From the opinion piece:
Last year, I pointed out how many big publishers came crawlin’ back to Steam after trying their own things: EA, Activision, Microsoft. This year, for the first time ever, two Blizzard games released on Steam: Overwatch and Diablo 4.
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I know everyone loves Valve, but it feels super weird to be celebrating a monopoly so much and so ferociously. (I know Steam isn’t a technical monopoly. We don’t need to have that discussion)
Gaben is old, and he’s gonna retire. It’ll likely be a lot sooner than anyone here is comfortable with. When Valve gets sold, or even when gaben isn’t in total control anymore, things are going to start changing, and there isn’t going to be a healthy, diverse marketplace to soften that.
There is a very good chance that the PC platform will be a really horrible place because of the lack of consumer choice in which they can purchase and play games.
I’m just glad GOG is surviving. It’s even closer to an ideal of DRM-free games you own. I try to buy from there whenever I can.
Gog is on life support last I checked, it wasn’t profitable and they had to cut headcount dramatically
It’s absolutely weird and unhealthy to celebrate it.
Gaben is old, and he’s gonna retire. It’ll likely be a lot sooner than anyone here is comfortable with. When Valve gets sold, or even when gaben isn’t in total control anymore, things are going to start changing, and there isn’t going to be a healthy, diverse marketplace to soften that.
This is it. Look at history and every major company in the past 200 years. Once the shift happens, it all goes to hell. And yet people are still shouting about some “Steam Victory” like wtf?
Meh, I think there are some private companies that manage to remain vigilant in their purpose even as leaders change.
In my opinion, most problems happen the second a company goes public. So I’m just hoping that Valve never chooses to go public and is thus never legally beholden to shareholder interests.
I agree with all your points… but… IMHO some things keeping Steam honest are services like GoG and if course the High Seas, but more than that there’s the plethora of other entertainment options.
This isn’t housing, air, or water. A person can just not play if it’s too much hassle or too costly. If Steam or any given entertainment option isn’t worth using, people just won’t. There’s no shortage of things to do other than play games, much less use Steam for gaming.
I agree that we shouldn’t imagine Steam will never change, nor should we blindly worship or glorify Valve/GabeN. I just think that games and entertainment generally is an arena where market forces actually work to benefit the consumer.
Of course employment practices and company culture is a whole 'nother thing…
It is technically a monopoly, you don’t need 100% market share to be considered one otherwise Google wouldn’t be considered a monopoly but it is.
In the Epic trial, Google made some of the same arguments as those used to defend Steam, like the presence of competing stores or the claim that it wins people over by the quality of the product.
Epic’s expert made these relevant points:
Google impairs competition without preventing it entirely
Google’s conduct targets competition as it emerges
Google is dominant
And we know who won in the antitrust case. Let’s see what happens in Wolfire et al v. Valve.
Wowww this is crazy misleading.
The difference is that Google’s software is forced onto OEMs without them having any real choice. That Google makes them sign contracts forbidding other default app stores. That Google has secret back room deals with some app developers and not others waiving the store fee, giving them an unfair advantage.
Valve does none of that. Can you point me to valve forcing, say, Dell or HP to pre-install Steam and no other game stores? Or them not taking a cut for some games?
Valve’s actions do not have to copy those of Google for it to engage in anti-competitive behavior. Focus on the Steam-specific arguments deemed reasonable enough for the judge to allow the trial to go through, like those on the MFN, high profit margin related to the 30% fee, user reviews manipulation, and so forth.
I know Steam isn’t a technical monopoly. We don’t need to have that discussion
That’s one way to swat away all criticism about the premise of your comment…
When Valve gets sold, or even when gaben isn’t in total control anymore, things are going to start changing, and there isn’t going to be a healthy, diverse marketplace to soften that.
Considering the fact that Steam is not a monopoly and alternate storefronts continue to exist (Microsoft will not stop selling games individually on their own store even if it’s just an afterthought to GamePass but it’s the same platform as GamePass), there will be alternatives to Steam if Valve turns anti-consumer. There is little actual loyalty among gamers. Just look at Blizzard: At one point their customer base was almost as die hard as Nintendo’s and it took only a couple of years to throw that away. (I noticed it when the audience actually booed at the Diablo Immortal reveal.)
