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”.
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?
There have been reports of Valve telling developers they can’t sell their game cheaper elsewhere (such as on a platform with a smaller cut than Steam’s 30%). But I think that was refuted.
It’s steam keys you aren’t allowed to sell cheaper elsewhere. Which makes some amount of sense: sell your game 30% cheaper elsewhere? None of their business. Sell a steam key 30% cheaper elsewhere? You’re using their download servers, infrastructure, social features, etc without giving them their cut.
From what I’ve heard, steam does not charge for the generation of steam keys. So every steam key sold off platform is a loss of sales for them. Restricting the price of keys sounds perfectly reasonable in this case.
Supposedly it was actually about someone wanting to sell Steam keys off Steam for cheaper, but I cba to find the proof right now so it could also be fake news.
Ok sure. But just because other stuff is worse doesn’t mean you shouldn’t fix something. We don’t stop fining drunk drivers just because murder is worse.
In practice having a game on Steam is even superior to having a DRM free copy. My DRM free copies of games are on some old hard drive in a drawer. My steam library is right there. Removing and installing games is super straightforward.
I like and use Steam. I agree that their dominance is mostly due to the lack of quality competition. They haven’t done anything super shady or anti-consumer.
But don’t expect that to last. It’s a story that’s been repeated countless times now. We know how this goes. One day something will change - probably ownership - and the enshittification will begin.
That’s what DRM free is about. You are in control of your DRM free games even after the developer, publisher, and the store you bought it from have all gone to hell. They also run better years from now when old DRM schemes no longer play nice with OS changes. DRM free is extra insurance that you’ll always have that game and be able to play it.
Too bad I don’t have the hard drive space to store my entire library. One day I’m going to be very sad right alongside everybody else.
I have lost like two dozen DRM free games because the hard drive they were archived on died. There are also some DVDs filled with DRM free games, that are somewhere in my closet. I don’t even have a DVD drive anymore.
When Steam started getting popular, I resisted it for years. Instead getting DRM free Indie games and lots of Humble Bundles. At some point there was one game I could get on Steam, so I started using it.
My old Steam games are easy and fast to access, install, and play again. Far easier than rummaging through my own archive. I don’t need to configure or install Proton to play games on Linux either.
The lack of DRM on my older games hasn’t provided me any actual real life benefit. The fears pandered about by opponents of Steam haven’t materialized in more than a decade. If anything, the advantages of Steam have become more apparent.
I just fucking pirate in that case. That’s a simple fix. I’m not buying games from dev sites directly and I’m not putting up with bs. I’d rather never play a game again if it got that bad. It’s like YouTube, barely anything is worth the hassle. Make it worse and I’m done entirely.
Maybe the difference is effort versus objective reality.
You and OP are concerned with whether or not they became a monopoly maliciously when I think the previous commenter is concerned with whether or not they simply are a monopoly.
In my view they are a monopoly and they have abused that. I’m thinking of their loot boxes and silent support of skin gambling.
We should be mistrustful of institutions with this much power, regardless of if they’re actively abusing it.
How are their lootboxes a Monopoly? They suck and should be banned in any game/platform because gambling is Bad… But is Fifa or overwatch a Monopoly because they have lootboxes? The silent Support of skin gambling? Didnt they make it harder to trade skins to combat These sites? What could they even rly do to stop the gambling sites? Because as long as you can trade skins the sites will remain.
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.
I hate to sound like a debbie debater but anecdotal evidence does not really weigh up against the fact that they control like 75% of PC gaming distribution. And to re-iterate the point I made in the comment you replied to, the argument is that they control enough of the market so they could do serious harm. The argument is not that they control more of their market than other monopolies, like the energy providers, or that they control 100% of the market.
The reason I’m not crazy worried about steam, and I don’t even think it’s a monopoly per-se (although I’m not referring to any definition, just a vibe) is that steam has a lot of the “market share” of video game purchases, sure, but if steam shut down tomorrow, or did something heinous enough to warrant a boycott, I am able to move. The epic games store and GoG both exist at the very least.
It would be a pain for me because I have a lot of money poured into steam, but not for anyone just getting into gaming who doesn’t have cache with steam. I didn’t pour it into steam because it was the only place for me to go, it was the best place for me to go. Idk, a big difference in Steam’s “monopoly” is that they don’t own a scarce physical commodity like oil or land, and they don’t have anything exclusive except maybe Valve games. Also unlike a monopoly there are many similarly functional competitors easily accessible on the Internet that offer an almost identical service.
