Competition isn’t possible? EGS is an active competitor that only takes 12% and they still can’t get fucking anywhere because their store fucking sucks. GoG exists and also takes 30%, their store/launcher are ok, but they don’t offer nearly as much for that 30%, but they make up for that with drm free games. There are other minor players out there, so competition is definitely possible, but not one of them offers a comparable product.
The only way steam would lower their cut is if someone came along and made a game store that actually offered a significant portion of the services steam offered and was about as good but also had a lower cut of sales. But good luck finding someone who can do all of that and also takes less than 30%.
You don’t seem to understand what a monopoly is. Having some small competition that’s not ever going to threaten you because you can leverage your dominant position is also a case of a monopoly.
Epic poured billions of Fortnite money with little to show for it. How is anyone going to compete with a platform that most gamers have all of their games on? This is why they need to be broken up or brought to order via regulations. Companies are not your friends.
Success is not illegal. Valve isn’t buying up smaller competing storefronts, or paying off developers for exclusivity, or burying competition in legal fees and prepared 80-page lawsuits. The only thing holding back real competition is the competing platforms being dogshit.
I was excited for the EGS when it was announced. Then it turned out to be a garbage platform with the shady exclusivity deals that turned Steam into an ad platform for games that had been poached by Epic. Valve responded to it with the Steam Deck and Proton.
At some point you’re so entrenched in the market you don’t have to do anything anymore. I was quite surprised that Valve somehow evaded EU Digital Markets Act gatekeeper criteria.
Ok but you made a claim that they were leveraging their market position to maintain a monopoly. So please describe how they are doing that in any way shape or form.
Just because someone claims something to sue a company does not mean it’s true. You gotta go through the whole court process and prove it.
It says Valve “forces” game publishers to sign up to so-called price parity obligations, preventing titles being sold at cheaper prices on rival platforms
I’ve never seen any publisher claim this, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t true. But it sure doesn’t sound like that has anything to do with being a monopoly. Epic, GoG, Ubisoft, etc. could all do the exact same thing.
Anyway, thanks for the link. I was not the one to downvote you on your last comment. You did what I asked.
How is anyone going to compete with a platform that most gamers have all of their games on?
They could offer their games DRM-free, guarantee that their multiplayer games have LAN or provide servers and/or at least provide that information clearly to the consumer, write an open source drop-in replacement for Steam Input and Workshop, guarantee more uptime on their matchmaking/friends servers, retain old versions of games that they distribute, and allow for user-customized or open source clients to fit all sorts of UI preferences, off the top of my head.
GOG mandates that all games must be DRM-free, so when I shop there, I know what I’m getting. Valve has tags that tell me if a game supports LAN, but developers aren’t required to report that, so I can’t tell if a multiplayer game I’m buying is built to last if the developer didn’t think to list it; if they were required to, that would be different. People lean on Steam Input and Workshop because those features are made easy for them, but using them means you don’t get those benefits outside of Steam, so there should be an open, third party alternative that developers can easily switch to if they’re familiar with developing for Steam; a company running a non-Steam store has an incentive to develop this. Matchmaking and friends servers, as they exist today, are frequently provided by the storefront, so when Steam servers go down for maintenance and I’m in the middle of an online match of Skullgirls, we get disconnected, and we have to wait until they come back up; there are ways to increase uptime and prevent this interruption, but Valve hasn’t improved the situation in at least 15 years.
Honestly, even those are pretty overkill to make a competing storefront. All you’d have to do is to offer lower prices and/or take a smaller percentage while matching at least a fraction of Steam’s functionality (unlike Epic) or actively working to screw over customers (also unlike Epic). If a store sold games consistantly 5% cheaper than Steam, even without controller options, good support, a built-in forum, explicit Linux support, ect., I’m confident it would be reasonably successful. Just look at Humble and Fanatical. While they do (mostly) sell Steam keys, their prices are arguably what made them a success, not the features you get after redeaming the Steam keys.