Steams biggest competition isn’t another launcher, it’s piracy. Gabe is wise enough to know that, if the next guy to take over is a chode they’ll learn the hard way.
Absolutely. I have not pirated a single game since I got steam. Before that it was almost exclusively pirated games. no shops close by, and buying on mail order took FOREVER! and was very much hit or miss… And impossible to return.
I did buy most of the games that i enjoyed, and played a lot. Since i wanted the box on the shelf. but i still played the pirated version. since that was much easier then puling out the book and look at the 5th word on the 3rd paragraph on page 121 for the copy protection. :)
Yep.
People fanboy over Steam endlessly without realizing that with time, it will turn to shit as well.
More competition is good, and maybe Epic is shit today but if their leadership changes then maybe it could actually significantly improve and surpass Steam.
But if it doesn’t exist, then if Steam turns to shit then you’re much more likely to just be stuck with shit.
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I guess we’ll see how this shakes out in the coming years. God willing, not much will change.
Nothing lasts forever.
Plus, we have enough games. Shut it down, play old games lol
The only reason I support them as a monopoly is because they are the closest thing to an ethical/moral capitalist company around. They are proof positive that treating employees, customers, and vendors fairly can lead to an obscenely strong company with profit margins that the amoral assholes out there looking for every way to shaft everyone to make an extra penny can are envious of.
From what I understand discussing the issue with friends who run game studios and deal with Valve/Steam, the employees pretty much have his mindset from the bottom to the top of the org chart. He has been smart in who he hires and who is promoted so leadership is not a bunch of sniveling money grubbers who will sell out immediately when he retires. 🤞
It’s just fanboyism. Everyone shits on PS and Xbox users, but PC gamers weren’t privy to the fact that the PC master race trope was meant mockingly and kinda just ran with it. Now they stan a corporation.
I’m not celebrating a monopoly, I’m celebrating a good platform for consumers. Steam likely knows that if it angers people its monopoly is ripe for a ton of regulation, at least in the European market where PC gaming is huge.
They’ve been hit with an anti trust lawsuit in Europe, lost and didn’t cooperate and instead paid some more.
They offer refunds because they got sued for it.
They’ve introduced more and more ways to monetize whales and to trigger people’s dopamine secretion to get them to buy more games.
Valve is still a company that aims to make profits, it’s not your friend.
This isn’t really that hot of a take. Steam does keep winning and it’s because of convenience for consumers. Valve also is probably the best of those companies when it comes to not violating rights. I really hope when Gaben passes the torch for valve ownership that it’s someone with his vision and priorities
Steam does keep winning and it’s because of convenience for consumers.
As a Linux user, nothing else comes even close. I can read on ProtonDB if I can expect a Windows game to just work, and more often than not, it does.
GOG is also a great concept, and somewhat Linux friendly, but it doesn’t have the Steam “click and play” convenience.
Epic Game Store however, has been decidedly Linux hostile for some reason??? As I see it, Steam and GOG are for gamers, Epic Game Store is for business. It would be a dark day for gamers, if Epic ever became dominant.Epic is Linux adverse mainly because of its Chinese investors. They don’t want to open source their spyware.
Why would they have to open source anything? Just because it’s running on Linux doesn’t mean it’s OSS or even F(L)OSS. Steam isn’t open source either.
Not to mention that open source software can and sometimes does contain spyware.
Nobody with two brain cells says foss can’t have spy/malware. What’s true is only that in important projects, it is very likely it will raise flags very soon. For example, see your link
I would think China would be eager to get out of western (USA) dominated Operating Systems.
I know Russia has attempted it as couple of times, but with very little success.
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Steam and GoG are not just free services for gamers either. At their core they are businesses, and they invest significantly to try and make people spend more/get addicted to their services.
I hate this whole idea that some companies are your friend. That just shows their marketing and branding is working on people and blinding people.
Publicly traded companies, which we’ve all learned to hate and not take as our friends, are in no way comparable to Steam which is privately owned. Gabe Newell is in no way forced by shareholders to push for increased profits, the company has no interest in pushing for enshittification unlike VC funded startups.