Steam “locks you in” to their ecosystem. But only for each individual game you choose to buy on their platform. If you didn’t want to hitch all your games to Steam for fear that they shut down or break bad Steam does not mind if you install GoG and buy physical copies of games to diversify your portfolio so to speak.
The steam lock in is a feature, anyways. I don’t want to chase down updates off dev sites or worse the dev shuts down. Which will happen far far far more often than Steam, anyways.
Nothing lasts forever. Steam included. Yes people may lose games they bought but you lose cars you bought too. You’d lose the game eventually either by the disc breaking or the developer dying. Etc etc etc
Things die. Nothing is forever. This includes software.
The argument here is not that Steam is, in the current flawed legal American sense, a monopoly, but that it is a monopoly in the sense that it has cornered enough of the gaming market that it could do very serious harm.
Note that “they’re not currently doing harm” is not a great counterargument here. When my neighbor buys a bazooka, I won’t be satisfied by “don’t worry I’m not currently using it”.
Absolutely this. I’m glad you were able to convey it in a way people understand.
Steam is a blackhole for PC gaming/gamers from a marketing perspective. They’ve capitalized on so much of the market, that once a person buys a game on Steam they are unlikely to buy the same game and/or even future games from a different but similar platform. It is in a sense, locking the consumer in and so many consumers are locked in. Nobody competed with Steam in the PC gaming market for an eternity and it’s not Steams fault at all.
Even if Steam went to absolute shit in the next 20 odd years they’ve pretty much guaranteed that I’ll be coming back to play all the games I’ve ever bought on there. Even if EGS or GoG improves their interface to compete with Steam, I’ve no reason to buy elsewhere (though do support GoG please).
Now to pose a question: How does a competitor even compete with Steam to capture even a % of the market?
Lemme knock out the obvious: Better UI and stronger community / community tools. I think these are a given. That being said, I do think EGS is going the correct route by investing in games / unique games and locking them into their platform. Everybody like free market and availability, but to compete against the goliath that is Steams marketbase, you gotta be the only place where to get some things. It sucks, but that’s what I can’t think of a better, to the point method for anyone to capture a similar market for growth, but what do you think?
That being said, I do think EGS is going the correct route by investing in games / unique games and locking them into their platform.
I strongly disagree. I quit consoles because of the exclusivity nonsense, and EGS guaranteed I will never buy anything from them by doing that shit. I won’t even redeem free games on their platform via Prime Gaming, just on principle.
You compete by giving devs and publishers a better cut, or convincing them to do deeper sales on your platform. You compete by providing a better service to users. You do not compete by literally not competing.
You’re describing how you would compete in a normal competition, but Steam has already had a decade to lock in it’s following. The competition is/was over.
I say that as a Steam user, there’s absolutely nothing a competitor can do to convince me to start buying / keeping my games on a platform outside Steam. Steam just has it all AND that’s where all my existing games already are. No amount of UI/UX improvements will convince me. No amount of sales will convince me because Steam will have the same game. Better cuts to developers doesn’t bring in repeat customers.
Like, Steam would need to take a nosedive in quality and care and I just don’t see that happening.
Well, exclusive games is the only thing Nintendo really has going for, and it’s working.
And those games being first or third party isn’t really making much difference for the final user.
I don’t particularly like the direction that Nintendo has taken in recent years, but are you willing to ignore that they were the only company in the market for handheld gaming until very recently? It’s not just game exclusives.
I’d sooner sell my pc than give a penny to egs. I won’t even take their free games. EGS will 109% become the evil monopoly you are all so scared of if it gets a chance at all. Fuck that they already have a weird monopoly on game engines (which is making gaming boring as it is).
The EGS app is so poorly built that Heroic, a third party app made by volunteers, runs faster, has a nicer UI, and has more features. EGS are not a serious competitor.
Lemme knock out the obvious: Better UI and stronger community / community tools. I think these are a given.
OK. With you, there.
That being said, I do think EGS is going the correct route
…and, you lost me.
I work in UI, outside the game industry. It’s plain to me very, very few publishers care about developing good UI or community tools. Epic is no exception. Perhaps that wasn’t what you meant, but if it’s a venue they intentionally ignore, it fits the OP picture perfectly.
I also think there are other features on which Steam has failed to compete, and an inventive competitor could investigate. Things like better game integration, better curation, promises against censorship to publishers of adult content, or creative uses of AI to improve player experiences, are all options. But I think that between the attempts of Google, Amazon, and Epic, it’s seemed that simply throwing money at the game industry without knowledge of what’s valuable to gamers, has not worked well.
