Until any competing store releases a Linux client, I can’t really argue against Steam. They are a gatekeeper and almost a monopoly, but they’re also the most benevolent and pro-consumer gatekeeper that we have in the PC gaming distribution space. As long as all the competition continue to be Windows-only and, in some cases, actively work against Linux users, I don’t want Valve’s digital fiefdom to fall.
I’m not sure “gatekeepr” is the right term when all you do is simply being better for your customers than anyone else. Like, Ubisoft, EA, Epic, they all are garbage companies. GOG is the only store I’d mildly consider (ignoring tiny indie ones like Itch here), but they also have 0 interest in Linux support, which is where they lose me. Without Valve, Linux gaming would not be where it is today, and as a Linux user that is already like 85% of my decision making being done in favor of Valve - with the remaining 15% not all strictly being in another camp either. If someone wants to challenge that monopoly, they’d have to do something better than forcing exclusives or luring with “free” games, because that’s some shady shit that makes me just want to stay away even more.
Valve isn’t perfect though. Especially when it comes to owning games. I couldn’t use Asprite on my laptop on my schools wifi because it couldn’t verify that I own a 1gb program to draw pixels. Disabling wifi didn’t help either. Still made up it’s mind on not letting me make sprites for my school assignment till I connected it to my home wifi.
The best part? There’s literally a free version that’s not on steam that I purposely didn’t download because I wanted to support the dev!Steam has an offline mode though. Why was it asking to verify anything?
None of that stuff sounds like Valve interfering.
Nobody is saying Valve is perfect. But the other companies just sucks much harder
How are they a gatekeeper? Near monopoly sure. But they don’t force companies to only publish on Steam. They don’t have restrictive rules. I’m not sure what gate they are keeping.
If you reeeeally want to stretch, they do have rules about pricing things lower on other platforms. Like, you can have a sale on your website that makes it cheaper than Steam, but can’t have the base price cheaper there than on Steam. That’s about it.
Disproven many times over.
You can’t sell the free generated Steam keys on other platforms lower than on Steam. You are perfectly free to sell the game on other platforms for less than Steam.
Just wanted to say: good work with OpenRGB!
Valve is interesting. Enshitification is the standard for something like social media. Corporations are the real customer and users do creative labor to keep it valuable.
Valve flips the script. Developers struggle because they are only expected to labor. Studios don’t get the full value of their labor. They might be a huge corporation but they are a worker to valve
When a monopoly is faced with a smaller, more efficient competitor, they cut prices to keep people from switching, or buy the new competitor, make themselves more efficient, and increase profits.
When Steam was faced with smaller competition that charged lower prices, they did - nothing. They’re not the leader because of a trick, or clever marketing, but because they give both publishers and gamers a huge stack of things they want.
Sure, Steam seems fairly okay, especially their Linux support, but I still mostly prefer GOG, wherever possible, because it offers more control to their customer over the product they bought.
It helps that Valve is not publicly traded, but I fear that if the current owner (Gabe Newell) dies, there might be a shift in business practices.
Enshittification can still happen in privately traded/owned companies, it generally happens slower and in case there are other reason for the owner(s) to maximize short term profits (e.g. business built on VC money), it can happen faster.
Gog support sucks tbh. Steam refunds everything no questions asked. Bought elden ring on gog, wrong region, couldn’t activate it back home. They told me to suck it. Fuck gog
In what region is Elden Ring available on GOG?
Gog is also much easier to deal with via a VPN. I bought some region locked games easily doing that and could play them anywhere, because they are DRM-free. Steam is much more difficult, because each account belongs to a specific region. Moving accounts means you have to have an bank account and address in different countries, so easy for rich people, more difficult for ordinary folks.
He probably has it confused with green man gaming, the CD key site.
Ah, true. My bad.
So more-efficient competitors emerged against the supermajority market leader and didn’t impact that company’s market share.
Hmm.
Thats not what they said, “More efficient” didn’t happen.
Just either a wildly more toxic environment with Epic, or a cheaper but much less user friendly one with GOG.
Steam didn’t need to change because neither of the competition understand the market.
Steam didn’t need to change because none of their competitors challenge their de facto monopoly. Reasons do not change how it is plainly a monopoly. They have a supermajority market share, and people glibly admit, they don’t even consider buying games except on Steam.
You said
more efficient competitors
But now you are saying that they didn’t challenge the monopoly? If they dont even challenge then how are they competition?
Steam let’s me buy games and play them. The interface with Big Picture Mode let’s me interact with the store.
