I laugh when i see this shit.
Imagine creating a platform which is so feature rich, and costs nothing for consumers to use, that other distributors want to legally force you to separate it from your store so they have a chance to sell the consumer the same game, for the same price (or more), but on “an equal playing field”.
It surprised me that only 10% had tried selling their games on GOG. I guess the thought of going DRM-free was scarier than the monopoly of Steam.
Yeah, of course it would. Senior Manager position is something that basically only exists for bigger studios. From the 306 developers interviewed, probably only a small part are indie developers.
If only all monopolies were so user-positive.
I suspect what’s unique in valve’s case is that they don’t have investors and board members and other stakeholders to lead them toward short-term profit maximization.
I dread the day where GabeN is leaving valve
meh, IDK. it won’t change the basic facts of the company, there will still be no stakeholders.
Depends. Whoever will follow up, can charge the company into a public one
certainly possible. I just think Gabe isn’t the only Gabe who works at valve.
It’s a monopoly that benefits the consumer.
It could easily not be a monopoly if any other company was dedicated to making as good of a customer experience.
I mean, they’re not really wrong. Valve has a monopoly on game distribution the same way that Google has a monopoly on Internet search. Alternatives exist, but they aren’t really competing with Steam.
Valve has so far been pretty pro-consumer which is how they got to where they are, but yhat doesn’t really change the fact that they essentially get to set the rules for digital distribution of games.
Really? Has Valve abused their position to specifically further entrench their monopoly or other anti-consumer behavior?
There was a time I would have agreed with that comparison but Google has sucked for a while.
Gamers have good reason to love Valve for Steam alone – not even accounting for their amazing games. They really do have the best gamer-oriented platform, and seemingly they care about gamers. I think they’ve done a lot to advance gaming on linux as well which is much appreciated.
But, at least the way I see it, they still extract rents from game devs to an almost feudal degree.
“Sure – come sell your
graingame – but you’ll have to give me a third of your profit because I own thetown squareplatform/servers.”Side note: It’s pretty funny that for a while Valve had Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis on staff to analyze spontaneously emerging markets for digital items on Steam – and he went on to write about the phenomenon above in his recent book Technofeudalism.
Edit: formatting
Unless games become something we truly own, steam is going to stay dominant. It’s more like a utility than a storefront. If you want to remove the dominance of steam you need to force a way to move libraries of games to other platforms.
Steam also got their monopoly the honest way by simply being the most consumer friendly option.
from the overall pool, 75% of respondents were senior managers
So… not developers, but businessmen.
Yeah, who do you think is best equipped to examine the sales and financials?
Irrelevant - the title and graphic says “developers”.
Steam is the reason I was able to get away from windows without having to give up a lot of games (and probably would need to do annoying troubleshooting for the ones that do work, since most of the compatibility issues I have seen were because the game tried to run natively instead of via proton).
Valve is “de facto” monopoly, bit the actual monopoly potential is in Microsoft hands. Microsoft is for PC gaming industry what Google is for the web browser one. Sure, there may be other cool web browsers, but it’s Google that (through Android base) decide whic web browser will be delivered with the next billions of Android mobile device: some elderly people on smartphone don’t even know what is a web browser (“oh, you mean when I Google? I don’t know: I just Google”).
All future new PC will be sold with Microsoft Store and Xbox junk ware: Microsoft has been exceptionally shitty for not being the actual monopoly in the PC gaming industry. But that’s a very feeble protection: break Valve business is just a mandatory “security update” away to happen. They can break Steam little by little (such as suggested by Tim Sweeney) or just a big blow by sheer monopolized manipulation (such as Google not allowing adblockers to chrome to feed their advertising business)
Microsoft tried to flip the switch years ago to kill anything outside the Microsoft store. That’s when steam released the original steam machines. Combined with general negative response to the messaging Microsoft has backed off, but they absolutely want to do it still.
They never tried to kill anything outside the Microsoft store. That’s just what Tim Sweeney and developers got fearful of and made a big fuss about (not saying it’s not worth making a fuss about, but they never announced they would do it). Microsoft did introduce more limited versions of windows that had sideloading disabled by default, but these were low cost versions of windows generally aimed at children and grandparents / non tech people, not at their gamer user base.
