving things, but just offering a better price. For whatever reason, nobody else seems to be able to meaningfully compete with Steam on that front, either.
I cannot emphasize this enough. This is the entire modus operandi when it comes to venture capital and “entrepreneurs” in industry.
They have a singular talent: exploitation. Be it a mineral rich vein under a mountain, an oil/gas field, middle-class folks with spending cash, gig workers, or information economy workers (e.g. programmers), it’s just one more resource to convert into wealth. Left unchecked, all the social evils we see from this thinking come into play: inequality, slavery, usury, fascism, and so on. The above even applies to their own employees, as there is no distinction in class of human being outside of the status of “owner”. There is no higher calling, no alternative focus. There are only resources and money.
The instant you make “keeping the company alive”, “make a product people actually want”, or even "employ people"a focus, the goal is no longer exploitative. It’s arguably more socialist, even if the overall goal is to continue to thrive as a for-profit business. As a result, it’s not useful to these jackals as-is. It must first be converted into parts to be exploited.
Such a thing is also a pariah in capitalist circles. They fucking hate it. The bigger Valve gets, the more hit-pieces we see in the media. Also, the more we see CEOs circle the wagons when the likes of Epic attempts to topple their market dominance somehow, and it always fails. Socialist corporate ju-jitsu appears to be a winning strategy, and thank goodness.
Also not be shitbag garbage monsters.
If Valve just made using Steam as soul-crushingly painful as we imagine it must, we might have a chance! Imagine what could be if the wizards behind the Google Play Store took a shot at making Steam!
I have a great idea! What if we censor every negative review! People would see all these
amazingshit games with amazing reviews and buy them!when it first release, steam was ASS
Steam was ass because it was just a an update platform, and most of us still had 56k or isdn as their means to the Internet and gaming. Yea it sucked when updates came out and you had to patch, it was a new thing to get patches like that vs buying a physical disk and the game just worked and didn’t require a day 1 update.
It was also the first online DRM most gamers interfaced with.
True from what I’ve read, and honestly I never used it in that form. I was mostly gaming on consoles at that time.
Their monopoly is preferable to many alternatives, but we need to remember:
It is a monopoly.
Their 30% cut is egregious.
The latter should be a simple argument, but I’ve had some bewildering interactions where people cannot grasp ‘number too big’ unless I name a precise lower value and stake my life on it. Nah. The simple fact is, it’s the same gross cut that console manufacturers take. Those companies design and manufacture the underlying hardware, and ruthlessly maintain absolute control over what games are permitted on the platform. So it’s eyebrow-raising that a mere independent repository can also scrape off a third of the retail price for games they didn’t make.
The former is a simple argument, but only when people can be honest about words. Every denial boils down to ‘but I like Valve!’ no matter how thoroughly I establish, so do I. They’re doing fine. They’re still a monopoly. There’s one store you kinda have to be on because everybody goes there… often exclusively. They have a super-duper-majority market share. Their competitors exist but do not matter. Epic has one game that makes a billion dollars a year selling hats, and even they can’t move the needle.
It’s fine because they’re not evil. They have not abused their monopoly position for anticompetitive practices, and it’s hard to argue they’re anti-consumer. But the precondition for abusing a monopoly is being a monopoly.
and ruthlessly maintain absolute control over what games are permitted on the platform.
Have you looked at any of the console stores in recent years? They’re all also infested with garbage.
It is a monopoly.
Semi-monopoly, not a true one like Apples store on the iPhone. Also no one is forced to use Steam, there are alternative shops. The PC platform is open. In fact the most successful games aren’t even on Steam. If Steam was a real monopoly, then this wouldn’t be possible. If you purchase a XBOX handheld that is based on PC hardware, you don’t have to install Steam, you can just use the XBOX shop. If you want you can install GOG and Epic shops too. Maybe the League of Legends launcher too.
And it goes a step further, because game keys for Steam can be purchased on other platforms and shops without paying Steam a single cut of the price. And yet, those games purchased with such a key are integrated into Steam and Valve provides “free” service to them. With all having said this, I don’t think one can Steam call a true monopoly.
Their 30% cut is egregious.
But its industry standard, not really egregious in the sense of abusing the market. Valve also provide services beyond just marketing their games on the platform, they host the games, provide features, do research and make it better and so on. Also the cut gets lower to 25% and then 20% if it sells better (which is not helping indie devs at all). Having all said this, I think 30% as the industry standard is way too high, but its not a fault of Steam only.
Standard Oil was not an absolute monopoly. Nobody was forced to buy from them. And yet.
An egregious standard is still egregious. The excuse has always been, well, Nintendo made the console, sold on thin margins, and they manufacture the carts, sooo an entire third must be reasonable. But Steam proves the only reason is that they can get away with it. They don’t need any force besides their existing dominance, to maintain that dominance.
It’s not a problem. But it easily could be. That’s all anyone’s talking about when they worry about the company after Gabe.
I don’t think that the Oil situation is comparable to the Open Standard PC. Everyone can decide to buy the next game on a different platform. You are not really locked to the Steam eco system. If your nation is based on Oil, then you are screwed. That is hugely different situation.
No, Steam is not a real monopoly. Steam also does not abuse the monopoly like Google does with their positioning and control of Android. That’s a real monopoly. And Nintendo is a monopoly too, regardless how you frame it.
Steam does not abuse their what?
I don’t understand the question.
You went straight from ‘they don’t have a monopoly’ to ‘they don’t abuse their monopoly’ in literally the next sentence. This topic is bewildering to discuss, because everyone not simply acknowledging ‘yes of course the one store with like ninety percent of sales is a monopoly’ is trying to juggle several conversations they’d rather be having. I often come to regret mentioning Epic or consoles because people pivot into criticism like I offered any form of defense.
