Steam is on a path to become a monopoly. Is that a good thing for the gamer?Support my work: https://www.patreon.com/thehatedone If it's not on Steam, it mig...
  • ampersandrew@lemmy.worldEnglish
    76·
    2 months ago

    Valve has a reputation for being the good guy

    Because they earned it.

    “Big tech monopoly is bad”, but somehow “Valve monopoly is good for the customer”.

    I had this discussion with some friends of mine lately. Valve is definitely not perfect, but the steps they’ve taken to be better than their competition, often in the consumer’s favor, is so far and away better than the likes of the other entrenched market leaders: Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft. I’m not a fan of them tying Steam Input and Steam VR, among other things, to…Steam, naturally…when they should be independent libraries, but would Sony and Microsoft have started to abandon their walled garden ecosystem strategy of exclusives without Valve leading the way? Not a chance.

    Predatory pricing? Not a problem. It’s the industry standard.

    But like…it is the industry standard, and it’s definitely not the definition of the word, “predatory”. If they offer the best deal in town, it’s still a good deal. Epic is offering better than that, but if it was so easy to match, you’d see the other platforms doing so as well, including those also trying to compete with Steam, meaning maybe the dollars don’t really make sense in Epic’s world.

    Steam is dismantling the entire concept of digital ownership

    The hell they are. For one, not every Steam game has DRM. For another, when I buy a game on Steam, any game, I certainly “own” more than when I buy a “digital copy” of a movie or a TV show, of which there is no avenue to actually legally obtain the file that contains the movie. It’s only streaming.

    [Before Steam] it was possible to buy a game and just play it without internet access

    Perhaps the video author is too young to remember, but online authentication on PC games definitely came before a single third party sold their games on Steam. MMORPGs predate Steam for that matter.

    Honestly, this whole video seems to come from someone who’s too young to have lived through this and only read about it. We became happy Steam customers because it was better than what came before. Valve is not responsible for standardizing any of this nonsense and did in fact get to where they are by being better than everyone claiming to be their competition.

    For many games sold on Steam, Valve takes a flat 30% cut. Why 30%? I don’t know.

    Exactly my point. They picked 30% because they were confident it would scale to cover their costs and because it was a better rate than what the developer could stand to make in brick-and-mortar.

    The cost of running an online store is essentially zero.

    No, it’s very much not.

    Now all of the other tech companies are getting sued for…[these monopolistic practices]…

    Because they’re exhibiting monopolistic, anti-competitive behavior. It’s a much harder case to say that Steam has engaged in monopolistic practices compared to Apple requiring that all software on their devices comes from their store. Which is why the Wolfire case is not a slam dunk.

    A lot of the other bad faith arguments here are derived from the incorrect idea that running a digital store costs nothing.

    I do shop on GOG for lots of the reasons that the video raises, but it’s often still a worse experience than buying on Steam. For instance, I’m on Linux, so while GOG’s refund policy is exceptional, I have to do a lot of legwork to get a game like The Thaumaturge to run in Wine, a game that’s Steam Deck verified and just works on Steam. And the only way I was able to deduce the steps to get it working was by taking a peak at SteamDB to see what the game’s dependencies are.

    • toynbee@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      2 months ago

      You have convinced me to investigate The Thaumaturge.

      Also … Excellent points, all.

      edit: s/Everyone/Excellent/

    • Kayn@dormi.zoneEnglish
      1·
      2 months ago

      How did you try to get The Thaumaturge to run? I found that I could run many games on my library without issue using the Heroic Games Launcher, which is arguably the premier Linux client for GOG games.

      • ampersandrew@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        2 months ago

        I launched it from Heroic, but these same steps will work without it. Run winetricks in your Wine prefix, install a DLL or component, and select both vcrun2019 and vcrun2022 and hit OK to let them install.

        I followed some steps for another game and found that you can look at SteamDB to see what other dependency depots the game uses. I also try to update the PC Gaming Wiki with fixes like this whenever I find them.

