“Steam will probably still outsell everything else combined by 100x”
Yeah, it’s a monopoly.
That’s not a complaint. It’s not a value judgement. People think the word is automatically negative or criminal, because of how often that market power gets abused - but it is just the label for having that market power. Valve is not a trust. Valve does not do any anti-competitive practices. (Their 30% cut is obscene, but it’s the same obscenity demanded by other monopoly storefronts.) Nonetheless, company after company keeps saying:
This store is the only store that really matters.
If you’re not on this store, you’re probably fucked.
We have a word for that.
On top of that, say it is a negative thing right? The hell are we going to do about it, they’re not like Microsoft where they have a crap ton of different divisions that they specialize in.
Their dominance in the market is due to their business choices where they Supply the product of that consumers wanted that no other competitor is willing to bring to the table,
they offer:
- a review/rating system
- a storefront that regularly gives damn good deals
- a mod workshop
- insane Linux support via proton
- a friend system that integrates with the games itself up to stream share and remote play capability
- a achievement system
- a discussion board
- a cosmetic and badge system to encourage people to buy and trade
The closest I’ve seen any other company do for that is epic but they actively shoot themselves in the foot with linux, their deals are absolute shit and while they give consistent free games out their feature set is super lackluster to even EA’s launcher.
Totally agree. They definitely have a monopoly in PC game distribution, but this feels different than most other situations. They are not forcing anything on anyone. This is really the consumer’s choice. The thing is, they offer a great service and consumers don’t really have much to complain about. The only time you would need to complain about something is if you lost your entire steam library. Which is a reminder that you don’t really own these games, you are renting them.
Think about other monopolies. Microsoft has a dominant force in the PC OS. You have other options like MacOS and Linux, but if you wanted to switch from windows to MacOS, you really can’t. Microsoft can force products onto people like edge browser or ads.
Comcast and Cox are monopolies as they normally service specific regional areas and stay out of each other’s way. Because of this, there is no competition when looking for an ISP and both companies generally act on bad practices and milk the consumers for everything they can.
The more you dig deeper into it, you’ll find that all these companies try and fuck over the consumer. The difference with Valve, is that they can fuck over the producer moreso than the consumer. The only other company I can think of that is similar is eBay. eBay is really a monopoly for an auction like or used goods marketplace. The consumer is more protected than the producer.
Tbh, I don’t know the ins and outs of the game development process, but at least for smaller teams and games, 30% seems very reasonable to get your game out there. I am in the process of making a game now and I am fine with that fee and not having to deal with all the headaches. I just want to make a game, publish it, and make some money.
Losing an entire third of your revenue, straight off the top, is egregious. It’s the figure console manufacturers settled on when they had game developers by the balls. Seeing it continue with a company that controls nothing about the platform they serve says a lot about how much power is inherent to simply having a supermajority market share.
Steam shoved its way onto everyone’s computer as mandatory DRM for Half-Life 2. Calling that move “forward-thinking” would not be a compliment.
Taking 1/3 of your revenue when they quadruple it absolutely is not egregious. Steam is the reason you’re capable of making a living selling PC games to begin with.
In this thread:
Steam is bad because they are a company that makes money. They would be better if they made no money and all games were advertised at their expense. Oh and I must post my game on Steam because it’s their fault no one else has bothered to even try and make a truly viable alternative.
Bad-faith nonsense is worse than directed abuse.
I’d rather have someone tell me to fuck myself than push this ‘you just don’t LIKE it!’ horseshit. Or pretend the only alternative to being a monopoly taking a shitload of money is to be a charity that makes zero dollars. Other numbers exist. Be serious, god damn you.
I have not much against steam.
But gog is a more than viable alternative to steam.
Let’s not act as if there’s no alternative when itch.io or gog exists.
Has steam more features? Yes. Is better for some things? Yes. Is the only viable alternative as a game store? No.
They suck.
Having a game on GOG is the same as not having it to me. I will pay for it on steam before playing it for free on GOG. Their launcher sucks (and unless it’s very recent doesn’t even support Linux despite their whole premise being supporting open shit), and manually updating games sucks. Plus they don’t get up to date versions even if you do use their awful launcher.
