Steam does a lot of shitty things — including using gambling mechanics on kids and failing to moderate the neo-nazi clubhouse that are their forums — but they are not a monopoly and do not behave in a monopolistic or anticompetitive manner whatsoever. Their success and market share is genuinely earned on merits.
Personally, I would prefer GOG, but many games don’t release there, or release there much later. Epic could compete, but their heart is clearly not in it as they refuse to give customers features they want out of a platform and do engage in anticompetitive practices.
Yeah, that difference in market share could be used to declare Steam a monopoly. For devs it means they have to publish their games there and accept that Steam will take 30% ofthe revenue.
Technically a monopoly means that a singular entity has or produces all of something. So to meet the definition of a monopoly they would have to have 100% market share.
Google was declared a monopoly in practice because they were using their market dominance to negatively impact other companies despite not having 100% market share like Microsoft and a bunch of other companies before them. That was about being so dominant and abusing it that action will be taken to keep them from becoming a literal monopoly.
No, they don’t want you selling Steam keys for cheap on other platforms.
Valve actually doesn’t earn anything from steam key sales. They don’t take the 30% cut on those, only on sales made in the Steam store. The only requirement Valve puts up is that you don’t start selling these steam keys (which are provided for free) cheaper than you can purchase the game in the Steam store.
I don’t see that hindering competition at all. It basically allows other marketplaces to sell Steam games, enabling competition in the first place.
You can even “buy” open source software on Steam that is available free from the home website.
You’re referring to the case with the developers of Lugaru, and they’ve been doing a great job of painting their fuckup as Valve barring platform competition.
The others have been improving for a bit but GOG and itch have been focused on niche markets while Steam has grown broadly using the money from valve’s early successes. If they want to step up to the kind of scale steam operates at, it will take a lot to overcome the innate loyalty of ‘I already have 1000 games worth of time and money invested in the steam system,’ and grow their repertoire outside their niches. Epic and Ubisoft also have tried, but they’re still trying to catch up to where steam has been plugging along for ages. Epic has tried to build out their own version of the ‘1000 games’ moat by giving out constant free games but their moat still isn’t that big, and ubisoft has been relying mostly on having a few exclusives, but that hasn’t really been a winning plan either because it’s not enough to get people to think ‘I want a game,’ means ‘go to origin,’ instead of ‘check to see if i already have it on steam.’
What does valve do to prevent itch and gog from having a fair shot at competiting if they scrounged up the investors to develop up a competing platform? They offer the features their customers expect and that customer base has so far proven to be a much smaller market
People like you can’t seem to differentiate wanting solid criticisms of Valve and Steam rather than just theory crafting all the worst things that can happen with them. The Steam hysteria makes no sense when its a storefront on open software platforms and the ones that are on closed software platforms aren’t doing what people are gearing Valve would do whenever Gabe dies or if Valve went public
At least put effort into explaining why Steam will become this terribly blood sucking store on PC where people can download from numerous options as compared to platforms like Xbox, PlayStation, Nintendo, iOS where you don’t have freedom to install anything you want. As a developer you can’t just distribute software and have them installable.
If people that wanted to make people concerned about Steam put more effort into their arguments, maybe people on Lemmy would give their concerns more credence. It’s surprising that on Lemmy, people who seem to value art and expression so much are so bad at expressing why people should be concerned about what they are concern about
This is exactly why it’s important for people to learn about how capitalism functions instead of how to identify morally condemnable behaviour. A liberal with think Steam is fine so long as they remain “horizontally” organized and Gaben remains the special boi he is, but will only be bad if it the company gets “greedy.” There is no benefit to PC game distribution being controlled privately; any media distribution.
I think the issue is, that if we’re going to call steam a monopoly (and maybe they are), then we’ve got to call Xbox, Playstation, Nintendo monopolies.
What I don’t want to see is legal attacks against steam while letting worse behavior off the hook.
I mean, the issue is these lines aren’t as concrete anymore. Is the Ps5 a console or a locked down pc?
