Steam is a video game digital distribution service by Valve.
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Being the most attractive platform doesn't make them a monopoly. It does however irritate me anytime I have to use a different platform that often functions much worse, like EA or Blizzard.
They don't have a monopoly. They just have the best platform. It offers a lot of quality of life features along with the games and rarely causes issues. I can't even recall them ever doing anything anticompetitive. There are other platforms available to purchase from if you don't like steam. GoG for instance. Or Epic if you want to support assholes.
You don't say.
Yo guys it's my cake day! happy birthday me!!!
In general, I'm not a fan of steam. I know i know, I'm saying this in THE steam community.
Steam is DRM, its terrible drm that can be bypassed with an easily downloaded crack tool, but drm nonetheless.
If a game I want is on GOG I will gladly get it there over buying it on steam.
the only reason i favor steam over gog is their stellar linux support
Not all Steam games use it as DRM. Many Steam games you can simply launch the executable without Steam installed and it will work.
Still, GOG is much better on that front.
But even games I buy on GOG, I often launch through Steam to take advantage of tools like Proton and Steam Input. Steam’s dominance stems from unwavering commitment to building a good user experience, and I’m not ashamed to reward that with my wallet vote.
Valve: Has reasonably priced games on sale frequently
Makes the Steam Deck
Actively supports Linux, both for VR and regular gaming
Has the best customer service out of any competitor
Has the best store experience out of any competitor
I mean.....it's not surprising that they're a monopoly, but that doesn't make them a bad one.
Who makes the games? 🤔
Valve has made games. Damn good ones at that.
You know HALF-LIFE Counter Strike Portal Team Fortress 2
and are the makers of the source engine powering Titanfall 1, 2, Apex and a lot more
Oh yeah when did those come out and how much of Valve's revenue do they account for lol?
If you count only Valve's own games' sales, those earned nowhere as much as the steam market trade of TF2 hats and CS skins
Exactly, Valve's success has been defined by the extent to which they have financialized their few games, stretched their IP, and used that as a games publisher. It's because they're a rentier with no games of their own any more that they are a virtual economy monopoly...
I fear for the day GabeN has to pass on the torch 😖
Which one of his 3 mega yachts do you think he'll pop his clogs on?
Benevolent Dictatorship?
Not really. You can choose to go somewhere else at any time. Even the Steam Deck is open to installing a different OS that doesn't even include the Steam store.
I like that their services are so good they don't even need to make any restrictions to get you into using them. If I installed another OS on my steam deck, I would still install the Steam store...
More of an elected monarchy really..
All hail king Gabe!
I've been seeing a fair amount of discourse lately that Gabe Newell might be the only reason why Steam is a benevolent monopoly, and it's why I only buy games on Steam when there's no other option, when they're not otherwise available on GOG and Itch.io.
Because Steam says for now that they'll have a failsafe in place to make our games playable even if the company goes under. Steam doesn't nickel and dime people, for now. Steam is doing important work for Linux, for now. Our profiles are fun and customizable like the internet used to be, for now. Steam's DRM is so light it hardly exists, for now. But what's going to happen to our huge libraries when Gabe retires or dies?
I hate that I even have to think this way, but I for one don't want to have all my eggs in one basket, especially when the competitors' policies are doing more to protect users right now.
Yeah.
I have enjoyed many happy years with steam and for now things are still okay, with Gabe keeping the enshittification at bay. They've done great things for the industry, and have my respect for that.
Yet we can't simply trust the platform will remain as benevolent as it always has been.
If history tells us anything, it's that nothing remains the same forever.
Well, since I use Linux, Steam is the only platform that cares about my money. The competition chose not to support my system.
People misunderstand the issue with monopolies. Monopolies, by themselvs, are non-issues. It's what they do in their position of monopoly that can be illegal, through anti-competitive behavior. Steam does none of that BS
This. So much this. Monopolies are often evidence of an unhealthy/stagnating market, but they're more symptom than cause. Trusts/cartels, price-fixing, and anticompetitive behavior are the actual abuses of market power, and are much more problematic.
I'm not going to claim that Valve is perfect (they're not, e.g. see issues regarding DRM) and I'd love to have more choices about where I buy my games, but I can't think of any instance of them abusing their position in the market to prevent new entrants or claim an unfair advantage. From what I've seen, they appear to be a very fair and honorable competitor in the space. However, if anyone is aware any examples to the contrary, I'd love to hear about it and update my opinions.
There's a difference between being feature-rich and popular and being a monopoly.
Call me when Steam is buying competing stores to shut them down.
Now, in terms of PC gaming monopolies, let me introduce you to "Microsoft".
Steam is naturally the only platform gamers care about because they're the only platform that acturally targers gamers, all other platforms target devs (except GOG who targets gamers that specifically want offline copies without DRM)
all other platforms target ~~devs~~ shareholders
Remind people that a monopoly isn't illegal. Abusing a monopoly to prevent competition and using a monopoly as a means to create unfair market conditions in other categories - Windows and web browsers in the past or Apple's monopoly on iOS software distribution.
Consoles are even more restrictive than an iPhone is still in the US and was in the EU. Complain about Steam all these devs and people want, unless it can be proven that Valve is using their market share to stop other companies from competing well, it's a moot point calling them a monopoly. That Wolfire lawsuit when I read the initial court filings they put out was a joke. It was citing Twitter posts and blogspam articles citing anonymous forum posts
Steam was not the first PC digital distribution store. It wasn't even great until like 2006/2007. In the early days Impulse could have been competitive but Stardock sold it to GameStop who in dumb move of the last 2 decades did nothing with it. Desura did not improve. GFWL was terrible. Windows Store used to have issues with making storage unreclaimable without a reformat of the drive. Direct2Drive never improved. GamersGate just stayed a key seller. GoG was never going to grow without regular day one games which wasn't going to be competitive as DRM free. Humble Store stayed a key seller.
Amazon and Epic's idea was to just give away games. Ubisoft and EA stores barely even had games they didn't publish. So sparse I bet they didn't have self publishing tools. Those 2 puzzlingly regularly had issues maintaining login sessions persisting over time. PC gaming is dieing was the mainstream meme until like 2015. Epic on Android doesn't even have a library of owned games view and it's been almost a year since that released.
Valve didn't make Amazon, Microsoft, Epic, EA, Ubisoft, Stardock+GameStop, Direct2Drive, ... all under invest and/or mismanage their PC game store platform efforts. It's not up to Valve to stop making the platform more appealing. EGS is 7 years old. Those other companies have been doing PC game stores for much longer. I remember buying and downloading PC games from Amazon before Prime gaming. It was just like Direct2Drive. Since 2004 Direct2Drive was always a storefront for any publishers game whereas Steam didn't start listing 3rd party games until 2005.
If any service was comparable to like end of 2013 Steam, that would easily be second best store platform. Instead every store is at best like 2010 Steam with nicer animations, bigger buttons. And today there's way more resources to make a competitor. More cloud service providers with mature onboarding tools. NPM install. A lot more open source databases. Kubernetes. Git. Etc. Should be able to do better than 7 year old Steam in 7 years from these companies that were far larger than 2002/2003 Valve when they got into PC game distribution. The big publishers were probably all wealthier than Valve up to like 2015
It's not Sony and Nintendo's fault that since the Kinect on the 360, Microsoft hasn't been able to manage their studios to be competitive with Nintendo and Sony studios
As long as Steam keeps giving me a great platform that doesn't suck, as long as they continue to push Linux gaming forward, I'll keep sending them money.