We HAD a lot of choices. Because there were lots of digital distribution platforms back in the 2000s.
Until that libertarian bastard paid publishers to use Steam for DRM on physical releases.
Used its Most Favoured Nation clause to prevent other services from charging less.
And whoops. They all go out of business.
Generations of G*mers have grown up only knowing the Steam monopoly. That’ll they create any old excuse to try and defend it.
It’s all to common nowadays that PC gaming for a lot of people (and especially people new to the platform) is essentially “Steam” gaming…
There’s still choices, you can buy from the Microsoft store, or publisher stores like origin or Uplay. Epic is a direct competitor, GOG is in a subset of the market like itch.io. Amazon sells PC games. There’s several streaming options as well.
PC gaming is a far more competitive market than your grocery store.
And G*mers throw a pissy fit anytime you suggest using them.
Also Steam leverages it’s monopoly to prevent games being sold cheaper on other services.
Gamers complain all the time. I also don’t really have sympathy for billionaire publishers complaining about the one company not actively fucking consumers.
Valve is actively fucking consumers by preventing games being sold cheaper elsewhere.
Until that libertarian bastard paid publishers to use Steam for DRM on physical releases.
Source on that?
You won’t get one, unless they decide to post a pic of their asshole.
Honest question, is there any other store that dorectly supports seamlessly running games on Linux? Even games that do not natively build for Linux?
No. You can use Lutris although it appears to be unmaintained. Native Itch games work fine. Even better than the Windows versions do on windows because you don’t need Admim privileges to install for whatever fucking reason
Oh, I know how to run my games, my point was more that in that case, Steam does have a literal monopol on being the only store that can run most games on Linux without using any 3rd party tools.
Not that I mind at all, and it’s not a real problem, but I was just wondering if that’s technically the case.
running gog games through heroic is pretty much as seamless as steam
It’s good that the community stepped up when CD Projekt didn’t.
Sorry but I have to disagree.
Holy failed updates batman. After I update some games, I have to fully restart heroic or it is an endless loop of “installing update” -> “Update available, click to install”
‘pretty much’ is doing heavy lifting
idk about that problem but some games just fuck. sometimes the instructions from others in “check compatibility” help
I was just curious whether technically Steam is a monopol for Linux, as in being the only store where you can run games without using 3rd party tools.
Not that I mind, running games on Linux is super easy nowadays (My favorite is Faugus launcher), but technically it can be another hurdle for some people.
But when I need to play some Epic free game, Heroic is awesome.
Well, things like Lutris do the same automated configuring of the underlying tools to run Windows games under Linux and putting it all under a “press button to play” interface as Steam as well as letting you manage your collection.
Lutris (and I believe Heroic too) even integrated with game stores and will list your games there and download them directly from there to install them.
What they don’t have is the store part - you can’t actually BUY games from those tools.
People using for example Lutris to play GOG games in Linux, have pretty much the same experience as using Steam from a browser to buy the games and then Steam app to manage your games collection and launch the games.
Having both Steam and Lutris, I personally prefer the latter because it seamlessly integrates with multiple stores and even works fine with games from other sources (such as games I bought in physical format way back in the day or games I bought directly from the developer).
Sure, the open source apps doesn’t include a store, but as I see it that’s actually a good thing since I’m not interested in getting the sales push to buy more games everytime I want to play a game, same as I’m not interested in seeing ads when I’m browsing the web.
What they don’t have is the store part - you can’t actually BUY games from those tools.
Heroic does let you buy games through the app, but it seems like it’s just a browser that gives heroic an affiliate link when you make the purchase.
I mean, they develop and maintain Proton yet they don’t even prohibit you from using it on other things. If literally any company did that, their shareholders would riot…
…so I don’t think it technically qualifies as a monopoly, but they probably could have had a legal monopoly using an exclusivity patent on the tech (although they technically can’t patent the whole thing because it’s based on Wine, but they could have done this in a way that they could have).
That is a fair point. I’m also not trying to discredit Steam, I don’t really think there’s any kind of a problem as of now (well, apart from the fact that it could go downhill very fast once Steam changes hands), and the services they provide are reasonable and for me worth the 30% cut, especially their Proton work.
If literally any company did that, their shareholders would riot…
If Valve were a publicly traded company, their shareholders would have rioted over it
I use Lutris myself to run GOG games and have the same experience.
Mind you, sometimes I do have problems and have to tweak things to get them to run (usually switching the runner to wine-ge instead of wine-staging).
