Finally someone with a voice said it.
Epic gives so many games away, but their launcher and store are so bad that I don’t even play their free games.
I don’t care if Uni wants to run a store. But forcing me to use their store when I buy the game on steam is pretty af. So I don’t play Ubi games either.
Their shit launcher made the games run worse.
In present day. I dont want to use Windows. So I simply cannot play much if the new games from the other shit companies because they have some vendetta against Proton / Steam Deck.
Now they’re literally doing it to themselves.
If I could testify for Valve as a customer I would.
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?
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.
That would require real ownership which is unlikely to ever happen. Company failures more likely just means loss of any library from them.
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.
Exclusives are a bastard child of oligopoly, where the distribution platform has more power than the publisher.
Before Steam physical games were NEVER sold only in ToysR, they were sold in all shops.
No, that’s pretty wrong. There absolutely were exclusive store releases, or temporary releases where one store would get a certain game a whole month early.
they’re still sold everywhere…just nobody buys em cause why the fuck would you when you can buy em online?
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 :) )
“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.
i think personally Steam’s/Valve’s dominance is really good here’s why:
- Improving Linux gaming,improving Wine and DXVK for gaming,so you dont rely on Microsoft for your OS.
- Great client(i like the: inbuilt Chromium based browser,Community features)
- Not so awful and maybe simple DRM methods(eg, needing the Steam client doesnt tank the performance that much,compared to something like denuvo which i think makes modding impossible,needs consistent internet connection,and tanks the game’s fps alot )
- I can buy with cash giftcard to buy games(I wish GOG had that)
- Workshop for modding on supported games.(ik some games have workshop and dont let you mod everything)
- Makes/has good games(Half-life 2 is the best game i ever played)
but the bad things:
- Steam Client is still 32 bit and Steam doesnt target ARM(E,G. For like M1+ macs,those need rosetta )
- third party clients arent a option
- You dont own anything you buy on Steam.
- Having the Steam client open at all times(ik not all games have this, but i assume CEF based Steam will lower the performance like slightly)
- TF2 neglect
- lootboxes/battle pass in some games(i am aware Valve was the first company to have a battle pass and fortnite popularized it)
alright thats what i think of the Good and bad of Valve/Steam
Edit: Fixed Paragraph break.
I think you switched to cons without saying.
I admit I haven’t tried very many, but I think you can launch any steam app “normally” without steam running. If you can find the executable or startup script, you can just point a shortcut to it. Some games will need Steam Services to run, but it’s not blocked or anything.
There’s a ‘but the bad things’ buried in the middle, desperately wanting a line break.
I did the same thing initially and tried re-reading it as sass. Especially if “TF2 neglect” was considered positive.
There’s a ‘but the bad things’ buried in the middle, desperately wanting a line break.
Thanks for the feedback, i have fixed it
they said it but there’s not a paragraph break do it’s easy to miss
I admit I haven’t tried very many, but I think you can launch any steam app “normally” without steam running. If you can find the executable or startup script, you can just point a shortcut to it. Some games will need Steam Services to run, but it’s not blocked or anything.
I think i mentioned this,? but there are Steam games that dont let you use it without having the client open, but yeah there are Steam games that work without the client.
I think you switched to cons without saying.
Its there but i didnt have a line break.
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
i kinda agree:
but its still possible to pirate some Steam games without the Steam Client,
and some still require it.
Steam had been one of the good companies so far. Until they showed clear signs of enshitiffication, I will patronise Steam.
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Competition keeps them honest, and right now we need more real contenders, not just storefronts throwing money at exclusives.
Then the competition should put in the work.
That’s hard to do when Steam has all but cornered the market. Say what you will about Epic’s ineptitude, but even investing billions, the publisher of the biggest game ever can’t break into the market. Now imagine how hard it’d be for a smaller player.
Epic can’t break into the market because of their own shitty launcher, not because of anything Steam has done to lock down the competition.
Now imagine how hard it’d be for a smaller player.
Not very hard, if they were willing to create a decent launcher and engage in sustainable business practices (and regional pricing).
I sincerely doubt that even if another launcher did everything Steam does, it would rival it without huge amounts of money being thrown around. People already use Steam.
And that’s assuming they get to this point, ignoring that Steam had decades to get there. It used to be ass.
