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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.
It's also a big risk, as they could always enshittify. It's a good platform now, but if Gabe dies or decides to give up his leadership position, that could all change very quickly.
Yeah, the day Gabe leaves is going to be a sad day for gaming, because Steam is probably gonna get real shitty real quick. I’m sure some finance-minded jackasses will do their best to maximize short-term profit and fly the whole ecosystem into the ground at Mach 3.
As long as it remains privately owned, it should be OK. The day shares go public, god forbid, will be the beginning of the end.
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 ~~grain~~ game -- but you'll have to give me a third of your profit because I own the ~~town square~~ platform/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
from the overall pool, 75% of respondents were senior managers
So... not developers, but businessmen.
It's only a monopoly in that it's so much more popular than everything else that's come along, and the main reason for that is because it's better than competitors. Most others are just publisher stores, and almost all have functionality that users disagree with.
In the OP article, the game distribution platform Rokky is also apparently a publisher store, having recently bought the rights to distribute Chinese games in the west.
I agree. There are other stores you can get your games from, that never got mentioned in this piece. I personally love GOG for that purpose. There aren’t many new games in there but there are big and day one releases
I avoided signing up for years because I thought it would lead to us only owning a revokable digital license to every new game. Oh how the turn tables.
Turns out if you invest in making your platform not suck it ends up paying dividends. Figure it out dumbfucks.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Game distribution platform Rokky has just released the results of a study it conducted with 306 senior managers of PC game developers (all from the US or UK)
Unsurprising that they find this, since that's what their business is about.
MAXIMIZE GLOBAL GAME SALES WITH ROKKY
Expand sales of your PC game beyond Steam. Sell game keys to 200+ global storefronts simultaneously with Rokky. Enjoy revenue increases of up to 100%.
Valve has a huge amount of good will to burn and the cynical side of me is waiting for the day they start.
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.
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.
Technically, I'd say that GOG does, as you can just download and back up all the installers for the games. Wouldn't even matter if the company went bankrupt or even if the entire internet died completely. You could still install and play the games just fine.
Remember when Ubisoft came crawling back to Steam?
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.
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".
Game distribution platform Rokky has just released the results of a study it conducted with 306 senior managers of PC game developers (all from the US or UK), and it makes for some interesting reading.
This study has a chance of being reasonable, but this article is junk. No word on methodology. I'm sure(/s) that the 306 managers aren't skewed because they're known by a non-steam platform.
In one sense yes they are a monopoly. But there are alternative game stores. However Valve has earned their cut of money by actually trying to make a platform that works for game developers, game players and themselves.
Don't get me wrong, they have a high risk of turning bad and extorting the market they have captured. But the truth is that every equally or greater sized competitor (Microsoft, Ubisoft, EA, Epic) has already skipped to the extortion part of the cycle and Valve simply hasn't, and hasn't really expressed any intention to do that. Being a privately owned company, Valve is allowed to sit back, enjoy the money they do make and not have to constantly ask for more, and develop what the staff feel like making without strict deadlines.
The smaller competitors are still great even if not as feature filled (GOG, itch) and you should support them too. So while I reject that Valve is the big bad, I also reject that Valve could never enshittify. My position is that Valve has earned a trust no one else has (even itch had to cave to Credit Card companies), and that trust is Valve's to break.
I feel like steam entered the market for online distribution pretty early. It initially started as a way for valve to update their own games and morphed into a digital distribution platform. They have had way more time to generate good will. My experiences have been very positive with steam, why would I leave a platform that works for me, to go to other companies that have already fucked me as a consumer prior to releasing digital storefronts? If the wagon ain't broke don't fix it.
They're a functional monopoly in my case since I'm on Linux. GOG is the main competitor for my money.
How'd they get their polling pool? Sitting outside the Valve corporate office?
What makes Steam so compelling for consumers is that it's more than just a digital storefront and launcher. They've expanded into so many different areas: Steam Input, Steam Remote Play, Steam Friends, Steam Workshop, Proton, Steam Marketplace, etc.
There is so much they do that it's not really just a store anymore -- it's an all-in-one platform. Most competitors do not come close to equal in any of these features; they usually just have basic launchers and maybe decent friend systems.
In my opinion, GOG is the best competitor yet because of their DRM-free installers and GOG Galaxy on windows which allowed you to have all your games in one place.
Is it a monopoly though. Monopolies are there to protect the consumer, not really the seller. A developer does not need to use steam at all. I really don't think steam can control the pricing like that. Like, if steam started to raise prices on people buying the games, then I feel like people would still jump ship. Places like gog and itch.io exist. There are plenty of game stores as well, Microsoft, Nintendo, ea.
The problem developers have is they feel if they make a PC game, that they have to put it on steam and no other platform or they won't make money. But the developer still has choices and I feel like steam is pretty reasonable with their cut and the tools they offer developers. A developer can even sell their game on a different platform at the same time they sell it on steam. They can even sell steam keys on their own website if they wanted to.
To call steam a monopoly is a bit of a stretch. People still have plenty of choices and steam isn't circle jerking their consumers.
The problem with this "anti-monopoly" rhetoric is that players want to play on the same platform as everyone else.