It’s very rare to be totally unable to run a GOG game in Linux with Lutris.
I would say that my rate of success with Steam is roughly the same.
That said, in Lutris I can run my games sandboxed with networking disabled, which I cannot in Steam (even if I started Steam itself sandboxed with networking disabled, Steam itself needs Internet access).
Maybe Steam is a little more seamless for non-technically adept users (of which there are more and more running Linux nowadays), but at least Lutris (and, I expect, Heroic) are way much more configurable and hence give a lot more possibilities for power users to do things like sandboxing or even to solve problems with running some more obscure or AAA games from a certain DRM-heavy era (for example, there’s a game which no matter what I couldn’t get to run in Steam, but with a bit of tweaking I could get a pirate copy to run in Wine under Lutris - still now that game is listed in ProtonDB as not running in Linux)
There are plenty of frontend alternatives out there that work fairly seamlessly and, at this point, I don’t think work on compatibility tools like Proton would be too affected even if Valve decided to stop working on it tomorrow.
Given that Proton is open source, provides plenty of instructions and permits reproduction and distribution (BSD-3-Clause-Open-MPI), any other store could likewise include it or a fork of it. They may have a factual monopoly, but it’s not enforced legally in any way.
It’s just that nobody seems to compete meaningfully. Steam has a vested interest in being independent from Microsoft, maintaining their own SteamOS and making games run on it. Other companies just might not have the same commercial drive. And if there are easy to use 3rd party tools that people are content with, why would they bother investing in their own solution? They’re accessible to the Linux market through no work of their own.
Of course, there are some companies actively not wanting to work with Linux. Some just don’t trust the platform. Some require particular technology that might not work on Linux. For example, things like kernel-level-anticheat being confined to the wine environment defeats the point of spying on the whole OS. And some would require additional work to make it run smoothly, which obviously is an investment into a market they may feel doesn’t promise enough profit.
I was going to point out how heroic launcher is fine, but that’s not a store.
That’s not really Valve’s fault that all the other storefronts don’t care to support Linux, though.
Lately steam sales have sucked; paying 40+ bucks for 2-5 year old games feels silly. So yeah, I’m with Gabe on this one. There are choices.
Gamers can buy wherever they want. But game devs either sell on Steam or they basically don’t sell at all.
It’s not a full monopoly. He just has a quasi monopoly. And there are rumors that devs who sell cheaper on other platforms risk not being shown to buyers on Steam…
With great power comes great opportunity for abusing that power to take more middle man tax.An earned monopoly is still a monopoly. Anyone who feels that the power that Steam wields in the gaming market is not an issue, I urge you to think or learn about why monopolies are harmful – not in relation to steam. Think about a manufacturer of gizmos completely cornering the gizmo market and what that would mean for the people wanting to buy gizmos, as time passes. Don’t think in terms of the laws or definitions of some specific country, just think about the effect it would have on society. Worst case scenario you lose some time and gain some insight on monopolies
Oh no. They’ve made gaming accessible on Linux, games still run you purchased 20 years ago on the latest hardware and they’re not a bloated pile of garbage
If anything, they’ve actually made things better for everyone
In contrast, if you purchased wii u games, you need to re buy for switch. Ps5, wii u and Xbox all basically are limited to what publishers can sell
I’d even argue they’re not a real monopoly because they Don’t control the hardware, and there are other platforms
Somebody needs to make a better gizmo than I guess 😉. Americans seem to love capitalism…so than, capitalize.
Think about a manufacturer of gizmos completely cornering the gizmo market
If your monopoly in the Gizmo market is because you’ve actively fought other companies, lobbied governments, filed frivilous patent suits, etc… in order to KEEP people from competing with you, than you’re a piece of shit.
If your monopoly in the Gizmo market is because despite there being no hinderance to them doing so, no competitor has been able to match your quality, than kudos.
In your example, you’re effectively saying that governments should force people to use shittier services just to avoid a monopoly, even if that monopoly is earned.
If people want to buy Gizmos, and that first company is losing their trust, another company will come in and compete successfully because that first company isn’t preventing them from doing so. If that second company does it better, great.
An earned monopoly and a forced monopoly are not nearly the same thing, precisely because an earned monopoly is on the whim of the consumers. If your product turns to shit, a replacement will make itself known. Whereas a forced monopoly is on the whim of the government and lobbyists.
But other stores exist, they just don’t offer what steam does (which includes Play on Linux).
