ITT I learn that oligarch gabe nawel is the elon musk of gamers
They’re a private company and thus have resisted many of the enshittification trends that run rampant through the industry.
And also their competitors are absolutely atrocious and are completely tone-deaf to what customers actually want.
This is exactly right. As soon as a company becomes public, it’s all over. Profits at X%, every quarter, no matter the cost. It’s the death of a company.
It doesn’t have to go public to do that. It can get sold to private equity. The original owner can pass the business to their kid who has grown up privileged and huffs their own farts. Going public is a guarantee of enshittification but it isn’t the only way.
Because they are one of the few mega companies that hasn’t shrinkflated, enshittified, or otherwise crumbled the quality of their offering. Haven’t sold out the privacy of their customer base to advertising companies, and are generally good to deal with for customers and developers.
It’s not a secret formula that no other company can learn from. It’s as simple as not being dicks IMO.
For some reason, most companies seem to grow too a certain threshold at which they sell their souls to profit and will self destruct to get more of it. Steam thankfully isn’t one of them…… yet.
They’re not beholden to public investors. If they go public or sell to a public company it will change.
If Gaben leaves or dies, Valve is probably fucked.
That will be like a whale-fall event for all the skittering bottom feeders of the finance abyss.
He has a son who will supposedly take over, but we’ll have to see how that goes when it happens.
Maybe they might actually moderating their forums and getting rid of the bigots and fascists though.
All these concern trolling articles about Valve’s “monopoly”. We never get this shit about Youtube, Windows, local ISPs and other utilities, etc. Super subtle, guys.
The entire AAA video game industry right now is basically freaking out, panicking and financially imploding right now, after at least a solid decade of mainly figuring out how to waste an enormous amount of money…
While all trying to be the next big live service game.
A live service game isn’t so much a game as it is a platform itself, a cash shop for in game content, a social media platform in itself.
(See Roblox for an extremely problematic but successful version of pulling this off)
These people all failed miserably at this, such that Ubisoft imploded, EA got bought out by Saudi Blood Money, Unity itself is imploding as an organization, MSFT switched its gaming division into pure wealth extraction mode before they shut it down in ~5 years and just act as IP liscensing overlords… etc.
They all tried to establish vertically integrated businesses, and despise that they can’t come close to matching Valve, the most competent horizontally built business in the entire industry.
And yes, the ‘video game industry’ includes nearly all ‘video game journalists’.
These people are with few exceptions, allergic to doing any actual investigative journalism, they’re mostly just paid to manipulate the flow of discourse around video games, as a form of marketing.
Every other company could challenge Steam, but instead is enshittified within an inch of its life from the get-go. It’s as much that Steam is doing so much right as it is that competitors are doing so much wrong.
Not you, GOG.
GoG was my second digital store, I resisted Steam for so long, but over the years, Steam has become my #1 source for games. It’s just so easy, plus they are relatively consumer friendly. With the revamp of Steam Families, it’s just so so much easier to have everyone playing on Steam. Plus I have a Steam Deck.
I try and buy games on GoG, set them up with Heroic, and it works great, better than EA, Epic and other storefronts, but just not quite as slick as Steam.
One day St. Gabe will be martyred, and Steam will undergo the unavoidable descent into enshittification, as to will GoG. I do not pledge undying loyalty to any platform, but Steam and GoG have been awesome for so long.
Besides, other than Itch and Humble Bundle, who even comes close in being good to use?
Because they aren’t a true monopoly. They are only a functional monopoly because their competitors refuse to be competitive. Nothing except corporate greed is preventing other storefronts like Epic from being utterly ass.
I skimmed most of this thread and didn’t see anyone mention that Steam actually supports third party stores. They let developers sell game keys on other storefronts for free (with limits, granted—the number of keys they can generate depends on sales on Steam, I think.)
Fanatical and Humble only exist because Steam handles all of the games delivery infrastructure for them. That’s, like, the opposite of monopolistic behaviour. Name another tech monopoly giving their services away for free so other directly competing businesses can profit.