The issue I see is that no one is competing on PC with Steam because they keep trying to tie themselves with the fucking trainwreck that’s Windows.
They keep trying to tie themselves with shitty desktop launchers.
They keep trying to tie themselves with toxic customer service.
There is competition, but it’s with Sony, Microsoft and their consoles.
If they dont even challenge then how are they competition?
That’s equivocating two definitions of “competition.”
no one is competing on PC
… that’s admitting they have a monopoly. That’s the monopoly we’re talking about. You’re not disagreeing with me, you’re just picking unrelated definitions and talking about something else.
Steam’s competitors, on PC, are services like GOG and EGS. Their teensy market share doesn’t disqualify them as competitors. They are in the exact same market. That’s why they have a “market share.” And Steam’s market share is so overwhelming that you’re treating their would-be rivals like they do not exist.
I could basically buy anything that I get on Steam, on either Epic or GOG. Their market share is not why I buy games on Steam, I gave you those reasons already.
I do not run Windows because its a shitty hostile environment that contractually prevents distributors from providing an optimised interface for gaming. It inserts adverts into every section, and even Windows users unironically complain that Windows Update is malware.
I gave you those reasons already.
In response to a comment reading: “Reasons do not change how it is plainly a monopoly.”
Their market share is what make them a monopoly. That’s what the word means.
Upvoting ‘no competitors means it’s not a monopoly’ is tribalism. Y’all don’t care about the words. You are performing loyalty. Comments defending the ingroup must be good and smart and right… even if they’re repeating the initial criticism.
‘Steam’s competition doesn’t matter.’ ‘Wrong! They have no competition.’ That’s worse. You know that’s worse, right?
Thats not what was said at all.
No competition is not good. But Epic is worse competition, and GOG is halfhearted competition that is an ultimately worse experience for most people.
This is just silly, is this dev just a salty b?
I may not like some parts of steam (like its ui) but I’d say gaben showed us how a big company should always be run.
They don’t buy out anyone (hello epic) they made many proconsuner moves and they are funding alternatives like proton without any guarantee of return.Your shit doesn’t sell without steam not because its YouTube and holding everything and everyone hostage, but because everything else is just that much worse.
If you wanna shoot yourself in the foot go ahead but don’t complain nobody is is helping with it.
Digital fiefdoms like who, you ask, as if you don’t already know the answer? “Valve is the most egregious example,” says Gavrilović. He hopes for a future where devs, not digital feudal lords, have more power, “but I lack the imagination to envision the replacement of Valve with a community owned alternative. That ‘winter castle’ will not fall as easily, but we should at least start openly discussing alternatives.”
Make an opensource game store that’s owned by a non-profit and paid for by the game studios that want to sell on it, giving them a say on how things should run.
That could easily be abused by the big players, and would be.
How?
Call me when they show predatory behaviour to establish their monopoly. I don’t think steam has exclusive deals as epic has for example.
Loot boxes and what is essentially a market of nft’s. Otherwise they’re pretty cool I guess.
I feel like some journalist got high as fuck with a dev, wrote out a fucking fever dream of… drivel and then the editors were like fuck it, Tim Sweeney pays us to post some hit pieces against Valve and this is all we got this month so we’ll just run with this.
Right on. I enjoy steam and I find Valve are mostly responsible gatekeepers, but at the end of the day, they’re still a gatekeeper
Are they gatekeepers though? It’s not like they own Windows or Linux and stop you from using any other store. Just having the biggest audience doesn’t make them gatekeepers to the market.
I never see people talking about what valve should change other than lowering the 30% cut, but arbitrarily forcing that would set a bad precedent.
Instead of virtue signalling here’s reasonable things Valve could do:
- allow developers to chose what features of steam they use for each game, allowing them to lower the cut by individually opting out of forums, workshop, cloud saves, achievements, inventory items etc
- offer a purchase = one time download with no drm (still legally one copy) for the closest thing to “owning” a digital game
- allow someone to inherit a steam account
Someone correct me if I’m wrong but I’m pretty sure proton is free to use and you can install stores and games not from steam on a Steam Deck, so again I really don’t know what they’re gatekeeping.
For specifics, I’d like to see consistent, transparent censorship standards, and Steam Workshop files made publicly available.
Steam’s censorship issues are only going to be more of a problem as the Japanese PC market continues its explosive growth. The platform’s inconsistency is surely frustrating Japanese developers, and the lack of transparency is giving fuel to a (not unearned) narrative that its content reviewers are arbitrary and xenophobic.
