Remind me again which game developer had to release their game on Steam? Or which publisher had no choice but to market on the platform? And are you the sole user forced to use Steam, or was that someone else…?
Interesting that first part… Respectfully, no one is entitled to sales on any platform. As a consumer, I’ve tried other launchers and stores. I hate them all. I choose to only use Steam (for the time being). It’s simply choosing the superior option, but it is an option. I can’t say the same for my internet, energy, or cable companies…
Respectfully, no one is entitled to sales on any platform.
I’ve never said that. Of course if I‘m publishing a game I want it to be successful. If I was a book publisher, I‘d have to sell via Amazon, too, simply because a lot of people never buy anywhere else. It is a requirement to sell on Steam for a successful campaign, and OP implied otherwise.
It would really help if the would-be competitors focused on consumer-facing features rather than… whatever it is they’re doing. GoG is doing a great job of this, but EGS is still missing even the most basic features years later, because they keep trying to get market share through buying exclusives and giving away free games and that’s sadly never going to work out. They just don’t understand what the consumers in the industry they’re trying to operate in want.
Sure, but the point I’m making is, it’s not Steam’s fault; they’re simply doing a better job than their competitors of making their storefront attractive to consumers. Rather than blaming Steam, you should be blaming the other storefronts for not being able to capture market share.
If I’d say to my publisher „but I don’t want to publish on Steam“ I can look for another publisher. You don’t need to defend Steam, I didn’t attack it by stating that you need to publish on the biggest platform.
I’m referring to your prior comments and history speaking in communities. The most recent one I remember involved Portal, Half-life, and counterstrike.
You’re not at Lembot_0005 level comments yet tho, so that’s good.
Yes, harassing users without context based on previous comments in other threads is much more valuable for a community. I don’t even remember having contrarian opinions about Portal or Half-Life, they are my favourite series‘.
I think the difference here is that Valve isn’t forcing a monopoly in the way our tech overlords like Google and Amazon do through acquisitions and regulatory capture.
Several companies have tried and mostly failed to compete with Steam, I’m primarily thinking of whatever the EA and Ubisoft launchers are. The two closest have been GOG whom I would argue is fairly successful considering what their goals are and Epic, whom I would say is much less so.
Valve arent paying for exclusives or anything, they are just delivering a far better product than anyone else. GOG has it’s DRM-free market, but outside of that, there’s nothing close. Even if Epic Games had feature parity, fuck that company.
I never mentioned Amazon, but it’s really no comparison, even the FTC in the USA has filed suits against them for monopolistic and illegal behaviour.
Ive never seen an advert for Steam myself, outside of on their own platform or a video on their own YouTube channel. They sell largely through word of mouth. I suppose recently they offered journalists to visit their HQ to show off their new hardware.
Valve has lawsuits in the work, although not from the FTC. The fact is Valve is just slightly above the other companies, but it’s a very low bar and that doesn’t negate their very real effect on the industry.
I bring up Amazon because your arguments apply to them. If I told you Bezos deserves all his wealth because he has a better platform then his competitors (all three of them) and offers an easy to use website with cheap delivery, you would probably call me a bootlicker.
All billionaires and their profit making machines are bad, no exceptions imo.
Valve employees aren’t pissing in bottles.
Amazon also does a bunch of shitty things on their marketplace (Amazon basics) and killed all the competition.
You are arguing something different. We all agree billionaires shouldn’t exist. You don’t need to try to topic flip to try and let us know. This was simply a discussion about the term monopoly and it’s definition.
Not to mention the companies that have legal decisions declaring they are a monopoly when they are only 80%+ of a market are in the context of those companies (Microsoft, google) behaving in an anticompetitive way using their majority market position.
So not technically a monopoly and not comparable to legally declared monopolies.
Steam is not the only supplier of particular goods, they do not own the market, they have not the highest price and do not lack competition. It is just that their service is far better than whatever competition offers. Nothing stops Microsoft, EA and Epic to implement same features Steam does. Like, literally nothing. These companies have money to do so. They just chose not to.
I see what you’re going for, but most people seem to choose money over doing the right thing. Which brings us right back to capitalism ruining everything, again.
You could defend Amazon with that logic. the fact that the barrier of entry is high is exactly what let’s Steam, Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo abuse of their soft monopoly.
Nothing justifies owning a billion dollars worth of of boats.
Which is surprising, considering how much money they generate off amazon store.
