Bad take. The competition is literally constantly shooting themselves in the foot by offering a worse service and doing nothing to make gaming better.
It’s not steams fault that companies like EA, Epic MS etc. are rotten to the core with their business practices and no one wants to use their storefronts.
GOG is the only one i might consider an alternative that isnt completely rotten.
Valve treats me like they actually want to earn ky business and they use their vast wealth to make cool shit. Valve is also the reason I no longer have to deal with Window’s bullshit to keep playing my favorite video games.
Yes, I would love to see more altruism, but Valve is, at the bare minimum, the epitome of moral neutrality as a business. So there’s nothing to really be mad at them about, and rather I have some gratitude for how they’ve used their money.
On the flipside, as others have pointed out, everyone else keeps shooting themselves in the foot. The only one thar hasn’t (to my knowledge) is GoG, but they’re never going to reach Steam status in a Capitalist society. And their social features are unavailable on Linux.
The next closest after that is Epic, who’s shitty, buggy ass launcher and storefront is so horrendous that when they give games out for free, people buy said games on Steam instead.
So… Why would we be mad at Valve for their competition being shit?
Because the other options pictured suck ass and having a million launchers is so god damned tiresome
its not monopoly if competition doesnt want to compete and isnt prevented from doing so. steam provides better service, which makes it de facto choice. should i be mad that only option i have is good? it just makes me worried that what if valve goes bad one day, but can’t do much about that.
No it isn’t.
Weren’t they literally being sued over it?
For me the difference is there is nothing stopping competitors, Valve is not locking them out of the market in anyway. If they don’t want to spend the time to build a good competing product, that’s on them. And additionally, PC gaming is just one platform for gaming
The network effect is a pretty significant barrier. If a game comes out and it isn’t on Steam, the odds are pretty good that most gamers would never bother looking at it. It’s hardly Steam’s fault that the only attempts at competition for decades have been enshitified from launch though.
If Steam is a monopoly, then explain how alternatives or competitors still exist. This entire “Steam is a monopoly” is bullshit because competition did and still does exist.
Nane one actual competitor lol
I use GOG for DRM free games.
Good Old Games.
Xbox gamepass
Because “gaming” is bigger than PCs. Steam has their own hardware and it sell like 1/100th of a PS5 or a Switch.
So Valve has a lot of room to compete with.
Used to prefer GOG over Steam. GOG did nothing for Linux gamers though, they didn’t even release their Galaxy client for Linux. Will prefer GOG over Steam again when this changes (they said recently they want to change this, but only after Valve has already invested a lot into making Linux gaming a real thing with almost zero friction). That’s also basically the best thing that Valve has done - they really did help to make Linux gaming a reality, and Linux gaming is an important step towards toppling Windows’ dominance. They deserve a lot of credit for that. But there are also plenty of other things that you can criticize about Steam.
If you’re on Windows though, you should definitely always prefer GOG over Steam because it’s DRM-free (you buy it, you own it). Of course, there are many more games only available on Steam, so it might not be possible all the time, but at least you should prioritize your choices.
We also have plenty of other monopoly problems, one of the biggest is YouTube.
I haven’t had any issues loading my GOG games through the Heroic launcher on ZorinOS
GoG is probably a pretty small company, I can’t really expect them to have a full Linux support system when Linux up until Windows 10 support ended was probably a pretty small niche that is now a slightly bigger niche.
If you’re on Windows though, you should definitely always prefer GOG over Steam because it’s DRM-free (you buy it, you own it)
I’m not really disagreeing with you, as with GOG you are guaranteed to get a DRM free game (and an installer which is better than Steam’s backup, as it’s guaranteed to work offline), but they still sell you just a revocable license.
I use Linux and I prefer GOG to Steam
what difference not having shareholders has
Monopoly is when you purchase other actors of the industry to extinction, and annihilatr competition this way. It has never been about having big market share due to superior service.
Thank you. Some people don’t realize part of being a monopoly is regulation capture and in some instances market collusion. That being big makes you a monopoly when that’s not all of it. Could Steam become one, possibly. Is it one currently, no.
Pretty much because the others are worse, and will continue to be until Gabe dies and they start to really squeeze all the value out of it they could.
Are they a monopoly? They’re definitely huge, but a lot of the games on Steam are non-exclusive, and they don’t actually control the rights to the games. Like, they don’t own the IP, they don’t restrict content to their platform, and they have some pretty functional if smaller competitors like GOG and Epic. They also make their platform compatible with game keys that weren’t actually sold on their platform.
They’re definitely something with substantial market dominance as a platform, not I’m not sure monopoly is really the word.
Monopoly is definitely the word, but they also don’t appear to be overly abusive about their market position.
They take 30% of all PC game sales. If that isn’t abusing their position, idk what is.
Retailers demanded a piece to put games in their stores as well. There has always been a price paid for going to market using someone else for it.
They allow devs to sell on other platforms and provide them steam keys for free, bypassing that commission.
I see this point come up all the time when it comes to Steam, but I have yet to see anyone really propose an alternative. How much should it cost to host your game on Steam? It obviously can’t be free because of hosting costs, and you’re also paying for marketing and discoverability, so what’s a good price for it?
Until recently, 30% was the industry standard for large software stores. Google is apparently lowering its cut after losing their recent battle with Epic, so it’s possible that the industry standard changes. I’d hope that Valve adjusts with it.
You lost 60% when selling physical media in stores, 30% was an amazing deal when steal launched
when steal launched
what a funny and in this context ironic typo
They’re a private company and thus have resisted many of the enshittification trends that run rampant through the industry.
And also their competitors are absolutely atrocious and are completely tone-deaf to what customers actually want.
This is exactly right. As soon as a company becomes public, it’s all over. Profits at X%, every quarter, no matter the cost. It’s the death of a company.
It doesn’t have to go public to do that. It can get sold to private equity. The original owner can pass the business to their kid who has grown up privileged and huffs their own farts. Going public is a guarantee of enshittification but it isn’t the only way.
