Until any competing store releases a Linux client, I can’t really argue against Steam. They are a gatekeeper and almost a monopoly, but they’re also the most benevolent and pro-consumer gatekeeper that we have in the PC gaming distribution space. As long as all the competition continue to be Windows-only and, in some cases, actively work against Linux users, I don’t want Valve’s digital fiefdom to fall.
How are they a gatekeeper? Near monopoly sure. But they don’t force companies to only publish on Steam. They don’t have restrictive rules. I’m not sure what gate they are keeping.
If you reeeeally want to stretch, they do have rules about pricing things lower on other platforms. Like, you can have a sale on your website that makes it cheaper than Steam, but can’t have the base price cheaper there than on Steam. That’s about it.
Valve is interesting. Enshitification is the standard for something like social media. Corporations are the real customer and users do creative labor to keep it valuable.
Valve flips the script. Developers struggle because they are only expected to labor. Studios don’t get the full value of their labor. They might be a huge corporation but they are a worker to valve
Just wanted to say: good work with OpenRGB!
When a monopoly is faced with a smaller, more efficient competitor, they cut prices to keep people from switching, or buy the new competitor, make themselves more efficient, and increase profits.
When Steam was faced with smaller competition that charged lower prices, they did - nothing. They’re not the leader because of a trick, or clever marketing, but because they give both publishers and gamers a huge stack of things they want.
Sure, Steam seems fairly okay, especially their Linux support, but I still mostly prefer GOG, wherever possible, because it offers more control to their customer over the product they bought.
It helps that Valve is not publicly traded, but I fear that if the current owner (Gabe Newell) dies, there might be a shift in business practices.
Enshittification can still happen in privately traded/owned companies, it generally happens slower and in case there are other reason for the owner(s) to maximize short term profits (e.g. business built on VC money), it can happen faster.
So more-efficient competitors emerged against the supermajority market leader and didn’t impact that company’s market share.
Hmm.
This is just silly, is this dev just a salty b?
I may not like some parts of steam (like its ui) but I’d say gaben showed us how a big company should always be run.
They don’t buy out anyone (hello epic) they made many proconsuner moves and they are funding alternatives like proton without any guarantee of return.Your shit doesn’t sell without steam not because its YouTube and holding everything and everyone hostage, but because everything else is just that much worse.
If you wanna shoot yourself in the foot go ahead but don’t complain nobody is is helping with it.
Call me when they show predatory behaviour to establish their monopoly. I don’t think steam has exclusive deals as epic has for example.
Loot boxes and what is essentially a market of nft’s. Otherwise they’re pretty cool I guess.
I feel like some journalist got high as fuck with a dev, wrote out a fucking fever dream of… drivel and then the editors were like fuck it, Tim Sweeney pays us to post some hit pieces against Valve and this is all we got this month so we’ll just run with this.
Let’s save it for when Gabe bites it and it gets shity.
Right on. I enjoy steam and I find Valve are mostly responsible gatekeepers, but at the end of the day, they’re still a gatekeeper
But what’s the alternative?
Gog, direct distribution, something else I haven’t thought of. I just fear monocultures. Things can go south fast
How is steam stopping developers from doing direct distribution?
The question was what are the alternatives, those are alternatives
In response to you saying steam is a gatekeeper.
I think their market dominance makes it an uphill battle for a dev to not put their games on steam. I don’t think that’s much of a problem right now because Valve has been reliable, but all it takes is a bad turn of events at Valve leadership for that to change. I think they are a gatekeeper only insofar as they have market dominance and a platform with games with DRM
Some titles have been very popular without steam, Dark and Darker is a good example of this, GTA 5 another.
I’m not going to pretend they don’t have the most sales, but they also have objectively the best platform. People love it.
As a gamer, there isn’t too much I can do about it, except buy games from other stores where the developers offer their games. As a developer, if I’m worried about Valve becoming abusive, it makes sense for me to use more than one marketplace, or a different marketplace than Valve altogether. Since Valve doesn’t seem to have a lot of exclusivity deals, this either means it costs more for developers to maintain multiple distribution channels, or they don’t think it benefits them to have multiple distribution channels. That said, the continued existence of those other distribution channels leaves the option to leave if they don’t like Valve’s behavior.
As a gamer, all I can do is support other stores, and I do.
I find it really interesting how Valve hired Yanis Varoufakis to analyze the markets that were spontaneously emerging from games on their platform, and how he went on to write a book about the feudalistic nature of internet platforms that is being referred to here. I wonder what Gaben thinks of that and what Yanis thinks about Steam.
Then there is the aspect of Valve being a flat company, no hierarchy, and how Gaben has talked about avoiding rent-seeking that other companies were taking part in, how he wants to make good products for gamers, doesn’t look at sales numbers.
Valve has some really great philosophy running behind it, and then there is the fiefdom of Steam extracting rents from publishers.
I agree and hope that what comes after it is even better at supporting gaming on GNU/Linux and contributing to various libre and opensource projects like KDE and Proton and Mesa and such.
Even Avalon fell eventually.
I’d really like it if Valve waits for until after I get a pile of external hard drives before they go under.
Steam obsessed people always cry about the lack of “features” in other stores, as if a game store + launcher needs features other than being able to buy and launch games.
Hell, I don’t even want to launch games. Just let me buy and download an exe (oh yeah, GoG does that, which is why I use GoG whenever I can…)
Sucks for devs that people just won’t buy their game if it isn’t on Steam though :/ Idk how to change peoples’ behaviour, unless Steam does something egregiously bad to users
One of those features is Proton. Thanks to Steam I can play every game I am interested in, without the need to install Windows.
GoG sometimes pushes out Linux installers that they immediately stop supporting, resulting in non-working games. Fuck that.
Your wants and needs are different from other people’s wants and needs, doesn’t mean other people are wrong.
The problem here is you think other stores actually let you buy and launch games reliably.
Steam is fast. Epic is slow. Epic is always asking me to 2FA to access my library of free games. Epic takes minutes to load their store homepage.