Tepid take: The only people calling Steam a monopoly are the loser competitors who can’t find a more extortive business model that will actually compete in their quest to syphon wealth out of the gaming ecosystem. Also ‘news’ outlets that are being paid to assert this narrative, and dumbshit reactionaries who believe those narratives. Sorry Epic CEO, you can’t cry and shit your pants into forcing a successful company to make room and give you a cut. The market will ony respond to a better product here, and Epic ain’t it. EA learned this lesson with their shit-ass Origin product years ago, brand loyalty takes a long time to build and is a powerful variable, and steam is good at not fucking with the gamers, or at least only within parameters of acceptability, it appears.
Tim Sweeney’s on record saying he doesn’t see any point in making EGS any better since it’s “good enough” lol.
Out of anyone, they had the best chance to make it, with the budget they had, and the fact that so many people have their launcher installed for Unreal Engine or Fortnite reasons. Yet they put so much money into exclusives, and none into having a compelling UX.
Pretty much because the others are worse, and will continue to be until Gabe dies and they start to really squeeze all the value out of it they could.
This is why bro. Other game launchers feel predatory and rushed. There is no reason for anyone to install the EA App or Ubisoft Connect other than playing that two games from those studios. The only alternative is the Epic Games Store which has the fucking worst UI in existence and has only got a microfraction of the minimum functionality useful to build a community around a videogame. It also lacks native Linux support, forcing users to use alternatives like Heroic Games LauncherSteam wins because it does nothing to increase “shareholder value” and it just cares to be a good platform for the users, it is respectful of consumers and actively fights corporate greed and publisher dishonesty
I keep forgetting how useless Epic is.
Every once in a while, I want to scan my Epic library to see what’s there… and it doesn’t even seem to have a library feature? I need to use a separate app just to see all my games on their storefront.
Then, occasionally, I’ll want to check out what people are saying about their free game offers… and they don’t have reviews?
They don’t support Linux.
Their Android app keeps redirecting to their website for basic functionality.
Do they even have a method for devs to show patch notes or game updates? I haven’t seen any.
I mean, great that they’re giving developers a bigger cut, I guess, but 88% of nothing is worse than 70% of actual sales. Why would I, as a customer, ever try to shop there? It’s a terrible UX missing many features I have grown to expect.
So, yeah. The author of this article gets it.
Edit: and why bother listing your game there, either? Another storefront to manage is a decent amount of overhead work, I’d expect. You’d need pretty good sales for the effort to pay off.
Used to prefer GOG over Steam. GOG did nothing for Linux gamers though, they didn’t even release their Galaxy client for Linux. Will prefer GOG over Steam again when this changes (they said recently they want to change this, but only after Valve has already invested a lot into making Linux gaming a real thing with almost zero friction). That’s also basically the best thing that Valve has done - they really did help to make Linux gaming a reality, and Linux gaming is an important step towards toppling Windows’ dominance. They deserve a lot of credit for that. But there are also plenty of other things that you can criticize about Steam.
If you’re on Windows though, you should definitely always prefer GOG over Steam because it’s DRM-free (you buy it, you own it). Of course, there are many more games only available on Steam, so it might not be possible all the time, but at least you should prioritize your choices.
We also have plenty of other monopoly problems, one of the biggest is YouTube.
If you’re on Windows though, you should definitely always prefer GOG over Steam because it’s DRM-free (you buy it, you own it)
I’m not really disagreeing with you, as with GOG you are guaranteed to get a DRM free game (and an installer which is better than Steam’s backup, as it’s guaranteed to work offline), but they still sell you just a revocable license.
GoG is probably a pretty small company, I can’t really expect them to have a full Linux support system when Linux up until Windows 10 support ended was probably a pretty small niche that is now a slightly bigger niche.
I haven’t had any issues loading my GOG games through the Heroic launcher on ZorinOS
I feel like this is something that could easily shift with one misstep by Valve. It’s good now because for the most part they have made consumer friendly choices.
I am really worried about what happens when Gabe kicks the bucket.
Because it’s one of the only functional monopolies that got there by attracting users rather than M&As to quash competitors and regulatory capture. Monopolies shouldn’t just intrinsically make you angry, they just are usually bad because they will have done anticompetitive things in order to become a monopoly.
As the article concludes:
Valve Corporation didn’t win by locking people in. It won by making sure they never really wanted to leave.
Really simple: because they are running it like tax funded infrastructure and not like an extortion racket.
interesting
It works, and since this is PC, we can very quickly pivot to something else if we need to.