It’s not a book or movie where the source doesn’t matter. Convenient updates are obligatory for modern gaming to function correctly.
I like GoG. I like that they push companies to remove DRM. I like that I can make offline backups of my games.
I prefer GoG over Steam when possible, but Steam is still infinitely more user friendly, and if the game in question is heavily multiplayer-focused, I’ll probably pick Steam over GoG just to use Steam’s multiplayer infrastructure.
GOG has had games that fail to maintain parity with Steam releases.
GOG requires workarounds on Linux moreso than Steam.
The first is not totally GOG’s fault but they should take action. If GOG is truly about preservation, they should make Linux a priority.
My second biggest gaming library is GOG. I love them in theory but Steam wipes the floor with them in terms of who gets my business in part because of those.
It’s worth it if you’re in the 1% of titles that succeed because of Steam. The next question is should any company have that kind of power. Steam’s monopoly is a real problem. Microsoft had less of a monopoly on computers when they got investigated.
That’s not true at all. Steam does a lot more than just list a title…and there is a ton of shit games that are put out there, they don’t make it because they’re shit, not because they’re not part of some magical 1%. Tons and tons of indie games have made it because of steam. They akso don’t have a monopoly, its just what most people use. There is still the epic market, itch.io, gog, humble, etc all of which you can choose to sell on or not.
It’s a de facto monopoly, just like windows was a de facto monopoly despite macos and Linux existing. There are plenty of good games that don’t make it on Steam, and Valve does very little for the money.
You know what also justifies Valve’s 30% cut? Their outstanding efforts in getting games to run on Linux, and the overall impact that this had on the Linux community.
I don’t think I’d be running Linux as my only daily driver if not for this. I was slightly dreading switching because I feared spending hours trying to fix broken games, but it’s been astonishingly straightforward (which facilitated me learning to live in Linux in a way I hadn’t been able to when was dual booting with Windows)
Ah, Cosmoteer. Extremely fun for like 10 hours, then you realize there is nothing left to do. I guess that dev has made a fortune off of it though, so hats off to that guy.
Honestly that sounds fine. It’s okay if a small game is only entertaining for 10 hours provided the price is reasonable. We shouldn’t expect every game to be an infinitely replayability mill
It confuses the hell out of me that we don’t say that about any other media.
“This movie that I spent $18 per person on only lasts 97 minutes what a rip off.”
wasn’t portal just a mod? very short game, but has some of the most memorable moments in all of gaming
Its still being updated and you can play for looong when you like building ships until your CPU melts.
Yeah, but you are then building for the sake of building. The crew limitations are a pain, so is getting the resources for the ships. If you are a purely combat player, having to mine asteroids for 95% of the time to get a bigger ship, or to get a necessary reactor isn’t fun gameplay. Then you build three large-ish ships and you cannot crew them all at the same time because people don’t want to work for you. Especially when you are a completionist and want to “finish” a system before heading out, you quickly stop getting fame and either need to jump to a higher difficulty system (which your ship won’t survive unless you know the “meta” well), or resort to more mining instead of the fun stuff.
Edit: all of these are choices made by the devs. In combat, you can take over a ship that has an airlock after you destroy the bridge. You cannot then scrap it for valuable parts, since scrapping captured ships nets you no materials back. It is viable for the very first or second sector you go to, when you don’t have factories (and finding a ship graveyard and scrapping for metal feels worthwhile) but you quickly outgrow it.
You can disable the crew limitations also you can have multiple ships. I usually play with one factory(for mining and processing), one starbase (a gigantic storage, waaay bigger than the ones from the game) some smaller ships for defense and quick intervention(often nuke carriers) amd one or two really big and heavily armored Fighters (record enemy destruction was 0,5seconds with a 20 rail guns offensive)
Most things you complain about can be changed in the options or with simple mods, you don’t even need to mine, you can just buy stuff. Also capturing enemy ships is unnecessary for farming, just drag the mine tool over it (or install a mod that lets you harvest them for no resource penalty)
The higher level systems aren’t that hard, you just need to upgrade your ship and larn how to combat with them, every ship plays different. Best way to survive is to outrange the enemy and be fast backwards to keep distance. (rail guns and rockets or lasers or everything)