Not every company can pull it off, but I’m certain if Epic had invested in their launchers it could have worked.
A few years in and their launcher has stagnated completelyI sincerely doubt that even if another launcher did everything Steam does, it would rival it. People already use Steam.
At that point, you can start grabbing business from steam via promotions and such. You don’t need to rival or outgrow Steam to break into the market, you just need a bit of the market.
And that’s assuming they get to this point, ignoring that Steam had decades to get there. It used to be ass.
It’s not even that other launchers have less features than Steam. It’s just that other than GoG, which has a very limited catalog and no regional pricing, there is not a single store that is not actively anti-consumer to a hilarious extent.
There being a barrier to entry isn’t Steam’s fault. If someone comes and makes a competitor launcher and storefront that is just as good, people can easily switch. Both developers and customers. Nobody is locked in
Looking at how other tech areas have all consolidated into monopolies or oligopolies, valve is the best case scenario for PC gaming.
Imagine anyone else being in control. Activision? EA? Ubisoft? The gaming industry is not immune from disgusting money hungry corporations stepping on the users to squeeze out every little penny they can. Valve has never done this and has kept others in check for the longest time. The day we lose the current version of Valve will be disastrous for the industry, I’m pretty sure.
I think you might reconsider what qualifies as “best case scenario” if you end that statement with “when this thing goes, it’s taking the industry with it”. Like, best out of a bad bunch, for sure, but the best possible outcome?
My personal opinion is that better than this in a money driven capitalistic economy is not possible. The pressures to keep growing and to make more are too great and most companies will do anything to make line go up. Valve has been very steady and metered in their ways over the years compared to any other company I am aware of.
If we change the external pressures, as in change our entire economic model, then sure, better can be had, I assume for all companies everywhere not just valve.
This is a bot ^^
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I think valve has the absolute worst skins market out there but their store is really good.
I feel like they’ve earned it because they’ve put in the most work. They are the best in the game because they make the user experience the best there is. EA, Ubisoft, and Microsoft have/had their own storefronts or launchers but they are clunky and unpleasant to deal with and the only benefits they had were exclusives. They’ve never put any effort into user experience and were mainly doing it to make themselves more money and it definitely showed. The only one that’s ever been a real competitor is Epic Launcher. And while it has gotten better over the years, the user experience is still not anywhere near Steam. And even now the Epic Launcher is still unpleasant to deal with in a lot of cases unless you just use it to play Fortnite.
With Steam everything just works and is basically seamless. Not only that, before Steam the modding community for most games had an immense learning curve and most people just avoided it save for Minecraft. And as far as I can tell you can’t even mod games you buy on the Microsoft Store because their file structure is atrocious.
The only storefront I wish was better/more popular was GOG. It’s not bad and has a lot of benefits (Like no DRM and offline installers), but Steam just makes everything so easy it’s hard not to get stuck with them once you’ve started.
Offline installers are the reason I only use my money on gog. I like to have control over the things I own, though it’s getting harder and harder these days. But where it’s still possible I use it, and gog is the only storefront that offers this service (which beats every other service I could think of).
The only storefront I wish was better/more popular was GOG. It’s not bad and has a lot of benefits (Like no DRM and offline installers), but Steam just makes everything so easy it’s hard not to get stuck with them once you’ve started.
Well the no DRM/offline installer part is the most important part. I buy a game, I download and install it. If I need more features I may be better off with Steam anyway.
As far as I know the Steam DRM is not mandatory to use for developers.
Yes, I still need to go through Steam for every install.
Non-drm steam games can actually just be copied around like you would copy the installer
I still need the client once (RIP Windows 7), and installations are not guaranteed to be portable.
While Steam is more or less the best big solution we have, it does leave a lot to be desired. The only reason they are the best is because they clawed their way to the top early, kept themselves “good enough” compared to the competition, and haven’t yet sold out their entire customer base.
At this point, they completely dominate. It’s insanely difficult to compete with them. So long as they make half of an effort to improve things and continue to be somewhat benevolent they’ll likely keep their crown.
However, Valve is not ideal. They are still looking out for themselves, primarily. Many of Valves improvements have just been reactions to competitors and other threats not an inherent desire to deliver the best product possible or do the right thing. It’s just the fact that most competitors are more obviously greedy and immoral that makes Valve look like the heroes.