Valve is also a privately held company, unlike most (all?) of the other big players. Therefore they don’t have the ever present drive and threat of “the line must always go up” to contend with. Valve can do whatever the fuck they feel like, however the fuck they feel like, and as long as they’re bringing in enough revenue to keep the lights on and keep Gabe Newell in Acapulco shirts and Cheetos, or whatever his jam is, there’s nothing anybody can do about it.
They can gamble and release a VR headset or two, and if it’s not a huge success, who cares? There are no shareholders breathing down their necks. They can support the Linux community and if it pisses of Microsoft, or whoever, so what? They want to wait 16+ years before getting around to releasing the sequel to their flagship franchise? There is no boardroom pushing them to slap it together and shove it out the door before Christmas, so they can just do that. Etc.
They were the company who had people who recognized that they already did all of their ideas and their best bet was to get out of the way for the next generation of developers. The other studios are apparently run by narcissists who still think they are at the top of their game. The world could learn a big lesson from Valve.
It’s not narcissism. It is a rational decision with major upside if you can pull off building your own storefront and launcher. If you can stop paying steam 30 percent of every sale, and have direct access to the user for data collection and targeted advertising, you try to execute. There is a ton of upside for Epic, EA, or Ubisoft to go direct to consumer and not have a middle man (and possibly be the middle man for others).
I’m referring to the young Gen X and elderly Millennials who still run the industry and still think that everything should be full of micro transactions, huge bugs, and DLC with no content. I’m referring to the people who are scared of Baldurs Gate III and claim that nobody can reach that standard. They are still thinking of games as they were 15 years ago but the world has moved on.
I’ve said this before but as soon as Valve becomes a public company, immediately start protesting and sailing.
I’m glad steam and gog exist. Both provide an amazing service.
Especially GOG being DRM free but they really need a Linux client.
Heroic is currently the best option imo, it at least has cloud saves and updates.
Hard ask for a Linux client when the Windows client is barely functional.
My friend said he installed gog galaxy onhis steam deck just fine
Try Lutris
Why? The website works fine.
downloading 30 separate 4GB files one by one is an unecessary chore. A ‘download all’ would make the website good
Epic bought rocket league and promptly tanked it in favor of their stupid fortniteverse. Maybe steam keeps winning because they’re not actively screwing over their customers.
Or Pheonix Point, where Epic bought an kickstarter game that was funded under the promise of releasing on Steam, GOG and potentially other stores and promptly made it exclusive - and this was in the early days when their launcher/store was in a much worse state too.
There must be more to success than that, because Valve likewise bought Campo Santo, the developer of Firewatch, and now their next game is all but canceled. These companies can’t help but focus on their big money makers at the expense of all else.
All I can find about their next game is called “In the Valley of Gods” which looks like it is still being developed. What game was cancelled? Also how is that the same as buying an IP then running it into the ground so their main IP can get a mildly popular game mode that will likely be forgotten about in a couple months? I’m already bored of rocket racing and I only installed it because a friend kept begging me to play fortnite zero build which I also don’t enjoy.
Epic bought rocket league and promptly tanked it in favor of their stupid fortniteverse.
Sadly Valve is guilty of a similar thing. Valve bought Campo Santo and (at least that’s the public statement) the developers were free to work on whatever projects and chose HL Alyx instead of that new game after Firewatch. Game development gets cancelled all the time and perhaps the new game just wasn’t that good.
Last year, I pointed out how many big publishers came crawlin’ back to Steam after trying their own things: EA, Activision, Microsoft. This year, for the first time ever, two Blizzard games released on Steam: Overwatch and Diablo 4.
Why is it so hard for companies to build a game launcher that doesn’t suck? Is it just a lowest bidder situation?
Steam sucked, really bad. For 8 years, maybe? Maybe more? It takes time to build something, but consumers demand everything immediately.
I mean steam sucked for 8 years like 20 years ago. Technology wasn’t the same as it is. They revolutionized the pc gaming scene and I’d argue that even that Steam version was better than the current EGS version. Was it uglier? Yea maybe but it did the job. You could install, manage and launch your games, cloud saves and it wasn’t bloat or spyware. The Steam just kept getting better even if with a messy ui in some places. They do a ton of shit that generates them no direct profit but that makes using Steam a no brainer. And gamers respect and value that even if not all of them.