It like if you bought an amazing vacuum that does everything (hardwood, carpet, car attachments, air filtration), and the competitor offers a vacuum that only does carpeted floors…its not a true monopoly, its the competitor not understanding what sellsOf course it’s bad. For decades Valve has shown others why gamers value their game store yet most game stores still do stupid shit that drives gamers away.
The only one making an honest attempt is GOG. And their only issue is low purchasing volume which means they are slow to develop and improve their platform.
And a launcher that makes epic look good.
This gizmo maker is making the best gizmo that everyone loves, best delivery and best support for people that buys the gizmo. Why would you fault that company for delivering what majority of people wanted. They didn’t corner the gizmo market by buying out smaller gizmo makers, they didn’t block smaller gizmo maker by undercutting them, they didn’t even advertise to cut into other’s profit share. They win the capitalist market by making the best gizmo plus the best experience of buying and owning the gizmo.
Yeah, sure.
Developers don’t, though. If you don’t release your game on Steam, you might as well not release it.
Not true at all starsector is one of my favs and so is vintage story. Your just straight up wrong.
Yeah, but how did you learn about those games?
not through steam, whats your point relating to this question?
You did not answer the question. Developers that self publish are repying purely on word of mouth marketing. Its rarely successful. Minecraft is very rare exception.
No they’re not, they’re good games and didn’t need steam to get recog ised by the comunity, Im failing to see your point.
I learn about vintage story from a very obscure video on youtube a few years ago. I never see any media talking about it. Lemmy is the only place i see people occasionally talking about it.
Idk what to tell you I found videos about it on YouTube and Iv found plenty.
Neither of those games have released and at least one of them is planning a Steam release
Of course counterexamples exist (Fortnite probably being the biggest one), but it’s true for the vast majority of releases
But how exactly is that steams fault? What should they do to remedy that?
I’m not assigning blame on them, and it doesn’t make sense that they would voluntarily do something to compromise their own business model, unless they fear regulatory oversight or serious competition (which, let’s be honest, aren’t happening) and decide to self-regulate instead.
Regardless, any change would come from outside factors.
What is their fault is using their monopoly status to charge 30% of sales for an online storefront. For many games, Steam’s cut is the single largest expense.
If you’re a developer of a game being sold on Steam, Gabe Newell’s personal cut on the game that wasn’t produced, published, or marketed by him or any company he owns is more than yours because he charges an unconscionable toll for the storefront.
If Steam charged 5% instead of 30% they’d still be making a killing, but since they have an an effective monopoly it doesn’t matter.
30% is the standard cut for game sales across the industry. Epic has a smaller cut, but customers don’t want to use it. As someone offering a product, you have to sell where your customers are. Steam COULD abuse their position by taking a higher than standard cut, but they choose not to. Steam isn’t a bad guy here. They made a good platform that customers prefer, and have made no attempts to stop competitors from competing and despite having the market position to abuse it, still only charge the industry standard for selling on their platform. If anybody would bother actually trying to compete with them, then you might see the cut come down, but all their competition seems content to just whine instead of actually making a platform worth using.
It’s the industry standard for online PC game sales because of them. They established that number when they were the first major player to the market. They don’t get to blame the industry for a pricing scheme they invented.
This is the company that didn’t offer refunds until they had to. They’re the company that used to make indie developers get permission to launch games through them with exclusivity agreements (Steam Greenlight program). They cry foul when devs put in loot boxes, gacha mechanics, and other live service bullshit when they don’t get a 30% cut.
They’ve been exactly as shitty as they can get away with. The only things that have allowed them to be less shitty are that they were first to the game and that they’re privately-owned l, meaning they do what’s in Gabe’s long-term interest instead of having to drive the stock price up every quarter until they collapse or allergens with someone else.
When Steam launched, gamers were very upset because they didn’t want to have to log into an online marketplace to play Half-Life 2. And now people get pissy when the games they want dont require you to give data and money to a billionaire who long ago stopped giving a fuck about gamers as anything other than a means to buy more yachts.
Industry standard for ALL game sales, not just PC. Steam did not invent this. PlayStation charges this. Xbox charges this. Retail in general charged this before Steam even existed.
But you’re clearly unwilling to see anything but “Steam bad! RAH RAH RAH!” So I’m just gonna block your dumbass self now.
Xbox and Playstation developed the platforms the games are on and sold the consoles at a loss.