Even beside that, the ideas you provided are all pretty minor. If you’re willing to throw more significant amounts of money at the platform, like many before have, you can go a lot further than that even. For example, seeing as Steam’s discovery algorithm is one of the bigger benifits Steam provides, you could one-up them by providing off-platform marketing for games launching on your platform. This would be a way to bring devlopers and players alike to use your platform without screwing over either. Similarly, you could take a page out of Epic’s book and do giveaways regularly. Alternatively, you could use a less generous system such as “buy anything and get x game free” or “every $10 spent gives you a chance to win x game bundle” to make it more sustainable, and/or allow you to market specific underperforming games. It isn’t that hard to come up with ideas that would allow a competitor to do well. You just have to do that rather than putting all your resources into trying to take games away from players, and harvest their data.
If EGS mandated those things it would be as successful as GOG. Which is irrelevant compared to Steam. Steam didn’t become successful because of tags. It’s because they were first.
GOG succeeds in one key area that gives me a reason to shop there. Steam succeeds in other areas. Epic succeeds in none. If GOG wants to supplant Steam, they need to be good in that key area and the areas that I value from Steam. If Epic wants to supplant Steam, they need to give a single shit about what their customers want.
Epic poured billions of Fortnite money with little to show for it.
Yes, Into fortnite, not EGS. The eggs spent all their money on timed exclusives instead of a better product, and that’s why they failed to make a steam competitor.
Oh, I know. I got exactly 1 free game from EGS, which I promptly bought on stream myself once I realized that EGS had no offline mode (so the game I had been playing refused to launch during an Internet outage).
And that’s one of the many reasons EGS isn’t able to get a significant market share, because as I said initially, EGS fucking sucks. If they spent half as much on improving the store as they do for timed exclusives and trying to lure people in with free games, they might actually get somewhere.
And you’d lose all of that.
Competition isn’t possible? EGS is an active competitor that only takes 12% and they still can’t get fucking anywhere because their store fucking sucks. GoG exists and also takes 30%, their store/launcher are ok, but they don’t offer nearly as much for that 30%, but they make up for that with drm free games. There are other minor players out there, so competition is definitely possible, but not one of them offers a comparable product.
The only way steam would lower their cut is if someone came along and made a game store that actually offered a significant portion of the services steam offered and was about as good but also had a lower cut of sales. But good luck finding someone who can do all of that and also takes less than 30%.
You don’t seem to understand what a monopoly is. Having some small competition that’s not ever going to threaten you because you can leverage your dominant position is also a case of a monopoly.
Epic poured billions of Fortnite money with little to show for it. How is anyone going to compete with a platform that most gamers have all of their games on? This is why they need to be broken up or brought to order via regulations. Companies are not your friends.
Success is not illegal. Valve isn’t buying up smaller competing storefronts, or paying off developers for exclusivity, or burying competition in legal fees and prepared 80-page lawsuits. The only thing holding back real competition is the competing platforms being dogshit.
I was excited for the EGS when it was announced. Then it turned out to be a garbage platform with the shady exclusivity deals that turned Steam into an ad platform for games that had been poached by Epic. Valve responded to it with the Steam Deck and Proton.
Leveraging dominant position to keep your monopoly is illegal even in the US.
Allegations of leveraging a dominant market position doesn’t mean its actually happening.
Valve had nothing to do with its competitors being garbage
What are they doing to leverage their dominant position?
At some point you’re so entrenched in the market you don’t have to do anything anymore. I was quite surprised that Valve somehow evaded EU Digital Markets Act gatekeeper criteria.
Ok but you made a claim that they were leveraging their market position to maintain a monopoly. So please describe how they are doing that in any way shape or form.
There you go: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cpwwyj6v24xo
Just because someone claims something to sue a company does not mean it’s true. You gotta go through the whole court process and prove it.
I’ve never seen any publisher claim this, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t true. But it sure doesn’t sound like that has anything to do with being a monopoly. Epic, GoG, Ubisoft, etc. could all do the exact same thing.