Heck I’m sure that they very quickly came up with a functional shopping cart at the very least.
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Heck I’m sure that they very quickly came up with a functional shopping cart at the very least.
Steam has been offering third-party titles since 2005 but still had no shopping cart as of 2008.
Origin is still bad and so is whatever Ubisoft’s launcher is called.
edit: for the record I didn’t say that steam was the best launcher, but I have found the launchers for world of warships and warthunder to be serviceable
I mean steam sucked for 8 years like 20 years ago. Technology wasn’t the same as it is. They revolutionized the pc gaming scene and I’d argue that even that Steam version was better than the current EGS version. Was it uglier? Yea maybe but it did the job. You could install, manage and launch your games, cloud saves and it wasn’t bloat or spyware. The Steam just kept getting better even if with a messy ui in some places. They do a ton of shit that generates them no direct profit but that makes using Steam a no brainer. And gamers respect and value that even if not all of them.
Heck I’m sure that they very quickly came up with a functional shopping cart at the very least.
If your goal was only to make a good launcher, it would be easy. If your goal is a lot of DRM shenanigans as if we were still in 1998, it’s really hard.
This article didn’t research the VR bits…Gabe has said multiple times, even recently, that they are working steadily on VR and it’s hardware. Their next headset even has a codename, Deckard.
Also, I don’t think most people realize Valve doesn’t have much of an internal structure. It more resembles a community of people working together because they want to.
Oh god, I just realized… Imagine if they brought Portal back, but in VR like they did Half-Life.
We’d get so many videos of people falling over in their living room
GOG > itch.io > Steam > whale poo > everything else
For Linux, it’s Steam and then anything that works with Bottles, Lutris or Heroic.
Blizzard had a legit decent platform for a while there. Real fall from grace.
Now Epic games are next, hopefully.
I don’t mind things being slightly spread out, even. What is like most though is if there were regulations that you cannot have exclusivity deals. Beyond a publisher not bothering to publish on store XYZ, there should never be a way a store is inherently excluded.
As in, fuck Epic.
I hope epic game store burns in hell, personally.
We did it boiz.
Pat yourselves on the back if you never used an alternative.
This is a weird mentality. Competition in the space is good, even if the current “default” thing is really good.
Competition for the sake of competition isn’t intrinsically a good thing.
Seems to me, most of the people complaining about Steam are greedy devs who want to make more money off of their products.
For me, as a user, that’s not my concern. For me, as a user, it’s more important that I can play games without having to download different launchers just to make someone else richer.
GOG is probably the only legitimate competitor with Steam. They provide value to customers instead of just themselves or greedy devs.
For me, as a user, that’s not my concern. For me, as a user, it’s more important that I can
have my convenienceFTFY
Also, the only truly bad competition is subsidized competition. As long as it’s not surviving on some kind of grant or funding, instead of its actual market value, then it’s always a good thing as it keeps competitors on their toes.
Listen. Some of us have our life savings in our Steam library. If competition ever drives Steam bankrupt, we go down with the ship! We take Steam’s health personally and very seriously. Your mumbo jumbo about competition doesn’t factor into it.
No one wants Steam bankrupt, they just want more than one videogame vendor on PC to be viable.
“Mumbo jumbo about competition” I can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic or are just legitimately a braindead moron.
There are exceptions to the notion that competition is good. If we attempt to map out all the exceptions, we will be left with mumbo jumbo. Economic libertarianism is the true death of the brain. Some monopolies are good and any threat to the monopoly is a threat to the consumer.
That’s why you buy from GOG.
Isn’t… This what a monopoly is?
Why are we celebrating that?
No? You can still buy these publisher’s games from them if you prefer and, as far as I’m aware, steam doesn’t have any stipulations that state once you sell on their platform that you can’t do so on others. In fact, that’s what these publisher’s tried to do. They thought they could easily build their own competing storefronts and reap the money. And, as the article says, they’re now crawling back. Turns out, Valve is pretty good at content delivery while remaining relatively consumer friendly.
More people should look up what a monopoly is before hosing everything with that label.