Those points are valid, but do you really think having better UI/UX is going to win them over customers when compared to Steam? Like, Steam is such a behemoth. Hypothetical, but if I was still a kid, and my brother had his whole library on Steam, where do you think I’d end up buying most my games? I think good UI/UX is only half the battle in this kind of competition.
You’re right, in that you do need a “hook” - but that needs to be on top of nailing the absolute basics. UI is definitely one of the more basic elements.
The key here is, good UI is not something that needs millions of dollars of investment - it’s generally sort of the opposite. It needs fewer managers over-designing things and finding the best ways to “marketing push” all the high-value product items.
To webpage developers, this motherfucking website is the best site in the world. It loads instantly, and barely requires any coding experience to make. Launchers are not websites (unless you want to bundle 800 MB of Chromium, as many sadly do) but some of the same principles of basicness apply.
It doesn’t matter that it’s not your fault. If you happen to stumble into a situation where you end up being able to do immense harm, it’s for the good of all of us if there’s some mechanism that ensures that you won’t be able to.
It’s more like all the neighbors attempted to build larger worse more dangerous bazookas and failed and are now telling you that the one left with a small working bazooka should be crippled so they have a chance to build their bigger weapons of mass destruction.
Meanwhile, you’ve got the keys to the entire kingdom so you don’t even need to be in the neighborhood to get hit by a bazooka, anyways. (Go pirate ffs)
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”.
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?
There have been reports of Valve telling developers they can’t sell their game cheaper elsewhere (such as on a platform with a smaller cut than Steam’s 30%). But I think that was refuted.
It’s steam keys you aren’t allowed to sell cheaper elsewhere. Which makes some amount of sense: sell your game 30% cheaper elsewhere? None of their business. Sell a steam key 30% cheaper elsewhere? You’re using their download servers, infrastructure, social features, etc without giving them their cut.
From what I’ve heard, steam does not charge for the generation of steam keys. So every steam key sold off platform is a loss of sales for them. Restricting the price of keys sounds perfectly reasonable in this case.
It’s a nice thing for us that they don’t really enforce it at all
Didn’t see it being refuted. I heard emails were leaked
Supposedly it was actually about someone wanting to sell Steam keys off Steam for cheaper, but I cba to find the proof right now so it could also be fake news.
Let me ask you this: does it matter? Whether my neighbor buys or just happens upon a bazooka, he has a bazooka, and I don’t feel safe.
If that’s a bazooka the damn electric and Internet companies have nukes.
Ok sure. But just because other stuff is worse doesn’t mean you shouldn’t fix something. We don’t stop fining drunk drivers just because murder is worse.
In practice having a game on Steam is even superior to having a DRM free copy. My DRM free copies of games are on some old hard drive in a drawer. My steam library is right there. Removing and installing games is super straightforward.
I like and use Steam. I agree that their dominance is mostly due to the lack of quality competition. They haven’t done anything super shady or anti-consumer.
But don’t expect that to last. It’s a story that’s been repeated countless times now. We know how this goes. One day something will change - probably ownership - and the enshittification will begin.
That’s what DRM free is about. You are in control of your DRM free games even after the developer, publisher, and the store you bought it from have all gone to hell. They also run better years from now when old DRM schemes no longer play nice with OS changes. DRM free is extra insurance that you’ll always have that game and be able to play it.
Too bad I don’t have the hard drive space to store my entire library. One day I’m going to be very sad right alongside everybody else.
I have lost like two dozen DRM free games because the hard drive they were archived on died. There are also some DVDs filled with DRM free games, that are somewhere in my closet. I don’t even have a DVD drive anymore.
When Steam started getting popular, I resisted it for years. Instead getting DRM free Indie games and lots of Humble Bundles. At some point there was one game I could get on Steam, so I started using it.
My old Steam games are easy and fast to access, install, and play again. Far easier than rummaging through my own archive. I don’t need to configure or install Proton to play games on Linux either.
The lack of DRM on my older games hasn’t provided me any actual real life benefit. The fears pandered about by opponents of Steam haven’t materialized in more than a decade. If anything, the advantages of Steam have become more apparent.
I just fucking pirate in that case. That’s a simple fix. I’m not buying games from dev sites directly and I’m not putting up with bs. I’d rather never play a game again if it got that bad. It’s like YouTube, barely anything is worth the hassle. Make it worse and I’m done entirely.
