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...
  • 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.