Do people here, on Lemmy of all places, still not worry about Valve being a monopoly?
It worries me, deeply. Especially with how the community already makes up excuses for them doing anticompetitive things.
There is only one way that ends.
I can’t think of a single example of a “happy sustainable monopoly” in history, but at best they must be exceedingly rare.
As far as I’m aware only gog really “competes” with them the other platforms are worse by a lot.
…This is exactly what I am talking about.
Why do people pivot to whataboutisms?
Valve is an effective monopoly. There is no talking around that.
They have made many straight-up anticompetitive moves, to cement that. The biggest example in my mind is the “other storefront pricing policy,” but there have been several over the years.
What other companies are doing is irrelevant to that point, unfortunately, as they don’t have enough market share to compete. It does not excuse Valve or make the situation any less worrying to me.
I recognize there is potential for a major shift in business practices to cause Steam to turn to shit, yes. I just refuse to worry about it. Other competators do exist, and I’ll move over if and when the need arises. For now I’m happy with having at least one company not trying to screw me over in the present.
Valve is only a monopoly because they are the best. If another storefront showed up and covered the gaps in what valve offers then they’d be able to carve out a niche for themselves like gog with drm free downloads. You can’t get that on steam. The others such as epic only seem to be able to come up with anti competitive bullshit that only harms the consumer. All these fucking companies these days seem to have forgotten that they exist to serve us. Steam at least still has a great deal of momentum in that direction. They do far more for us than any of the other options IMO. It’s not even close.
I remain baffled at how few studios sell their games directly on their own site.
The practical barriers are virtually nonexistent, so I’m assuming there’s some form of capitalist fuckery going on behind the scenes that makes it financially unviable?
There are practical barriers still tho. You’ll have to either maintain or outsource maintaining:
- hosting infrastructure
- CDN
- Security (both frontend and backend)
- DRM (either serial numbering or yet another hosted verification services)
- user accounts and data handling
- payment processing
And that’s for a basic game, if you want feature parity with steam, add on top:
- version control and access (playtests, betas)
- version control for other platforms (Mac, Linux)
- hosting for savefile sync, achievements
- hosting for UGC (mods, screenshots, configs, recording)
- hosting and infrastructure for user livestreaming
- CDN for mods
- review (automated or manual) for mods or UGC
- legal protection and compliance against UGC
- multiplayer service infrastructure
- automated/manual moderation of game servers/lobbies
- anticheat system
- hosting for newsfeed (update announcements, news)
- and so on, you get the point…
By the time you implement the basic stuff and half of the extras, might as well pay the 30% commission and just focus on what you wanted to do: make games. Instead of having to cosplay as a sysadmin or orchestrate 15 different providers
The things on that list are all technically true but at the same time not really that big a deal? Certainly they’re all solved problems already. Making a good video game in the first place is harder than any of those things.
Yup, that’s my whole point. It leeches time and resources that might amount to more than what valve takes as commission
there’s some form of capitalist fuckery going on behind the scenes that makes it financially unviable?
Uhh. It’s that Steam is an effective monopoly?
They hold all the attention, all the recommendations, so if you aren’t on Steam you are practically invisible.
There are a few major games that only self publish. Starsector is one, of the top of my head. Hence it is practically invisible to most.
Ok but publishing yourself doesn’t block you from also listing on Steam, or does it?
It determines the price. If you “self-publish” on a web shop or something with DRM free downloads, you have to price it the same as on Steam, otherwise Steam may delist you. So devs can’t get around the 30% fee by offering a discount on their store.
And… practically, if the storefronts are the same price, most will just buy on Steam.
There can be other complications related to scammers, but that’s not Valve’s fault. Supporting both also takes more dev effort.
Rimworld took this route, at least for some time. It started only self published via the Ludeon Store yet ended up mostly on Steam because that’s where all the attention and mods went. I have the game bought both places, oddly enough.
Common misconception. You only have to price-match when selling Steam keys on another platform. If you sell a non-Steam copy of the game, you can price it however you want
also it didn’t particularly make sense on its own terms. Even if I am committed to pricing the same as on Steam, I still get to keep that extra 30% on the sales that I do make.
And it’s not as though the sum total of marketing you do for a game is stick it up on Steam and wait for the recommendations to pour in. But still most game promos and ads I see include a Steam link rather than one to the studio’s store.
There’s over 100,000 games on Steam now, so the notion that you’re relying them to market your game for you is highly suspect.
santa, gaben has been good this year, give him another boat
oblig
I mean both true but yeah
100% hard agree. Not launching an IPO is the single best thing Gaben has ever done. Letting in corporate executives would utterly destroy Valve and run them into the ground to fund their golden parachutes. It’s happened time and again. Professional “executives” do not run companies for the benefit of the customer they run them into the ground to make themselves richer. Kudos to Gaben for being intelligent enough to recognize this and keep Valve private.