All it takes is to give a good service like Valve does. But somehow, as in Zippy’s pic, competition keeps shooting themselves in a foot. Probably due to shareholders that Valve does not have.
Tbf, I wouldnt even touch Amazon with a kilometer long pole even if the game was free.
I order on Amazon only if the physical item is the cheaper AND easier option to order from (usually because I can only get thing A but not B).
If I can avoid it, I will try to.
Mono=one poly=seller… and last I checked Steam is not the only seller of video games. They aren’t even the only seller of digital video games. They aren’t even the only seller of digital video games for SteamOS.
They are the largest because they do what’s right by their customers and employees. As a ‘for instance’, I bought Portal 2 for the PS3 many years ago. I no longer have my PS3 but I can still play Portal 2 (as well as Portal which was just thrown in for me) on any PC.
Treat customers right and you get rewarded. They are the majority market shareholder because they have earned it, not through deceptive business practices but through being a great company.
If they were a monopoly they wouldn’t allow other game catalogs on their systems, yet I have GOG and Epic on my Steam Deck. In fact, there isn’t even a requirement for me to have Steam on my Steam Deck. Just because a company is the market leader doesn’t mean they got there through unethical means.
You are equating “monopoly” with “abusive monopoly.”
No, I’m not. I’m saying they aren’t a monopoly by the simple fact that they aren’t the only providers of the service they sell. And while they are currently in a position to use their power to make themselves a monopoly, they are not doing that and instead are playing fair with their competition.
I refer you to the other comment subthread where I mentioned textbook examples of monopolies which had 80-odd percent market share, you asked me if Steam had that, I said yes, and then you went quiet.
Don’t bring up points that you were already challenged on and had no reply to - it’s lying, because you already know it’s wrong.
You’re right, the 80% figure I read was from a small poll, it seems 75% is the more accurate figure.
That’s honesty. You don’t “owe me a reply” but replying selectively is dishonest. It’s pretending you haven’t heard any contrary information, when you have.
Now given the 75 is quite close to 80, I think calling Steam a monopoly in the market of pc video game distribution is quite fair, don’t you? The honest thing to do would be to change your mind in the light of what you didn’t know before.
No, Google pays off other browsers to use Google as the default search engine, among many other actual monopolistic practices. Steam does none of that and simply provides a product.
Paying people to promote your stuff is not an abuse of monopoly position, because Duckduckgo is perfectly capable of doing the same thing.
Abuse of monopoly position would be leaning on search results to promote Chrome or Android (for example). And they have been caught doing some anti-competitive shit.
Ah OK, so the classic monopolies in American History (Standard Oil - controlled 90% of its market; American Tobacco - controlled 80% of its market) were not monopolies.
steam has a 75% marketshare of PC games distribution in the US. the 2nd biggest player, epic games, has a market share estimated from 3% to 7,5%. i can’t find data for steam’s market share outside the US, but i’d expect it to be even higher.
if google can be considered to have a monopoly on web browsers with 73% of the marketshare, even as alternatives (like safari, 13%) exist, i don’t see why steam wouldn’t count as well.
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That tends to happen when you have a monopoly on an industry where you get 30% of the revenue from other people’s hard work.
I wouldn’t describe it as a “monopoly” per say. I’d describe it as “all of the competition is filled with idiots”:
Remind me again which game developer had to release their game on Steam? Or which publisher had no choice but to market on the platform? And are you the sole user forced to use Steam, or was that someone else…?
If I want my game to sell I have to release on Steam, though.
Interesting that first part… Respectfully, no one is entitled to sales on any platform. As a consumer, I’ve tried other launchers and stores. I hate them all. I choose to only use Steam (for the time being). It’s simply choosing the superior option, but it is an option. I can’t say the same for my internet, energy, or cable companies…
I’ve never said that. Of course if I‘m publishing a game I want it to be successful. If I was a book publisher, I‘d have to sell via Amazon, too, simply because a lot of people never buy anywhere else. It is a requirement to sell on Steam for a successful campaign, and OP implied otherwise.
You can sell your game on Steam, in addition to other platforms as well.
You’re not contradicting anything they said, and you’re not contradicting that Steam is a monopoly.
It would really help if the would-be competitors focused on consumer-facing features rather than… whatever it is they’re doing. GoG is doing a great job of this, but EGS is still missing even the most basic features years later, because they keep trying to get market share through buying exclusives and giving away free games and that’s sadly never going to work out. They just don’t understand what the consumers in the industry they’re trying to operate in want.
