I only buy games on Steam, GOG and ItchIO. The main reason I don’t give a cent to stores from EA, Ubisoft or Epic Games anymore is their services and terms are horrible. I’m all in for supporting competition when it’s good competition.
I would buy from GOG too, if they provided Linux support in form of an official launcher. And if available also official Linux builds. Back in the days GOG did that, but they stopped doing it. And before someone comes after me, I know there are alternative launchers on Linux. But I don’t want to give GOG money for work others doing it for free. I don’t want support a company who only cares about Windows.
Yeah they were ahead of Steam there for a while.
They started supporting and cooperating with heroic launcher.
Thus heroic is the defacto official GOG launcher on linux.
I used to be the same.
I have changed to prioritizing GOG though since I try to limit purchases from US companies and I despise how Steam knowingly profits from making children addicted to gambling.
In the past, before Proton, if a game was available at comparable prices on GOG and on Steam, I’d buy it on GOG, also because no DRM meant better compatibility. After Proton, my purchases from GOG went way down.
Steam is the very, very rare case of a major company that is both not beholden to shareholders, and has a pretty good guy at the helm.
I simply do not understand the sentiment that not being a total bastard is something celebrated and not expected or required.
And while many like our Steam benevolent (almost) monopoly, I do wonder how would the market look like if we had 20 competing companies that cannot gain more than 5% of the market share. Can you imagine the competition between them and how would that benefit us, the consumer?
It would likely result in endless corporate backstabbing, exclusive deals, contracts fights, and patent trolling
Which would likely result in horrid quality of life for the end user. Having to maintain countless accounts and subscriptions to have even fractional access to games.
It would likely also fuck over the studios and indie developers who would be shoved aside or relentlessly bought up in a ever growing attempt to grow.
More competition does not always mean things are better for the consumer. You can see the exact same thing played out with the recent rise and now slow descent to streaming services. As we went from one good one that turned into a horrible one as the sharehold is demanded it, then more rows and then things only became worse.
When you start operating at the sort of scale that the internet does, true, the whole competition thing being better for the consumer rarely works out.
You more frequently just end up with a bunch of greedy companies endlessly trying to one-up each other f****** over everyone in their attempts resulting in no one-winning, not the company, not the developers creators or middlemen nor and definitely not least the consumer.
True competition benefiting the consumer also requires there to be a connection to the consumer in a reason to actually service them. The companies need to be fighting for the consumer and not just each other. But that is all capitalism is turned into. The consumer is no longer the end goal. They’re just fighting each other to stomp them out so that all that’s left is themselves.
It’s been shown time and time again for decades now at at sufficient size competition just by itself does not help. The only thing that is repeatedly shown to be helpful is private companies with a good person at their home. Not trying to be a greedy f***.
And it’s showing time and time again. Every time that person retires the company sold their holders. Found public offerings made things just get worse.
The problem is not monopolies are bad. It’s not. The competition is good. It’s at public companies are a problem in the law forcing companies to do everything in their power to please. The shareholders is killing everything.
More competition does not always mean things are better for the consumer [cut], e.g. streaming services
I don’t believe this oligopoly is competing with each other?
(I’m not arguing with the rest of your post because capitalism bad :) )
That would mean exclusives everywhere. Everyone would try to force some game pass on us, until our only choice to get an OK selection would be having 4 subscriptions. Or piracy.
With Steam, I get a well integrated platform for buying, updating and launching everything with the correct compatibility layer.
That’s more convenient than piracy, so I use it.
Honestly 20 different companies would probably suck for the consumer. That’s 20 different storefronts to compare, 20 different libraries to manage, potentially 20 different sets of logins, 20 sources of data breaches. It’s unlikely they would adopt an open standard to allow a shared library. Maybe you have a 21st company that makes a product like heroic launcher. You’d likely run into regionality issues where a particular store is unavailable, so you may not be able to play purchased games. You would have all sorts of odd exclusive dlc and pre order bonuses so a cosmetic item you like could be locked to a store you haven’t used. Multiplayer likely wouldn’t be global cross play between all companies, you likely get some set of 20 companies working together for multiplayer. Some games may develop a good scene available to a single store, requiring a game to be repurchased. Exclusives or timed exclusives would be annoying to track, as each store would likely have different catalogs.
I think this amount of competition could be good if individual competitors were allowed to fail. All the parts that build vendor lock-in would need to be removed, and more things would need to be interoperable, but it could be quite good and even specialised.
Each storefront could live or die independent of each library and each game service. If one company tried to squeeze money from users, they could just take their elsewhere, without worrying about losing access to games or connections to friends.
Of course no company would create such a system voluntarily, most depend on monopolistic practices to survive. It would take monopoly busting-policy or a foss group to even begin such a thing.
“Not being a total bastard” is a weird way to describe overhauling the gaming on linux experience at no additional cost to the end user, among many other incredibly pro consumer choices they’ve pushed in the last twenty odd years.
Yeah. Steam is fucking solid.
step aside jesus, we have a new savior and his name is gaben
Steam kinda killed gaming piracy for many. Hope they won’t go the Netflix way in the future.
it’s crazy how you offer people convenience and they willingly pay for it. I remember steam killing piracy before DRM or anything like that existing
You make it sound like drm didn’t exist before steam or like steam isn’t a form of drm itself. Old drm was more basic and far less nefarious, like entering a cd key or codes in your manual. This later escalated to online activated cd keys. At the very least, these forms of drm didn’t run all the time like steam did- I remember steam getting huge pushback (from myself included) because it ran like absolute dogshit. Later forms of drm got worse with checks in the discs that collected data on your pc (securom, anyone?). Steam did a lot of good things but it did not erase drm- it merely created another form of it (I.e. You no longer own your games, you are buying licenses they can revoke at any time)