To answer your question. Not right now. The internet sort of fell into a handful of giants that were determined to be the gateways for whatever specific product. Google became the default search engine. Facebook because the default social media. Twitter was the… whatever you want to call that stupid shit.
Valve got pc gaming distribution. It had to happen this way because we got tired of having 23 different login accounts and having to remember your icq 45 digit code to talk to this friend but aim to talk to these 3.
The side effect is it created essentially monopolies and all these companies slid towards evil. Google is literally helping the government make kill bots not. That’s a thing. And anyone pretending valve isn’t a corpo monster with blood on its hands as they made their billions getting an entire generation of children addicted to gambling, you’re out of your mind. Gaben is smart to keep himself basically a positive game meme instead of pulling a musk and revealing to the world you’re a Nazi prick. But they’re all the same.
The reality though? It can all evaporate overnight. Facebook is still used plenty but it’s not the thing the kids are going to. They’ve shifted what they do and care about. The same could happen to valve anytime. Will it be epic that dethrones them? Probably not. But it could happen when the way people game fundamentally changes.
At least when GoG vaporizes, the install files will still work.
And for what’s not on GoG the other DRM free platforms, like Fitgirl, tend to fill the gaps.
Yes they just have to be competent buisness people, GOG exists
GOG won’t take over with a no drm policy, it cuts too many games out.
I like the policy, just being realistic.
That is true
Probably not. Even MS couldn’t do it and they owned the platform. Now Valve push Linux. No other store really runs on that, and certainly not in a way that lets you run games written for Windows.
Epic are closest to being a competitor, and they’re still just a free games platform that will only run until the Fortnite money stops coming in.
One of my favorite quotes about Epic (it may have been Tim Sweeney) was something like “people would rather pay for a game on Steam than get it for free on the Epic Store” and it’s true. Hell even games I’ve got for free on Epic I’ve still purchased (probably on sale) on Steam.
Epic are closest to being a competitor, and they’re still just a free games platform that will only run until the Fortnite money stops coming in.
Appreciate the reminder to play the games I need to on that platform
Well that’s because pretty much all of the competition are terrible.
There hasn’t really been much innovation in digital market space since the concept arose. Valve started it and a few other companies over the years of tried, including Microsoft and all have failed.
I think valve succeeded because they weren’t trying to make a digital market place, it started out as just a distribution platform so not every decision was about how to make the most money out of the customer. You make the money on the games, not the platform and then you build up from there.
Gabe’s strategy is public information at this point. He’s gone on record several times with the information.
The focus is on what gamers want first. Reduce barriers to entry. Simplify the process. That naturally attracts customers and the money making happens as a result.
Every single other company has this reversed.
Yeah really is down to the only platform that isn’t repeatedly shooting itself in the foot is GoG and their no DRM policy has a lot of major publishers saying no deal.
In all other cases it’s less what Valve does right, and more what everyone around them is doing wrong.
I and I guess itch.io as well but that’s mostly because of how easy it is to get a game on the platform so it’s really good for small games and demos.
We only need one digital store front. The people should collectively own it.
Have they tried making a better product?
Or scratch that. Have they tried making a product that is as good?
Well I mean yeah, the public could, simply by not buying any more Steam games. But wait, that would mean missing out on new games. Activism and sticking it to The Man are great and all, but let’s not get crazy here!
Amazing what is possible when you’re not beholden to shareholders that only give a shit about quarterly profits at the expense of everything else, including the entire business.
Perhaps businesses should have a rule that investors can’t take money out for 10 years. Perhaps then they would actually engage in some long-term strategies.
There is already short term vs long term capital gains tax, but it’s only one year. Maybe they could tweak that a bit
Valves secret is that selling digital games is profitable 100% of the time, so they never needed to enshittify.
A lot of services are straight up unprofitable and need to go to extreme lengths of ruining the experience just to make a single positive dollar. Those lengths are also often poorly thought out or actively destructive to the platform. Valve just sells games with essentially 0 overhead past servers (insanely expensive, btw, but you know what i mean)
Turns out that the best business plan is a profitable one out of the gate with people who care about their work instead of vampires that bleed your customers dry
More money now temporarily is better then always getting money forever.
Yeah, but have you considered being an MBA demon and wanting even more money?
Investing into customers and their overall happiness and loyalty works out, go figure.
The King who has never seen grass will starve to death on an iron throne.
Even if I’m playing a game I bought from GoG, I still need Steam involved for its controller support or Proton if I’m on Linux.
You can run proton without Steam.
When every competitions enshittifies themselves before they are even a valid competition, naturally there’d be no competition
Its almost sad that these organizations cant even pretend to not be garbage.
This is them trying to be nice. This is how they are on their best behavior. Their behavior will not improve if they ever gain more marketshare. Its all downhill from here, and theyre already chipping away at the bedrock to go lower.
