this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2023
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It is a monopoly - they just don't abuse it as much against their audience.
For developers it's either take their 30% deal or just don't sell your game because a lot of people only use steam.
Not even Cyberpunk or the Witcher could sell more on gog than on steam even though you knew that there the developers got 100% of the money spent. Gwent standalone flopped so hard on GOG that it had to be rereleased with limited features on steam and sold more there
People are just fundamentally lazy so it totally is a problem that you have one store with such a massive market share even if it's very convenient for the end-user they can completely exploit their position against publishers.
Sure EPICs way of making games exclusive to their store is not elegant but without that no-one would choose that store over steam
I am not sure if it's just people being lazy. Steam legitimately is a good gaming platform. It just has so many features that really bring the PC platform to the level of consoles in terms of UX. Social features, discussion boards, reviews, matchmaking, chat, broadcasting, remote streaming, all this alongside a kickass store. That's why Valve could roll out something like Steam OS and not have it feel woefully inadequate compared to what consoles offer.
Don't forget notes for games, steam workshop, and for those of us open source enthusiasts, making easy/reliable gaming on Linux. It has never been so good being a Linux gamer.
Tell me a game store that supports Linux out of the box (not messing with wine stuff or lutris)
This is partially on these companies for failing to provide an equal experience to Steam on their platform. I bought Witcher III in GoG to support the devs, and my reward was a lost save by the time the DLCs came out, because their client didn’t have cloud saves. So guess where I bought their stuff from there on? Sure, they added these features later but for some people the damage is already done.
It's a monopoly, but it's one that a big company like EA or Epic Games can defeat. But, they have to actually put in the work and effort to present an experience that isn't an enshittified version of Steam.
So far, none of them are willing to put in the time, so they don't get the prize.
Most gamers don't know and/or don't care, so they will take the least resistance path, which is Steam.
~~Steam has a "most favoured nation clause" which prevents companies from actually selling for cheaper on other platform. This is how steam maintains its monopoly. If it were possible for CD Projekt Red to sell it cheaper outside of steam it would force steam to actually charge developers less.~~
Edit: see below, it's actually not that clear.
They could sell for cheaper, they just can't sell Steam Keys specifically for cheaper than what's on Steam itself. Which makes sense honestly, you're literally using their service for both presence and distribution.
Looking at steam's own policies, this is true for steam keys, but there is an an going lawsuit that claims steam also makes this apply to non steam-enabled games: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/07/valve-issues-scathing-reply-over-the-facts-behind-a-steam-antitrust-case/
But looking mosre closely than I did previously this is based on:
So I don't really know, but if what valve says is true (which looks like it is), then I don't see any monopoly abuse indeed.
They do have a monopoly, but it's in large part for providing a better service. As a Linux user, I prefer Valve 100% over Epic that buys Rocket league and discontinues linux support. I do prefer Itch and GOG for the possibility of no-DRM games, but I've got to say it's overall a worse experience (no auto updates, no social features etc...)
I made my initial comment after watching: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOEG5qmMQas which suggested that Steam applied the MFN for non steam - enabled games too, but was done prior to Valve's response.
For the price parity thing, there's the game Tales of Maj'Eyal that is $6.99 USD on Steam but is free on their website te4.org. Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead is an open source project, but is on Steam for $19.99 USD. Caves of Qud is actually on sale now on GOG, but the Itch.io and Steam version aren't. Sure, these may just be because traditional roguelikes don't garner that much attention, but they are cases nonetheless that show otherwise.
The lack of auto-updates can sometimes be good. StarSector updated relatively recently and if they actually updated automatically (even if they offered an option to disable it, they update so infrequently, I'd probably have neglected it), my save and all my mods for it would just break, or worse break silentl until it was too late.
Thinking about it there are also multiple FLOSS games that are free on GitHub/Linux repos but paid on Steam. For example Mindustry and Pixel dungeon.
This is still easily verifiably untrue in practice. Go to isthereanydeal and you'll see verified, approved Steam key retailers running sales for under the Steam price on hundreds of games literally every day. Humble offers a global discount on all keys in their store if you're s subscriber, undercutting virtually every Steam page. That's not to mention the bundles they sell which regularly cut hundreds of dollars of keys down to a few bucks.