Hell, this is probably controversial, but Apple and Google actually have the monopoly on PC gaming. Android and Ios make the most money out of any gaming ecosystem.
I think so too, but they are a fairly small company/group with a stable (50+%) owner & basically don’t bother with much (neither publisher or consumer side). Eg GOG is smaller but fights DRM a lot more actively (and achieving DRM-free deals even before Steam).
I hope before Gabe goes Gaben’t he makes Valve a proper nonprofit - bcs the service they offer is like a mass infrastructure thing (which are always scary).
As to why devs think they have a monopoly - it’s hard to succeeded without Steam, especially if you arent a AAA studio (and even a small mistake on Steam part for their game’s visibility on Steam Store can cost them everything), and Steam isn’t really fighting over devs to offer them a better deal than the competition, it’s the other way around (it’s clear who has the power).
So yes, they have quite a fair bit of monopoly.
Modern, especially tech, monopolies aren’t a single-provider-locked-in type of thing, look at Google, they hold a monopoly over so many markets without those prerequisites. And they fought, shaped the markets intentionally to eventually get to that position (that’s why they were valued that high even before the revenue kicked in).
No? I’m going to stick with the actual definitions you ignored, the same ones you stopped responding to while downvoting like my toddler.
The best you’ve managed so far is inventing your own definition where a company only counts as a monopoly if it behaves badly and takes “monopolistic actions,” which is a neat little tautology. And you still haven’t shown a single definition that includes any of that.
In case you managed to not see, or forget, where i previously brought this up, here’s a link so you can refresh yourself: https://lemmy.ca/post/55030092/20023839
Outsized market power, what left out are the actions taken to make such an outsized market power. Monopolies are not a passive that form all by themselves. They are created through expansion acquisition, and aggressive crushing of competition. Disney and Nintendo do these actions. Valve does basically… Nothing.
I agree valve hasn’t done anything, but that isnt part of any definition of monopoly i’ve been able to discover, except for someone arguing in bad faith on the internet.
Sounds like Steam fits that description pretty well. I agree that steam isn’t a strict monopoly, there is competition, but they are so far and ahead they still function as a monopoly in their area.
Since you’d rather throw mud than talk terms, I guess that’s where this ends.
“Comodity controlled by one party”. Except it’s not controlled by one party.
Outsized market power, what left out are the actions taken to make such an outsized market power. Monopolies are not a passive that form all by themselves. They are created through expansion acquisition, and aggressive crushing of competition. Disney and Nintendo do these actions. Valve does basically… Nothing.
A single dominant seller, but again leaving out all the rest I have written above.
There is nothing Valve can stop doing to be less “a monopoly”. All they’ve done is provide a pretty decent service, and nobody else can be arsed to top that, even companies with the resources to do so.
By your definition, lets imagine a world where Amazon had 100% of the market and there were no other competitors, even if it happened naturally, without malicious intent, they wouldn’t be a monopoly? Come on.
I dont see ‘has to act a specific way’ in any definitions of monopoly. A monopoly isnt about being evil, or ‘actions taken to make such an outsized market power’ even if thats often part of the result, but just describes their position in the field.
This isn’t about how a company got there, it’s about where they currently are. Steam may not have crushed competitors aggressively like Disney or Nintendo, but its market dominance and control over PC game distribution still fits the textbook definition of a monopoly.
Steam has ~79.5% of the PC gaming market, I’m one of their customers and love their service, but that doesnt change that “monopoly”fits them.
Yea, it’s pretty rough for tattorack, but that’s what happens when you ignore definitions and argue in bad faith. They ignore all contrary evidence and definitions, and insit their made up definition is accurate.
/Shrug, some people just aren’t open to discussion .
That’s not my definition. That’s just the definition. And you’re using a corporation that is actively monopolising the logistics market, even so far as breaking the law to kill any competition, as an example. Nicely done.
Thanks, that was done intentionally, to highlight the absurdity of your argument. I assume we both agree that Amazon is an effective monopoly (though i have had people fight me on that too!)
You say its not your definition, but i linked three different definitions which didn’t use that language. in fact, in all my searching, not a SINGLE definition includes a discussion on how they got there, but on the **CURRENT **state of the market.