Look: I have an NES homebrew that opens with the Yuzu logo and the words “never give Nintendo money.” I’ve been yelling about Apple’s enforced censorship since 2007. I’ve called for Google to be broken up for at least ten years. You do not need to tell me what an abusive monopoly looks like, in this thread where I am explicitly making the distinction between abusive monopolies and just plain having a monopoly.
There’s other subthreads saying Valve succeeds “despite capitalism.” People get so fucking weird about this company, because they refuse to believe that a corporation can do normal business and still be fine.
To quote myself:
Semi-monopoly, not a true one like Apples store on the iPhone.
What happens when Gabe moves on? I guess all good things come to an end.
Enshitification will start it’s course and it will be fast.
Eeh, not necessarily. Eric Johnson is next in line, and he’s pretty chill.
I do think steam needs competition because a monopolistic marketplace always ends bad, but also fuck epic and their whinging. It just feels like they expected to enter into the digital gaming marketplace landscape and valve would just roll over and give up.
Make. A. Better. Product. you dolts, its that easy. If you want to disrupt valves monopoly in the marketplace, you have to make something disrupting. A storefront that has 10% of the features steam has then trying to snipe developers into exclusive deals by trying to offer them lower rates isnt going to do the trick.
There’s also the whole thing where Tim Sweeney is such a dick constantly running his mouth that I hate him so much I won’t even use his platform for free stuff. And there have been games I actually wanted that were offered. I still chose Steam and / or GoG over literally free because fuck that guy and the AI slop version of a horse he rode in on.
Make. A. Better. Product.
Certainly easier said than done when it comes to Steam, given how much of a head start they have and the resources available to them to compete with any serious attempt, but it feels impossible to Tim because he spent all of Epic’s time and money whining, litigating, and giving out free games instead of making the EGS better for consumers.
Coming up on 8 years since its initial launch and they’re only now adding “advanced digital commerce technology” like a shopping cart. All bluster no substance.
All they have to do is try to make something actually focused on customers, rather than focused on extracting wealth from people. Honestly, at this point, I think not sucking would be more than enough to get a foot in the door and suck up all the people who hate Steam for some reason
Exactly, this very much gives off “We’ve tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas!” vibe.
Not saying I have a clue what they could do to disrupt steams monopoly, but id gather one of the suits that Epic pays 7 figures to probably should get on that.
It helps that the industry seems to always be inhabited by the greediest, most misanthropic companies on the planet.
About the only weak point Steam has, is the inconsistent and poor treatment of adult games. Hopefully we either see Steam stop being a prude, or someone definitively taking that segment away from them outright.
Do they realize that what they really said was: having shareholders destroys businesses.
I was thinking around the same, more specifically that what they’re saying is that “in the long run companies managed to produce value for shareholders actually produce less value that companies managed to produce value for a single private owner”.
This is actually pretty consistent with what we see in many industries with both kinds of companies and a pretty daming indictment of publicly traded companies as a mechanism for increasing value creation.
Note the exception to the rule is Private equity looking for a place to unload debt and need a fall guy
shareholders in public companies dont care about the health of the business
Lol, this is an unironically awesome takeaway.
Anyone who isn’t head deep in Capitalism understands that, yeah.
Private companies have shareholders as well.
That’s a new one for me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shareholder
Both public companies and private corporation have shareholders.
But only for companies participating in the equity ownership, right? I’m not fully versed with that, so need to ask here. I don’t know how this works with Gabe and Valve. I think the important detail here is, that Valve is not publicly traded and can decide who buys shares from their company and could reject any money. I don’t think this is possible with publicly traded companies, right?
Ownership of companies via shares is only for LLCs (which is a possibility but in practice uncommon) and Corporations and both Sole Proprietorships and Partnerships do not have shares.
That said, it is indeed possible for a company to have ownership by shares and not be publicly traded (i.e. not in the stock market) so for example a corporation with no traded shares would be a private corporation.~
This is what I found out for the US by searching for “types of companies” and “LLC shares”.
The countries I lived in and owned companies in Europe have similar things but with different names (for example what a Partnership in the US is roughly what’s called a “Society by quotas” in Portugal and is actually the most common kind of company).
In my experience people that never had their own registered business don’t usually know any of this because they have no need to look into it.
Yeah, often times if a company needs a loan then they open up a stake.
i think in private corporations only a very limited amount of shareholders can have shares
If they are shareholders, they hold at least one share. Every one of them. There’s no limit on number of shareholders or shares held. But those shares are not publicly traded.
There are limits on shareholders in private companies.
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/5/500-shareholder-threshold.asp
Looks like the number is 2000, but that excludes employees. It used to be 500.
That’s only a (USA) reporting limit. A private company can still have more than 2000 shareholders, but it must then publicly report its finances like a public company would.
Fair… but why would any private company do that without going public? Do any?
My steam account is 22 years old. I probably have 400+ games on there. I do believe in GOG and try to buy games there where I can, but if I have a choice between the major platforms, I will pretty much always choose steam. I bought a bunch of games on Xbox Live and my PS3 back in the 2000s that I no longer have access to. There’s a certain subset of gamers for whom Steam will always be the platform of choice.
GOG might one day, but they need to step up their experience before that even becomes a possibility.
Maybe other competitors should start offering a better experience to compete instead of trying to shovel enshittified garbage onto everyone and then complain about other companies that don’t shit all over their customers (looking at you, Tim Sweeney, you turd of a CEO).
They seem to be keeping themselves afloat at least. Theirs is the only launcher I’ve bothered installing besides Steams.
Maybe gog should send a few more accidental Nazi emails to really get the point across.