Retailers have physical overhead that gar exceeds Steam’s cost per sale.
Steam doesn’t have those reasons. They just wanted a bigger cut without incurring the expenses.
Steam maintains:
- Server costs for the storefront, fast game file distribution and the variety of other services they offer to developers (eg the friends system, game invites, the Workshop, the marketplace, cloud saves, etc…).
- Steam handles payments for you, worldwide. This alone is already a pretty huge undertaking that many underestimate.
- Steam does a ton of analytics for devs.
- DRM.
- Support staff for handling customer complaints, refund requests, etc…
- Sets up seasonal sales and handles promotion for devs willing to participate.
- Steam allows you to resell Steam keys on other platforms, which forgoes the 30% cut entirely (creating new keys is free), as long as you won’t resell the keys cheaper than the game’s price on the Steam storefront itself.
- At high enough sales, Steam cuts back on the part they take.
All of this stuff is free and bonus for devs. You pay a one-time fee to set up, which you get back if your game sells enough copies (it’s a really low bar, unless the game is total gunk you’re going to reach that threshold). Not to mention the costs involved in bringing your game to other devices it wasn’t originally built for, allowing you to gain access to a larger share of the market (again, for free. It’s even available to users using a competitor).
Steam provides not only a storefront with lots of features that devs can use, they also provide servers, backend support through different APIs and not to mention the insane amount of data users need each day. (Around 275 PETABYTES a day, or 100 exabytes a year) That kind of infrastructure is not cheap, and seeing as that was the industry standard (it’s still what Google and apple get from their storefronts) I’d say that’s pretty reasonable.
Also the 30% cut goes down to 25% after the first $10 million in revenue, then down to 20% after you reach $50 million. I do think they should put in a lower cut for independent developers who are releasing small games, until a certain revenue threshold is reached, but overall I would say it seems reasonable to me.
That 30% is industry standard, steam didn’t even set it. You people are morons
Steam was the first major online games distribution platform. Who else would have set the standard?
That is also something that would allow a competitor to come in to outseat their dominance. In fact, charging 5% instead of 30% would make it much more difficult for competition to develop because it would be next to impossible for somebody to penetrate into the market by offering a lower rate that’s only viable with huge volumes of sales. Usually, offering unsustainable prices is a way that a dominant player achieves a monopoly. If they have big cash reserves, they can run at a loss until their competition dies out.
They don’t have to push Steam DRM on devs. They could just leave stuff open like on GOG… They could use a scaling model of fees based on the popularity one’s games receive, since people have said the current levels are prohibitive for micro indie devs…
If you want to sell your product in a store, your product has to abide the stores rules. This is nothing new. You don’t get to whine about how you can’t sell enough anywhere else because customers prefer buying from the store, that’s asinine.
they don’t push steam DRM…devs choose whether they want it or not
I know devs can choose; I didn’t say “force,” after all. But the fact that so very few games are DRM-free bugs me…
That not steams fault so why bring it up?
They encourage it, I’m sure.
So a hunch is all you got…
Plenty of indie developers on itch.io
I would like to see their income breakdown between Steam and other platforms.
Difficult to measure. A lot, and I do mean a lot, of indie devs on itch.io will likely get the biggest sum of their income from Patreon subscriptions.
From what I’ve heard speaking to some of them, when it comes to succesful Patreons, even a Steam release is peanuts compared to how much money was made through Patreon.
Billionaires shouldn’t exist.
I’m eager yo use GOG in Linux. Meanwhile, Steam is fine.
I get it but its not like they are buying up competition or doing bad practices to win unless doing what your customers want is being unfare. In this case I blame the competition.
Steam is the superior platform and you they can’t compete with a company that gives consumers so much value, so they’re gonna claim monopoly, which is ironic because they don’t breakup actual monopolies, so why should they fuck over something that isn’t a monopoly? Oh right, because antitrust is a tool for companies to attack competition, not to avoid the consumer hellscape of monopolies.
Offer more value to gain market share. If you can’t, I guess your business model is worse than Yoru competitors, isn’t it?
My wonder is who is this benefiting? Is this a bid to get gaming under stricter control by destroying its main outlet for many?
Given video games place in the PC realm and the aggressive push for AI powered cloud compute, it they fuck up steam to disincentivize personal PCs, I wouldn’t be surprised. Been a few propaganda prices about Gabe/steam in the last couple weeks. Something is up.