This is why I say Steam has an effective monopoly.
So yes, it seems like you’re using your personal definition, but it contradicts the actual, widely accepted definitions.
If you want to call me out and say “you initially said it WAS a monopoly, but its only an EFFECTIVE monopoly”, ill take that egg on my face, its earned and i should be more careful with my words.
Not on games per se but almost on mods. Yes, there are other platforms, but the majory and newest are on Workshop. And they make it hard to download them, if you don’t own the game on Steam (and Valve has it in their terms that they own the mods hosted on Workshop).
So one could argue that they use the indirect peer-pressure approach to market dominance, similiar to Google on Android.
I wouldn’t complain if they just had a “Download” button on their web version. But they don’t, you have to use the finicky steamcmd intended for server administration.
I do a fair bit of modding, and actually almost never interact with steam workshop. Nexus mods, thunderstore and r2modman, or something game specific like Everest (Celeste) or Lumafly mod manager (Hollow Knight). Not to mention modding like ReShade or OptiScaler, or custom proton versions with extra features.
I tend to associate Steam Workshop with very simple mods, like skin swaps, or mods with dedicated game support, like Rivals of Aether characters. Most of the more serious game modifications are hosted elsewhere, at least in my experience, and I usually forget to even bother checking what steam has available.
That said, I agree that an easier download button for using those mods on other platforms would be a good feature.
This. Steam Workshop I only use for my basic Witcher 3 mods being removing weight limits for inventory and stuff like horse sprinting stamina. I think it’s been over a year since witcher 3 workshop launched. There’s barely anything on there. Everything is on Nexus. All the ultra wide monitor support mods I grab off codeberg, GitHub, gitlab, or Nexus. I remember all the half life mods I used to get off modDB. Steam workshop is a far distant second to Nexus for mods for me. Close to GitHub for how much I use to download mods from
Keeping in mind Valve is a for profit company. Why would they host anything that adds extra bandwith cost and does not increase revenue on their platform?
Alternative “appstores” on Android are not hosted by Google, as far as I know.
Steam will get the social media warrior upvote brigade on their side every time, despite being a single point of failure that at any moment can change it’s operations to restrict anything and everything they wish unless you pay up.
Already we can’t transfer ownership once we die. We can’t port out our licenses to anywhere else. We can’t even reinstall a game without an internet connection afaik. If I could port my entire library to GOG I would.
There’s no good competitors because the money isn’t there to build one. Developers don’t want to maintain yet another platform and gamers don’t want another application to manage all their shit. Would take tens of billions of dollars today to get in there on top of having near feature parity.
I’ve been worried for a long time about what will happen when GabeN dies and someone else takes the reins. The only reason why the platform isn’t royal shit is because it’s his company and no grubby MBAs have managed to take it public. That can change on a whim.
Potential enshittifications:
Subscriptions. MBAs love them!
Advertisements. Think on-launch forced ads that play in steam before launching a game unless you pony up perhaps $15/mo in platform fees to bypass it. Maybe they’ll start with a much lower insignificant price to make it whatever for users to add a credit card and allow autobilling… for later price increases.
Download fees. Watch this quick 2 minute advertisement to begin the download for free right after!.. or just $5 per download / $30/mo for unlimited ad free downloads for your whole family (up to 5 people on the same ip! geolocation restrictions apply. Max 1TB per account per month)
No good competitors because they don’t have money? Excuse me? Are you seriously trying to paint Epic Games as some poor small underdog company?
Yes, Steam will eventually go to shit. But it’s not shit right now, and the competition can’t even be bothered to have a shopping basket feature in their store, something every online store already had since the dawn of online stores 20 years ago.
I wouldn’t buy shit on Epic for so many fucking reasons. They’re not a realistic competitor in terms of their DD product. They make money on fortnite and their engine.
Their revenue for their games store for “3rd party titles” was $285 million in 2024, compared to Steam’s 10800 million overall revenue… only 37x higher, clearly epic is a strong competitor. Maybe you wanna claim something silly like valve’s first party sales were 10.5 billion or something.