They absolutely were heading that direction with both windows and Xbox until the massive backlash from the public forced them to tone down their plans. It’s still the same company that tried to kill used games on consoles, and they basically have with the creation of game pass. Valve built an escape hatch to Linux for gaming, which has forced them to be a bit nicer on the PC front, but that’s not a sign of Microsoft being good.
Lol, they didn’t try to kill used games on console, when they announced the Xbox One they also announced that you would be able to digitally sell and transfer your games licenses and share you digital library with friends.
Gamers didn’t hear that though, and then those plans got scrapped when they had to rework everything before launch.
Turns out if you invest in making your platform not suck it ends up paying dividends. Figure it out dumbfucks.
Something I think a lot of people in first world countries might not be thinking about also, is that Valve set very reasonable prices in third world countries for about 5-10 years. It meant not having to pirate games anymore, risking viruses and having to look for cracks every update, having distributors closed down, etc.
Steam set reasonable prices, had a download manager that could pause downloads, offered download servers in several regions and countries to make it faster, etc. And now they’re making gaming on Linux easier. 🤷🏻♂️
Platforms like EGS have been throwing incredible games at us for years (until recently), and they can’t get enough people to stick around because it’s just not worth the trouble even free. I have collected many of those games, and I ended up buying them on Steam because it was just easier to deal with, even with third-party modding (such as SMAPI for Stardew Valley).
The one thing I will say against Valve/Steam is that their social platform is a shitshow and either they should invest in moderation or just shut it down, because it’s impossible to enter there and not be blasted with racism, misogyny, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, etc. It sucks because there have been times when I went to a game’s Steam forum and found out about some recent bug or workaround, so there is value there, but it’s completely overtaken with all the bigotry. But I get it, gAmErS… if they ever moderated that place, their userbase would probably shrink.
Haven’t even bothered making an account on epic for the free games or what ever they are offering. I just don’t care, steam is so much better. Got a few games in GoG too but I wish they did a little better in the Linux support side of things.
I’ve been gaming on Linux for a year now and I have (and run) way more games from GOG than Steam.
Historically I avoided Steam because of the whole “you don’t own the games, you just license them at full price” nature of the “phone home” validation they have for most games, so I had a much larger collection in GOG than Steam to begin with since I would only get from Steam the really interesting games which I wouldn’t find in GOG (plenty of games I simply did not buy because they were Steam only).
That said, running GOG games in Linux is as least as simple as Steam games, thanks to me using Lutris which does all the heavy lifting of properly configuring Wine and VKDX to run my games and even integrates with GOG to directly download the installers: in practice I have about the same chance of success with click-and-play installing and running a game in Linux from the Steam Store via the Steam App as I do from GOG via Lutris.
Then on top of that, because I’m a techie, I actually prefer Lutris + Wine because it’s so much more open for configuration than Steam and to figure out yourself how to run games for which there are no pre-made configuration scripts, such as pirated ones - for example, for one of my Steam games I couldn’t at all find a way to run the official version of the game in Linux via the Steam App, but I could get the pirated version of that game to run just fine via Lutris.
I even have a default setting in Lutris which will run my games inside a Firejail sandbox with networking disabled plus a bunch of other security settings, something I can’t do in Steam (were I can only do it for the entire Steam App, which won’t function with disabled networking).
You don’t own gog games either. Not using drm doesn’t grant ownership.
Two things:
- …
You’re confusing ownership of the “copyright of a game” with ownership of the actual instance of a game.
In jurisdictions were the Law is not just bought and paid for by industry lobbyists, you definitely own that copy you got when you downloaded the offline installer from GOG same as you would a game CD. What you don’t own is the copyright of the game.
Further, even in the jurisdictions were IP Law is thoroughly bought and thus has been subverted to serve media industry interests, you de facto own that copy you got when you downloaded the offline installer from GOG: because the way things are set up with GOG (meaning, no DRM), the copyright owner would have no recourse but to literally take you to court to take away that copy, which they won’t because it’s too expensive so not worth the cost - unlike with Steam they can’t just switch off you access to it by toggling a flag in a database.