Yeah sure, but acting like I don’t need Steam for my game to sell is untrue.
Sure, but the point I’m making is, it’s not Steam’s fault; they’re simply doing a better job than their competitors of making their storefront attractive to consumers. Rather than blaming Steam, you should be blaming the other storefronts for not being able to capture market share.
I‘m not blaming anyone.
I know! There’s this great game called Fortnite that no one has ever heard of because you can’t get it on Steam. /s
It did well because EGS is so great /s It’s obviously the exception.
You don’t even have to release your game on pc to sell… Some don’t at all. Sticking to only consoles.
Minecraft, Star Sector, Dwarf Fortress until recently. Stores like Epic and GOG and itch.io.
Plus Steam gives you content distribution, discussions, patches, all for free.
If I’d say to my publisher „but I don’t want to publish on Steam“ I can look for another publisher. You don’t need to defend Steam, I didn’t attack it by stating that you need to publish on the biggest platform.
Hey look, the contrarian is back! Wow! I thought you would take some time to reflect after your wack takes.
I don‘t think it’s very contrarian or whack to acknowledge the fact that I may need to sell on the biggest platform if I want my game to do well.
I’m referring to your prior comments and history speaking in communities. The most recent one I remember involved Portal, Half-life, and counterstrike.
You’re not at Lembot_0005 level comments yet tho, so that’s good.
Yes, harassing users without context based on previous comments in other threads is much more valuable for a community. I don’t even remember having contrarian opinions about Portal or Half-Life, they are my favourite series‘.
Yeah, why do you buy things if you’re against capitalism? Checkmate.
Doesn’t make it less of a monopoly.
I think the difference here is that Valve isn’t forcing a monopoly in the way our tech overlords like Google and Amazon do through acquisitions and regulatory capture.
Several companies have tried and mostly failed to compete with Steam, I’m primarily thinking of whatever the EA and Ubisoft launchers are. The two closest have been GOG whom I would argue is fairly successful considering what their goals are and Epic, whom I would say is much less so.
This is the key point people are missing.
Valve arent paying for exclusives or anything, they are just delivering a far better product than anyone else. GOG has it’s DRM-free market, but outside of that, there’s nothing close. Even if Epic Games had feature parity, fuck that company.
Fuck valve too. Gabe has over a billion dollars worth of boats. Fuck him to hell and back
Amazon doesn’t either. Most of the arguments defending Steam can easily apply to every other “bad” company.
The only thing that differentiates steam is their marketing budget targeting small forums and Reddit.
I never mentioned Amazon, but it’s really no comparison, even the FTC in the USA has filed suits against them for monopolistic and illegal behaviour.
Ive never seen an advert for Steam myself, outside of on their own platform or a video on their own YouTube channel. They sell largely through word of mouth. I suppose recently they offered journalists to visit their HQ to show off their new hardware.
Valve has lawsuits in the work, although not from the FTC. The fact is Valve is just slightly above the other companies, but it’s a very low bar and that doesn’t negate their very real effect on the industry.
I bring up Amazon because your arguments apply to them. If I told you Bezos deserves all his wealth because he has a better platform then his competitors (all three of them) and offers an easy to use website with cheap delivery, you would probably call me a bootlicker.
All billionaires and their profit making machines are bad, no exceptions imo.
Valve employees aren’t pissing in bottles. Amazon also does a bunch of shitty things on their marketplace (Amazon basics) and killed all the competition.
There’s a huge difference in ethics here.
You are arguing something different. We all agree billionaires shouldn’t exist. You don’t need to try to topic flip to try and let us know. This was simply a discussion about the term monopoly and it’s definition.
Technically Steam isn’t a monopoly by actual definition.
What you, and others often mean with the term, is that they hold a majority market position.
Not to mention the companies that have legal decisions declaring they are a monopoly when they are only 80%+ of a market are in the context of those companies (Microsoft, google) behaving in an anticompetitive way using their majority market position.
So not technically a monopoly and not comparable to legally declared monopolies.
A monopoly (from Greek μόνος, mónos, ‘single, alone’ and πωλεῖν, pōleîn, ‘to sell’) is a market in which one person or company is the only supplier of a particular good or service. A monopoly is characterized by a lack of economic competition to produce a particular thing, a lack of viable substitute goods, and the possibility of a high monopoly price well above the seller’s marginal cost that leads to a high monopoly profit.[1]
Steam is not the only supplier of particular goods, they do not own the market, they have not the highest price and do not lack competition. It is just that their service is far better than whatever competition offers. Nothing stops Microsoft, EA and Epic to implement same features Steam does. Like, literally nothing. These companies have money to do so. They just chose not to.