Without Epic and others throwing cash on the fire trying to compete I doubt we’d have seen even the slow upgrades to the Steam experience we’ve seen in recent years.
Without the Australian lawsuit, we’d have no return policy.
Without the clever abuse of arbitration by a group of lawyers, Valve would still have forced arbitration in the agreements.
Steam OS was only a thing, and Proton only got backed by Valve, when Microsoft first started positioning itself to eat Valve’s lunch by exerting control over Windows and pushing for things like UWP and the MS/Windows/XBOX storefronts on PC.
The vast majority of Valve’s storefront improvements are algorithms and crowd sourcing solutions. They want to be as hands off as possible because being hands on is hard and comes with liability. The whole skins market and gambling fiasco kind of shows that they’d much rather just not get involved if possible - same risk/reward cost/benefit analysis used by every greedy company. If that means lying about how aware they are of it that’s what they’ll do.
Don’t get me wrong. The least worst is, unfortunately, the best we’ve got. I love gaming and use Steam a lot. It’s just that the other big players are just so terrible that I think Valve gets a free pass. Hell, much of the tech industry is swallowing tactical nukes hoping that the radiation will somehow mutate them into a good business. In the meantime they are using the illusion of “expansion” from the resulting explosions to make themselves look bigger for investors. I support anyone not doing that.
While many accuse Valve of monopolising the PC gaming market, others argue that Steam’s dominance is simply the result of doing things right.
These assertions do not contradict. I cannot overstress that.
This whole article is ‘Valve’s monopoly is fine because they did things right.’
Having one good store is not, in itself, a problem. But it does mean we’re one fuckup away from having no good stores.
So we’re acknowledging it’s a monopoly? Cool. Defense is still an acknowledgement. I’ve had the weirdest goddamn arguments with people insisting they’d never shop anywhere else, and if games aren’t on there it’s their own fault they’re doomed… but how dare anyone use the m-word! Obviously that can only mean one seller with absolute control, like how Standard Oil owned all 85% of the market.
The question is, is it a monopoly because they are doing something to force their way into that position, or does every other offering just suck?
And what is the solution to said monopoly? Because as far as I can tell, the only way to give the other shitty stores a chance is to deliberately make the steam experience worse.
There’s also the question of if this is even a real problem. For instance, if two people are trying to sell lemonade on their street, and one is just throwing a lukewarm cup of haphazardly crushed lemons at you for $2, and the other is charging $3 but giving you a cool glass of carefully squeezed lemons… the second one may have a monopoly, but that’s because the first isn’t competent. Should the second be punished in some way because of that?
Saying it’s a monopoly doesn’t mean it needs solving. Anti-competitive behavior is a problem - but being a monopoly doesn’t require that abuse, and you don’t need a monopoly to exercise that abuse.
Yet people get deeply fricking weird about saying it’s a monopoly.
It’s naked taboo. It’s people feeling icky about a word, and actively refusing to engage in rational argument about meaning. When someone has dogmatically internalized that monopoly=bad and Steam=good, the text doesn’t matter. Even pointing out things they just said gets dismissed as some kind of attack against The Good Store.™
We have to start from plain acknowledgement that Steam’s competitors do not matter. They are plentiful and irrelevant. Explaining why they are doesn’t change that they are.
Should the second be punished in some way because of that?
It’s not a punishment. It’s a correction, required to maintain a healthy market.
Your lemonade stand would be more like if there was a stand on every block: By virtue of the scale of their business they could afford to undercut any competition that tried to start up. If they did that they could be slapped on the wrist for being anti-competitive.
Is Valve/Steam anti-competitive? IDK. It’s a monopoly, though, so you have to watch it extra carefully to ensure it doesn’t abuse its position as a market leader.
The bottom line on what I’m trying to say, is that valve isn’t doing anything to correct. The only way to make them less competitive would be to actively make the user experience worse.
Is it a potential problem that valve could go anti consumer and fuck everyone over? Absolutely. But until that happens, there’s nothing to actually do beyond point out that it has a monopoly. Which… I mean, doesn’t actually do much more than trigger the “monopoly = bad” thought in people’s minds.