Anyway, thanks for the link. I was not the one to downvote you on your last comment. You did what I asked.
They could offer their games DRM-free, guarantee that their multiplayer games have LAN or provide servers and/or at least provide that information clearly to the consumer, write an open source drop-in replacement for Steam Input and Workshop, guarantee more uptime on their matchmaking/friends servers, retain old versions of games that they distribute, and allow for user-customized or open source clients to fit all sorts of UI preferences, off the top of my head.
Those things are up to developers / publishers, not the marketplace.
GOG mandates that all games must be DRM-free, so when I shop there, I know what I’m getting. Valve has tags that tell me if a game supports LAN, but developers aren’t required to report that, so I can’t tell if a multiplayer game I’m buying is built to last if the developer didn’t think to list it; if they were required to, that would be different. People lean on Steam Input and Workshop because those features are made easy for them, but using them means you don’t get those benefits outside of Steam, so there should be an open, third party alternative that developers can easily switch to if they’re familiar with developing for Steam; a company running a non-Steam store has an incentive to develop this. Matchmaking and friends servers, as they exist today, are frequently provided by the storefront, so when Steam servers go down for maintenance and I’m in the middle of an online match of Skullgirls, we get disconnected, and we have to wait until they come back up; there are ways to increase uptime and prevent this interruption, but Valve hasn’t improved the situation in at least 15 years.
Honestly, even those are pretty overkill to make a competing storefront. All you’d have to do is to offer lower prices and/or take a smaller percentage while matching at least a fraction of Steam’s functionality (unlike Epic) or actively working to screw over customers (also unlike Epic). If a store sold games consistantly 5% cheaper than Steam, even without controller options, good support, a built-in forum, explicit Linux support, ect., I’m confident it would be reasonably successful. Just look at Humble and Fanatical. While they do (mostly) sell Steam keys, their prices are arguably what made them a success, not the features you get after redeaming the Steam keys.
Even beside that, the ideas you provided are all pretty minor. If you’re willing to throw more significant amounts of money at the platform, like many before have, you can go a lot further than that even. For example, seeing as Steam’s discovery algorithm is one of the bigger benifits Steam provides, you could one-up them by providing off-platform marketing for games launching on your platform. This would be a way to bring devlopers and players alike to use your platform without screwing over either. Similarly, you could take a page out of Epic’s book and do giveaways regularly. Alternatively, you could use a less generous system such as “buy anything and get x game free” or “every $10 spent gives you a chance to win x game bundle” to make it more sustainable, and/or allow you to market specific underperforming games. It isn’t that hard to come up with ideas that would allow a competitor to do well. You just have to do that rather than putting all your resources into trying to take games away from players, and harvest their data.
If EGS mandated those things it would be as successful as GOG. Which is irrelevant compared to Steam. Steam didn’t become successful because of tags. It’s because they were first.
GOG is successful and profitable. EGS loses hundreds of millions of dollars.
Boutique shop successful, therefore Amazon is not a monopoly.
GOG succeeds in one key area that gives me a reason to shop there. Steam succeeds in other areas. Epic succeeds in none. If GOG wants to supplant Steam, they need to be good in that key area and the areas that I value from Steam. If Epic wants to supplant Steam, they need to give a single shit about what their customers want.
Yes, Into fortnite, not EGS. The eggs spent all their money on timed exclusives instead of a better product, and that’s why they failed to make a steam competitor.
Those free games weren’t actually free, Epic paid for them, you know.
Oh, I know. I got exactly 1 free game from EGS, which I promptly bought on stream myself once I realized that EGS had no offline mode (so the game I had been playing refused to launch during an Internet outage).
And that’s one of the many reasons EGS isn’t able to get a significant market share, because as I said initially, EGS fucking sucks. If they spent half as much on improving the store as they do for timed exclusives and trying to lure people in with free games, they might actually get somewhere.
You dont seem to understand what a monopoly is either since steam isnt one