I see what you’re going for, but most people seem to choose money over doing the right thing. Which brings us right back to capitalism ruining everything, again.
All of them.
Go do your own game shop with the feature set of steam.
We have seen how well that was executed with Epic.
I wouldnt even call the GOG implementation bad but it obviously lacks the PR in comparison (+ games like CP2077 are also available on Steam)
You could defend Amazon with that logic. the fact that the barrier of entry is high is exactly what let’s Steam, Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo abuse of their soft monopoly.
Nothing justifies owning a billion dollars worth of of boats.
Amazon tried and failed, too.
Which is surprising, considering how much money they generate off amazon store.
All it takes is to give a good service like Valve does. But somehow, as in Zippy’s pic, competition keeps shooting themselves in a foot. Probably due to shareholders that Valve does not have.
Tbf, I wouldnt even touch Amazon with a kilometer long pole even if the game was free.
I order on Amazon only if the physical item is the cheaper AND easier option to order from (usually because I can only get thing A but not B).
If I can avoid it, I will try to.
Mono=one poly=seller… and last I checked Steam is not the only seller of video games. They aren’t even the only seller of digital video games. They aren’t even the only seller of digital video games for SteamOS.
They are the largest because they do what’s right by their customers and employees. As a ‘for instance’, I bought Portal 2 for the PS3 many years ago. I no longer have my PS3 but I can still play Portal 2 (as well as Portal which was just thrown in for me) on any PC.
Technically Steam is not a monopoly, but the way people commonly use the term these days is as simple as “majority market share”.
Treat customers right and you get rewarded. They are the majority market shareholder because they have earned it, not through deceptive business practices but through being a great company.
If they were a monopoly they wouldn’t allow other game catalogs on their systems, yet I have GOG and Epic on my Steam Deck. In fact, there isn’t even a requirement for me to have Steam on my Steam Deck. Just because a company is the market leader doesn’t mean they got there through unethical means.
You are equating “monopoly” with “abusive monopoly.”
Google got its monopoly in internet search by being better than the competition. It’s still a monopoly, even though it mostly plays by the rules.
No, I’m not. I’m saying they aren’t a monopoly by the simple fact that they aren’t the only providers of the service they sell. And while they are currently in a position to use their power to make themselves a monopoly, they are not doing that and instead are playing fair with their competition.
I refer you to the other comment subthread where I mentioned textbook examples of monopolies which had 80-odd percent market share, you asked me if Steam had that, I said yes, and then you went quiet.
Don’t bring up points that you were already challenged on and had no reply to - it’s lying, because you already know it’s wrong.
The gaming market is much larger than PC gaming.
And Steam does not have an 80% market share on PC gaming, so who’s lying?
And finally, who the fuck do you think you are that I owe you a response?
You’re right, the 80% figure I read was from a small poll, it seems 75% is the more accurate figure.
That’s honesty. You don’t “owe me a reply” but replying selectively is dishonest. It’s pretending you haven’t heard any contrary information, when you have.
Now given the 75 is quite close to 80, I think calling Steam a monopoly in the market of pc video game distribution is quite fair, don’t you? The honest thing to do would be to change your mind in the light of what you didn’t know before.
No, Google pays off other browsers to use Google as the default search engine, among many other actual monopolistic practices. Steam does none of that and simply provides a product.
Paying people to promote your stuff is not an abuse of monopoly position, because Duckduckgo is perfectly capable of doing the same thing.
Abuse of monopoly position would be leaning on search results to promote Chrome or Android (for example). And they have been caught doing some anti-competitive shit.
Ah OK, so the classic monopolies in American History (Standard Oil - controlled 90% of its market; American Tobacco - controlled 80% of its market) were not monopolies.
And Steam controls 80%-90% of the video game market?
of the PC video game market, yes.
steam has a 75% marketshare of PC games distribution in the US. the 2nd biggest player, epic games, has a market share estimated from 3% to 7,5%. i can’t find data for steam’s market share outside the US, but i’d expect it to be even higher.
if google can be considered to have a monopoly on web browsers with 73% of the marketshare, even as alternatives (like safari, 13%) exist, i don’t see why steam wouldn’t count as well.
Now include consoles and phones.
You can analyse markets at different levels.