Maybe the difference is effort versus objective reality.
You and OP are concerned with whether or not they became a monopoly maliciously when I think the previous commenter is concerned with whether or not they simply are a monopoly.
In my view they are a monopoly and they have abused that. I’m thinking of their loot boxes and silent support of skin gambling.
We should be mistrustful of institutions with this much power, regardless of if they’re actively abusing it.
How are their lootboxes a Monopoly? They suck and should be banned in any game/platform because gambling is Bad… But is Fifa or overwatch a Monopoly because they have lootboxes? The silent Support of skin gambling? Didnt they make it harder to trade skins to combat These sites? What could they even rly do to stop the gambling sites? Because as long as you can trade skins the sites will remain.
Loot boxes are not a monopoly.
Its a bad thing they did to abuse their monopoly stance
??? This doesnt make sense… How did they abuse their Monopoly stance with lootboxes?!
I have a near complete control of a market segment.
I want to monetize that control further.
I release slot machine mini games into my most popular games.
I have contributed to the gambling epidemic that plagues modern society.
I am not a trust worthy entity.
I am Steam
Does that make sense?
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.
I hate to sound like a debbie debater but anecdotal evidence does not really weigh up against the fact that they control like 75% of PC gaming distribution. And to re-iterate the point I made in the comment you replied to, the argument is that they control enough of the market so they could do serious harm. The argument is not that they control more of their market than other monopolies, like the energy providers, or that they control 100% of the market.
The reason I’m not crazy worried about steam, and I don’t even think it’s a monopoly per-se (although I’m not referring to any definition, just a vibe) is that steam has a lot of the “market share” of video game purchases, sure, but if steam shut down tomorrow, or did something heinous enough to warrant a boycott, I am able to move. The epic games store and GoG both exist at the very least.
It would be a pain for me because I have a lot of money poured into steam, but not for anyone just getting into gaming who doesn’t have cache with steam. I didn’t pour it into steam because it was the only place for me to go, it was the best place for me to go. Idk, a big difference in Steam’s “monopoly” is that they don’t own a scarce physical commodity like oil or land, and they don’t have anything exclusive except maybe Valve games. Also unlike a monopoly there are many similarly functional competitors easily accessible on the Internet that offer an almost identical service.
Steam “locks you in” to their ecosystem. But only for each individual game you choose to buy on their platform. If you didn’t want to hitch all your games to Steam for fear that they shut down or break bad Steam does not mind if you install GoG and buy physical copies of games to diversify your portfolio so to speak.
The steam lock in is a feature, anyways. I don’t want to chase down updates off dev sites or worse the dev shuts down. Which will happen far far far more often than Steam, anyways.
Nothing lasts forever. Steam included. Yes people may lose games they bought but you lose cars you bought too. You’d lose the game eventually either by the disc breaking or the developer dying. Etc etc etc
Things die. Nothing is forever. This includes software.
I do exactly that. I have complementary libraries on GoG and Steam, although Steam is obviously bigger.
Absolutely this. I’m glad you were able to convey it in a way people understand.
Steam is a blackhole for PC gaming/gamers from a marketing perspective. They’ve capitalized on so much of the market, that once a person buys a game on Steam they are unlikely to buy the same game and/or even future games from a different but similar platform. It is in a sense, locking the consumer in and so many consumers are locked in. Nobody competed with Steam in the PC gaming market for an eternity and it’s not Steams fault at all.
Even if Steam went to absolute shit in the next 20 odd years they’ve pretty much guaranteed that I’ll be coming back to play all the games I’ve ever bought on there. Even if EGS or GoG improves their interface to compete with Steam, I’ve no reason to buy elsewhere (though do support GoG please).
Now to pose a question: How does a competitor even compete with Steam to capture even a % of the market?
Lemme knock out the obvious: Better UI and stronger community / community tools. I think these are a given. That being said, I do think EGS is going the correct route by investing in games / unique games and locking them into their platform. Everybody like free market and availability, but to compete against the goliath that is Steams marketbase, you gotta be the only place where to get some things. It sucks, but that’s what I can’t think of a better, to the point method for anyone to capture a similar market for growth, but what do you think?
I strongly disagree. I quit consoles because of the exclusivity nonsense, and EGS guaranteed I will never buy anything from them by doing that shit. I won’t even redeem free games on their platform via Prime Gaming, just on principle.