The steam documentation mentions for keys that while it is OK to run sales on different platforms at different times, the steam store must have similar sales within a reasonable time period, and he base price must not be higher on steam.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOEG5qmMQas
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Done
Many years ago I bought some old DOS game where Linux runtimes using the original files exists on GOG. What I expected was a disk image or a zip containing the files - what I got was some exe containing the files. Why would I ever try to buy something from someone fucking up something that simple again?
I might buy some indie games from a developer directly - but with a middleman steam is the only option.
That's not a steam issue, that's a developer/publisher issue Plenty of old Scumm based games work by just pointing scummvm at the game directory
Ah, seems I missed a "on GOG" in the reply.
If you're so sure Steam is a monopoly, can you please provide any evidence for that? To be clear, being very successful does not make someone a monopolist.
If Valve were a monopolist, they'd be listed here: https://digital-markets-act.ec.europa.eu/commission-designates-six-gatekeepers-under-digital-markets-act-2023-09-06_en
They account for about 75% of game sales on PC from what I'm finding, it's a "virtual monopoly", i.e. they have enough reach to control the market even if they have competitors.
75% of the units sold or 75% of the overall revemue. Given that the most successful PC games aren't even on Steam, the latter seems unlikely to me. Roblox alone is a sustained revenue stream in insanely high numbers.
Do they block the competition in any way? They aren't the stewards of Windows. Epic buys exclusive rights to games. Does Valve do the same? On Steam Deck, there's even an entire independent app store (Discover with Flathub) enabled right out of the box. That's how the community made Minecraft and Heroic Game Launcher available. Official EGS, GamePass, and GOG launchers could be made available via Flathub but MS etc. choose not to.
Nintendo is compared to other console manufacturers.
Microsoft is considered to be in a position of monopoly in the OS market, yet they're not the ones building the PC itself.
Holy fuck did I just enter a freaking asylum or something?
Yeah, to say a successful business is a monopoly because it is far reaching is absurd.
Call me when Good-Old-Epic-Steam launches.
One can have a monopoly without directly trying for it. Especially when it comes to services with a lot infrastructure involved. Once you make those investments, it's hard for anyone to compete against them.
A monopoly just means you control a significant amount of the market. I think, technically, they would fall under oligopoly. Where a few businesses have control of the market instead of just a single business. But the point is they have a far larger share of the market than most others. This is mostly because they create a product that people want to use, instead of making a service that unfairly captures the market through things like game exclusivity or hostile takeovers.
But when the EU recently announced service gatekeepers, Valve was not among them. Microsoft is.
*Because they don't meat the minimum financial and monthly user criterias to be taken into consideration when analyzing the monopoly status of their platform
You forgot to add that part 👍
So Steam does not meet / meat🥩 the financial and monthly user numbers to count as a monopoly? So Steam is not a monopoly then. Great.
No, the PC videogame market is too small for the European Union to analyse it.
If the local hardware store is the only one selling screws for 100km around and it doesn't show up on their list, does it means they don't have a monopoly or it simply means that they don't bother checking that because the hardware store doesn't:
Make 6.5B a year/doesn't have a market capitalization of 65B
Doesn't have 45m monthly users in the union AND 10k business users in the union
Meets those criterias three years in a row
Because these are the criterias required for the EU to take the time to analyze a companies' position in their market.
Then please provide ANY form of facts-based analysis that Steam is a monopoly and no "Trust me, bro" isn't that.
The European Union considers some companies to be a monopoly with a smaller market presence than Steam has in the PC video games sales market. That comes from your own source buddy.
You continue to deflect that you have no proof that Steam is a monopoly.
Your whole argument to show that it isn't is based on ignoring their market dominance and referencing the DMA that hasn't even been used to analyze Steam's position in their market because the PC video game market as a whole isn't big enough to be covered by the DMA.
The proof, that I already mentioned, is the fact that no antitrust agency anywhere convicted Valve of anything related to monopoly.