The Workshop matter is far smaller in comparison, but Steam is gatekeeping crowdsourced work product.
The workshop is an interesting topic and one if like to see a larger discussion around - theoretically people are free to upload their workshop content outside of Steam altogether, but arguably it’s on developers to support importing non-workshop content.
Censorship is definitely something that needs sorting out. I hadn’t heard of much censorship going on but I can definitely see it happening, giv n Japan’s standards can differentiate massively from America’s. Clear rules need to be laid, and I hope clear reasons are given when it occurs.
Having the biggest audience to the degree that they do absolutely makes them a gatekeeper. If Steam became predatory tomorrow it would have a catastrophic effect on the consumer friendliness of the current PC market because you wouldn’t have anywhere else to turn for many games. GOG and Itch don’t have nearly as large of a selection of mainstream stuff.
That’s on developers for not putting their games on other platforms, Valve do not prevent you from doing so. If they went crazy tomorrow, people can just jump ship.
I swear the only games that could never be on another store would be Valve’s own. It’s really not their fault that other platforms are so bad or niche.
Like realistically what should they do to not be seen as gatekeepers? Become worse to scare developers and customers onto other platforms?
It’s not their fault they’re gatekeepers, it’s a symptom of their success. The biggest platform will have a much greater pull inherently, and it should be their responsibility to act fairly because of that position. Thankfully they seem to take that seriously so far. We can only hope it stays that way.
I find it really interesting how Valve hired Yanis Varoufakis to analyze the markets that were spontaneously emerging from games on their platform, and how he went on to write a book about the feudalistic nature of internet platforms that is being referred to here. I wonder what Gaben thinks of that and what Yanis thinks about Steam.
Then there is the aspect of Valve being a flat company, no hierarchy, and how Gaben has talked about avoiding rent-seeking that other companies were taking part in, how he wants to make good products for gamers, doesn’t look at sales numbers.
Valve has some really great philosophy running behind it, and then there is the fiefdom of Steam extracting rents from publishers.
But what’s the alternative?
Gog, direct distribution, something else I haven’t thought of. I just fear monocultures. Things can go south fast
How is steam stopping developers from doing direct distribution?
The question was what are the alternatives, those are alternatives
In response to you saying steam is a gatekeeper.
I think their market dominance makes it an uphill battle for a dev to not put their games on steam. I don’t think that’s much of a problem right now because Valve has been reliable, but all it takes is a bad turn of events at Valve leadership for that to change. I think they are a gatekeeper only insofar as they have market dominance and a platform with games with DRM
Some titles have been very popular without steam, Dark and Darker is a good example of this, GTA 5 another.
I’m not going to pretend they don’t have the most sales, but they also have objectively the best platform. People love it.
As a gamer, there isn’t too much I can do about it, except buy games from other stores where the developers offer their games. As a developer, if I’m worried about Valve becoming abusive, it makes sense for me to use more than one marketplace, or a different marketplace than Valve altogether. Since Valve doesn’t seem to have a lot of exclusivity deals, this either means it costs more for developers to maintain multiple distribution channels, or they don’t think it benefits them to have multiple distribution channels. That said, the continued existence of those other distribution channels leaves the option to leave if they don’t like Valve’s behavior.
As a gamer, all I can do is support other stores, and I do.
Let’s save it for when Gabe bites it and it gets shity.
I agree and hope that what comes after it is even better at supporting gaming on GNU/Linux and contributing to various libre and opensource projects like KDE and Proton and Mesa and such.
Even Avalon fell eventually.
Steam obsessed people always cry about the lack of “features” in other stores, as if a game store + launcher needs features other than being able to buy and launch games.
Hell, I don’t even want to launch games. Just let me buy and download an exe (oh yeah, GoG does that, which is why I use GoG whenever I can…)
Sucks for devs that people just won’t buy their game if it isn’t on Steam though :/ Idk how to change peoples’ behaviour, unless Steam does something egregiously bad to users
One of those features is Proton. Thanks to Steam I can play every game I am interested in, without the need to install Windows.
GoG sometimes pushes out Linux installers that they immediately stop supporting, resulting in non-working games. Fuck that.
Your wants and needs are different from other people’s wants and needs, doesn’t mean other people are wrong.
The problem here is you think other stores actually let you buy and launch games reliably.
Steam is fast. Epic is slow. Epic is always asking me to 2FA to access my library of free games. Epic takes minutes to load their store homepage.