Curiously, with Steam they can block you from accessing the copy of the game you bought even in the non-corrupt legal jurisdictions, because if they just block you from accessing it even if they legally can’t, it’s now up to you to take them to court to restore access to something you legally should have access to, and you won’t do it because it’s “too expensive so not worth the cost”.
- …
Whilst the whole thing is a bit of a mess with multiple takes on multiple jurisdictions, the praxis side is the same everywhere: “Possession is 9/10 of the law” as the saying goes - so if you have it fully under your control (so, no “phone home” system that can lock you out from using it) THEY have to take you to Court and justify to the Judge why they should be allowed to take it away from you, whilst if it’s not under your control and they just take your access to it away from you, YOU have to take them to Court and justify why they should have to restore you access.
Even were you do not have legal ownership of a copy of a game, the way the GOG stuff is set up, once you’ve downloaded the offline installer you have de facto ownership which is pretty costly for them to overturn.
Meanwhile, the way the Steam stuff is set up you do not have control over that instance of the game and they can just take it away from you, and then it’s you who will have trouble overturning it even in jurisdictions were you’re legally in the right.
Many of my favorite games don’t have drm, and you can just copy the install folder and boom, you own a copy
Yeah, but the store doesn’t actually tell you which is which when you’re looking to buy a new game, now does it?!
Further, will that copy of an install folder work if you copy it into a new machine? Maybe, but probably not (it depends on things like how the game handles missing registry keys and/or the graphics card changing whilst there’s already a shader cache for the previous graphics cards).
When you’re making a purchasing decision, if that factor is very important to you, Steam’s possibility that maybe it can be done in an unofficial non-supported way, but you don’t get told upfront if it does work, and you’re not sure if it will work if you change machines, doesn’t count as a real “I get to keep the game no matter what” feature - it’s a hack, that sometimes works, usually doesn’t.
In GOG that feature is standard.
This wasn’t a “hey this is ok because you can sometimes do it in a jank way” comment, more of a “hey in case you didn’t know you can go make copies to preserve what you like” comment
Ah, cheers!
It’s always good to inform people.
it’s just not worth the trouble even free
for me, it all boils down to this. The best DRM is making garbage. I won’t even sail the seas to find it, I just will never use it.
Epic has offered quite a few decent games for free but their forced client/launcher is such shit that its not even worth installing. I absolutely wouldn’t be surprised if people pirate games even after they’ve gotten them free on epic just to not have to deal with that bullshit.
https://heroicgameslauncher.com/
Works on windows, Mac and Linux. Connects to GOG, Epic and Amazon.
absolutely spot on write up, thank you
They’re a functional monopoly in my case since I’m on Linux. GOG is the main competitor for my money.
Valve has a huge amount of good will to burn and the cynical side of me is waiting for the day they start.
Bullshit. There are many other PC games stores and launchers. Only reason they don’t have lot of users is because they are just not very good. In my view, Valve is not actively trying to establish any monopoly, their competition is mostly incompetent, especially EGS. Of course, I understand that if devs want their games to succeed, they have to play by Valve’s rules, but let’s face it, that’s where customers are. This is not by some trickery of Valve. It’s because Valve happens to be very pro-consumer. So, I don’t agree with the assertion that Steam is a monopoly.
Epic games store could have been great and yet, Epic’s disdain for gamers has caused it to fail. Now EGS is just a glorified Fortnite launcher for the most part.
I am not saying that Steam or even Valve is perfect. They are not. They are just leagues better than their competition.
I will also say is that major reason why Steam has an monopoly is that they have invested their resources to streamline the PC gaming experience and also make gaming on Linux better as well as Steam controller which also allows us to remap control layout.
None the alternative does that and are just another DRM-Storefront. That’s my major pet peeve with Steam alternative like Epic Games Launcher. Closest we have is GOG for to be able to download offline installer and most the games are DRM-free. Otherwise, I just would rather buy games on Steam as it just works for me… 🤷
When you buy something digital, since it’s expensive, you want an assurance that the platform would honor your access for many years.
Valve has the best chance of that.