You compete by giving devs and publishers a better cut, or convincing them to do deeper sales on your platform. You compete by providing a better service to users. You do not compete by literally not competing.
You’re describing how you would compete in a normal competition, but Steam has already had a decade to lock in it’s following. The competition is/was over.
I say that as a Steam user, there’s absolutely nothing a competitor can do to convince me to start buying / keeping my games on a platform outside Steam. Steam just has it all AND that’s where all my existing games already are. No amount of UI/UX improvements will convince me. No amount of sales will convince me because Steam will have the same game. Better cuts to developers doesn’t bring in repeat customers.
Like, Steam would need to take a nosedive in quality and care and I just don’t see that happening.
I’ve turned around and bought games they were giving out for free on egs. I won’t even install that bs.
Well, exclusive games is the only thing Nintendo really has going for, and it’s working. And those games being first or third party isn’t really making much difference for the final user.
Only real difference is hardware lock in.
I don’t particularly like the direction that Nintendo has taken in recent years, but are you willing to ignore that they were the only company in the market for handheld gaming until very recently? It’s not just game exclusives.
They were not. They killed the PSP and the Vita. Even before the N64 and the GCube had massive exclusives.
The only “recent” failure was the Wii U, which had only one or two great exclusives.
Nintendo was included in that statement.
But you’re not the market. So this not working for you doesn’t mean it’s a bad strategy, and Nintendo is an example of a company who pulled this off.
I’d sooner sell my pc than give a penny to egs. I won’t even take their free games. EGS will 109% become the evil monopoly you are all so scared of if it gets a chance at all. Fuck that they already have a weird monopoly on game engines (which is making gaming boring as it is).
Maybe, but EGS is also the driving force behind Unreal Engine 5, which despite everyone hating it really is a good engine.
Valve doesn’t even lease it’s engine out to other devs. I don’t even know if they’re still developing their game engine.
So I do give props to EGS for pushing game engines forward and making them available.
The EGS app is so poorly built that Heroic, a third party app made by volunteers, runs faster, has a nicer UI, and has more features. EGS are not a serious competitor.
OK. With you, there.
…and, you lost me.
I work in UI, outside the game industry. It’s plain to me very, very few publishers care about developing good UI or community tools. Epic is no exception. Perhaps that wasn’t what you meant, but if it’s a venue they intentionally ignore, it fits the OP picture perfectly.
I also think there are other features on which Steam has failed to compete, and an inventive competitor could investigate. Things like better game integration, better curation, promises against censorship to publishers of adult content, or creative uses of AI to improve player experiences, are all options. But I think that between the attempts of Google, Amazon, and Epic, it’s seemed that simply throwing money at the game industry without knowledge of what’s valuable to gamers, has not worked well.
Those points are valid, but do you really think having better UI/UX is going to win them over customers when compared to Steam? Like, Steam is such a behemoth. Hypothetical, but if I was still a kid, and my brother had his whole library on Steam, where do you think I’d end up buying most my games? I think good UI/UX is only half the battle in this kind of competition.
You’re right, in that you do need a “hook” - but that needs to be on top of nailing the absolute basics. UI is definitely one of the more basic elements. The key here is, good UI is not something that needs millions of dollars of investment - it’s generally sort of the opposite. It needs fewer managers over-designing things and finding the best ways to “marketing push” all the high-value product items.
To webpage developers, this motherfucking website is the best site in the world. It loads instantly, and barely requires any coding experience to make. Launchers are not websites (unless you want to bundle 800 MB of Chromium, as many sadly do) but some of the same principles of basicness apply.
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.
yeah its like if you were in a race and you said your opponent cheated because you broke your leg and they didn’t
If my neighbor finds a bazooka rather than buy one, he still has a bazooka.
If all your neighbors shoot themselves in the face, it’s not your fault they did that.
It doesn’t matter that it’s not your fault. If you happen to stumble into a situation where you end up being able to do immense harm, it’s for the good of all of us if there’s some mechanism that ensures that you won’t be able to.
It’s more like all the neighbors attempted to build larger worse more dangerous bazookas and failed and are now telling you that the one left with a small working bazooka should be crippled so they have a chance to build their bigger weapons of mass destruction.
Meanwhile, you’ve got the keys to the entire kingdom so you don’t even need to be in the neighborhood to get hit by a bazooka, anyways. (Go pirate ffs)
“Others could get a bigger bazooka” is also not something that would satisfy me if my neighbor has a bazooka.