    • Pika@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      1·
      2 months ago

      I agree with almost all of your viewpoints , however I believe that steam has engaged in monopolistic practices. The difference in market share between Steam and any other game launcher is night and day, it is the online game store. That being said that’s not always a bad thing as they have shown

      They have a higher than average fees that is for sure, but they also have a significantly bigger feature set than any other store out there. Like when you launch a game on Steam you have a game publishing with built-in DLC support, you have a built-in mod Workshop, you have the review system, you have a built-in DRM if that’s something that you wanted to do, you also have access to a community forum for bug reporting and discussions, not to mention you have the entire steam proton system and the VR system at your disposal both of which are Super complicated to set up stand alone.

      Their Workshop, while it takes a 75% cut, is mostly for the Cosmetic items or the trading items were steam does almost exclusively all of the work for it. Basically the only thing the dev team has to do for it is upload the image for the item and the cost that it thinks that item is worth and then steam does the rest. At that point the 75% cut while steep, makes sense to me

      Every other reason that they provided in that video, seemed to either hyperbolize the impact of it or disregard what is concidered standard. like for example pricing parity that’s an industry standard, any reputable shop has the same system, and if there is any place that’s different, they actively try to have similar pricing. Hell Walmart hires people strictly to go to their competitors to make sure that their pricing is the same as their competitors. The attribution agreement while I don’t believe should be legal, isn’t anti-competitive, it is anti-consumer but not anti-competitive. I am also super against the fact that technically every game is a license but again that’s not anti-competitive that’s anti-consumer.

      I firmly believe that if a game competitor decided to have an equal feature set to the steam launcher, eventually they would be able to give steam a run for their money. Which is not something I can say the same of with companies such as Google which has been proven to actively manipulate the market and use their position of power as a way to keep competitors out, be it by making it so third-party browsers can’t use DRM, or doing things such as manipulating your web results that way your competitors do not appear. I have never seen steam do this

      • ampersandrew@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        2 months ago

        You say they engage in monopolistic practices, but did you cite one? You dismissed a lot of the same points from the video that I did, but I don’t see what supports your point that they’re behaving as a monopolist.

        not to mention you have the entire steam proton system and the VR system at your disposal both of which are Super complicated to set up stand alone.

        Proton is actually super easy for a competitor to set up standalone. There’s nothing stopping the likes of GOG from just distributing Proton or Wine with their Windows executables for Linux customers, if they wanted, and they can even obfuscate it and make it invisible to the player like Steam does. The big trick that Valve pulled out of their hat for Proton, which again is not monopolistic, is that they re-encode videos that use Microsoft’s proprietary video codecs, since they can’t legally share the DLL that enables playback of those videos. To do what Valve does here is replicable, but it comes at a cost to the distributor. I can’t speak to the effort involved in setting up a competing VR platform, but it seems to be of less and less concern at this point.

        • Pika@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          1·
          2 months ago

          It’s monopolistic practice is soley due to its market share, that alone is enough to. It’s a monopoly that isn’t anti-competitive, it’s inherently not bad, as long as it isn’t being Abused, many misconstrue anti-competitive as monopolistic, the term doesn’t go hand and hand. Monopolistic competition exists when many companies offer competing products or services that are similar, but not perfect substitutes. This is valve at the moment with steam. Alternatives exist but none come even close to being a full substitute. but that’s OK it isn’t a bad thing, but it doesn’t change the fact it’s monopolistic.

          As for the gog thing, maybe it is easier than I thought, if so I’m surprised that no other game store has done so, steam dedicated an entire division to it and it still has a lot of issues with functionality and usage.

          • ampersandrew@lemmy.worldEnglish
            2·
            2 months ago

            A monopolistic practice is one that enforces a monopoly unfairly. Just having market share means they’re approaching a monopoly, but it doesn’t mean they’re getting there by monopolistic practices.