Asked about this rule, Newell repeatedly denied it exists, even when shown internal communications seemingly showing Valve employees enforcing it: “Valve does not have a policy or practice of dictating prices to third-party software developers on other platforms.” When asked how Valve would react if it ever happened, Newell initially said he was confused by the question and then added, “Many of our partners and many of our customers are quite happy with the service that we’re providing.”
It would be interesting to see what happens if some of the larger publishers did this.
Someone few weeks ago posted a link where there were few emails that were exchanged with Valve and puglishers(?) with redacted pieces here and there. Their point was that Valve tells devs/publishers to match prices of their games on their own stores to prices on Steam.
I may be not a great english speaker, but in reality it did read that if a company wants to make discount somewhere else, they need to match the exact same discount on Steam. Point of that was that Valve doesn’t want customers to think that Steam is an expensive option when shopping for games.
I think that this is a common misconception and Gabe was annoyed that interviewer had not double checked information regarding Valve policies.
This has been re-hashed over and over. The terms are that if they want to discount steam provided keys on another platform they have to match that price on Steam. Steam keys are free to generate for them. They are free to distribute them on any platform. But the deal they make when they generate the steam keys is that they will adhere to the pricing rule.
If they want to discount keys generated on Epic’s store, then they can generate and sell them at any price they want.
I believe there is an exception for bundles like the humble bundle.
This is becoming hair splitting, it’s clear they don’t want publishers give out keys on steams dime, that might change with charity bundle but the general rule stays the same.
Valve has a monopoly at being the only online gaming storefront that doesn’t suck.
Nah I think gog is fine, they’re just not the same size (and for linux also not plug & play)
Gog and itch.io are decent. They’re different types of stores, but very usable.
Yup, it’s why I am willing to argue for them, at least until Gabe dies. He’s proven to be far more fair and I know you wouldn’t get that deal anywhere else. These days it really does seem like there a coordinated push to attack valve for not being scum like the rest of the industry these last couple of months.
It does make me nervous though that one player has so much power.
But certainly in the here and now as a consumer, I use steam because it makes life easier. It makes it super easy to join and host multiplayer games, gives me access to convenient game recording stuff without having to have separate software, lets me share games with my found family, and most games have achievements, which my silly achievement-whore brain loves. I’m also grateful because if not for Steam’s work developing proton, I doubt my switch to Linux would have been as straightforward as it has been.
I agree that it does seem like a targeted attack on Steam by industry hacks who I trust infinitely less than Steam. Corporations are never our friends, merely our temporary allies. However, the hacks attacking Steam are definitely my enemies, and the enemy of my enemy is my temporary ally
It’s because they actively fight for the consumer rather than the publishers.
It’s funny though because valve has so much fucking money because they are not chasing next quarters arbitrary gains…
Valve is proof that if you don’t try to screw over your customers somehow you end up with profits. Weird how that works, and instead of companies learning something from that we’ll… they do what capitalism does…
The only one that lets me keep in my library, download and install at any time games that were delisted 10 or 15 years ago by their publishers.
For that reason alone, they deserve my money over any other storefront.
Enormous choice? Lol, sure. Think of all the individual studios 20 years ago making games. You could buy them at multiple stores, on CD or DVD, maybe even download a patch or two from the developer online.
Today most of those individual studios have disappeared, many bought up and dismantled by the industry, and every single one of those industry titans is trying to corral you into their system via downloader or subscription, and the majority make sure you don’t actually own the game you bought. Steam is just the least evil among them, and there’s plenty of apologists that say Steam makes it possible for indy developers to get exposure. But at what price?
What’s stopping indie developers from hosting their downloads on their own site? Sure, offering all the other features Steam does would be hugely expensive, but that’s why consumers prefer it. Those features aren’t necessary though and people would forgo them for a good game. Advertising would be more difficult but they could get popular streamers to play it or do Reddit or twitter posts to get exposure.
Doing all those things themselves are riskier than using Steam but there’s nothing actually stopping them from trying. Steam takes a big cut but a big cut is still preferable to a smaller total amount they would likely get by not using Steam. It’s not Steam’s fault no other platform has gotten their shit together in decades.
Yes, but before Valve you had a lot more choice, because you could buy things in actual shops. I didn’t have to wait until the handful of predetermined “sale weeks” a year to actually get games at budget prices.
And it’s not just Valve, but if they ever go public or bust, you’ll all wonder how you were ever fooled for so long.
Of course he’s not going to come out and say it, why even ask him?
