Of all the Golden Joystick Awards 2025 winners, Schedule 1 arguably stood out as one of the most unique – after all, it is about running your own drug empire… but, what if it wasn’t?
After launching into Early Access on Steam, Schedule 1 took the web by storm and currently sits with “Overwhelmingly Positive” reviews eight months on. Players praise it as a fun management game, with many spending over 100 hours in-game. At the Golden Joystick Awards, Schedule 1 further proved itself with a win and a nomination, bagging the Breakthrough Award and going up as a Best Early Access Game contender.
Another prime example of why Steam has an absolute Monopoly on the market.
A single distributor should not have that kind of influence over game development
The real problem are the payment networks. If VISA and Mastercard put limits on porn and drugs in games ( as they have already done) no shop can sell it
This kind of game becoming successful would have been impossible before Steam. In the old days the brick-and-mortar stores would refuse to stock any game that was even remotely controversial in content or age rating. Steam has been hands-off regarding what they allow outside of things that are illegal (or, recently, that their payment processors disapprove of - if you want to talk about influential monopolies that shouldn’t exist…).
San Andreas and The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion were even pulled off of store shelves temporarily due to their age ratings being adjusted. Places like Walmart are a hundred times worse gatekeepers than Valve has proven to be.
That’s the thing. Steam didn’t do ANYTHING to traditional distribution channels. They all put themselves out of business, or out to pasture.
Either you’re too young to have experienced “the old days” or you live in a very conservative area.
There was absolutely a mature section for nearly every store I went to, they either had sleeves to cover the games with printed/handwritten titles, or were collected and kept in their own area that was in view of an employee to tell kids to stay away.
Oh, you meant department stores, not actual local game stores.
https://dosgames.com/game/crime-fighter/
In this, you play your way to become a crime lord. You make money by pickpocketing, pimping, dealing drugs, stealing car stereos, breaking into banks, kidnapping children for ransom money and killing cops to get their guns.
Back then, you didn’t buy games from Walmart (the gaming market wasn’t big enough for that), you bought them via mail order.
We had a game like that in graphing calculators we passed around at school.
And yet, it’s still the best we have. And I can only imagine the shenanigans if any of the competing storefronts held the position Steam does.
I’m fairly certain the gaming scene would be far worse if, say, Microsoft had the leading storefront.