285m in revenue is not 285m in profits. Their publishing deals with companies probably don’t leave much left for actual income, and i’d be surprised if they operate with profit if you exclude first party titles.
Anywho… Why are you so hyper focused on epic, and not the market as a whole?
They’re one company and everybody hates them. I don’t give a shit about them. GOG is rocking ~40m in 2024 revenue… and they have a bit of a unique offering with 0 DRM and offline installers. Their nature keeps developers away since there’s an assumption that without DRM you won’t sell anything.
What else is there that is even remotely relevant compared to steam? I don’t know of any for PC games (windows/linux/mac) - mobile may make more money but that’s a separate market.
There’s no good competitors because the money isn’t there to build one. […] Would take tens of billions of dollars today to get in there on top of having near feature parity.
This is ridiculous bullshit. Epic had shitloads of money, they just couldn’t find their ass with both hands. It took them years to implement a freaking shopping cart.
Epic’s incompetence doesn’t matter to me. Find me another alternative that isn’t riding on the coattails of pre-existing billions in revenue.
Fortnite makes exponentially more than their DD platform.
GOG is the closest thing to a competitor imo but their philosophy restricts them from really competing on day 1 game sales outside of a minority of titles.
Everybody else is a seller of adult games, indie titles, or simply a key seller for steam games.
You didn’t do that though. I said for a competitor to come along that they would need to sink tens of billions of dollars, like uber did. I fail to see how this is a ridiculous statement. Epic being incompetent doesn’t have any relation to what a real competitor would need to do to gain a foothold with say a meager 25% of valve’s share.
Epic didn’t do enough to gain serious market share. They haven’t given up but I don’t see them making any inroads without further investment to the tune of tens of billions of dollars. They literally need to build up their platform to be substantially cheaper (e.g. by offering subsidies) while also making it fit for use (by spending way more money on quality devs.) They haven’t… and nobody cares except folks like you who think they’re a serious competitor as justification for white knighting for valve. lol
folks like you who think they’re a serious competitor
Yeah that’s exactly what my bashing of their pathetic excuse at a storefront was implying.
tens of billions of dollars, like uber did
You’re comparing the cost of building a simple software platform (and face it, Steam isn’t THAT complicated to replicate from a technical perspective) to a company hiring tens of millions of people worldwide for billions of man hours and hardware depreciation. Your estimates are so unrealistic it’s hilarious.
Stop making excuses for every other company that has failed to compete with Valve. It has not been out of the price range for competition of other companies. Big publishers have been making storefronts for about 2 decades and proceeding to underfund and mismanage every attempt.
Steam was not the first digital storefront on PC. They were not a huge behemoth company by 2014. They were not bigger than Epic was by the time EGS launched. Not bigger than EA when Origin launched. Not bigger than Ubisoft when Uplay launched. Not bigger than Microsoft when GFWL launched. Not bigger than Amazon anytime these past 15 years of digital downloads from them. I doubt it took Valve tens of billions of dollars to make 2014 Steam right before SteamOS launched, 2014 because not a single storefront platform has reached feature parity with end of 2014 Steam.
Steam launched in 2003. A single ten billion dollars, I wouldn’t be surprised as about the accumulative revenue of Valve 2003-2014.
Already we can’t transfer ownership once we die. We can’t port out our licenses to anywhere else.
What is the policy of any other store. Of you want a solution here go lobby the government you live under to mandate inheritance of digital goods
We can’t even reinstall a game without an internet connection afaik. If I could port my entire library
This is a game by game case as it’s up to what DRM is implemented if any. A ton of games you can just copy the folder around and click the executable. We’re you not around during the SecuRom and StarForce days. GFWL install limit days.
Call people what you are yourself, a social media warrior, but that doesn’t make you any less ignorant of PC gaming markets than whomever you’re crying about. You won’t be taken seriously when you’re making excuses for a bunch of companies historically and a number to this day larger than Valve was when building Steam up
Download fees. Watch this quick 2 minute advertisement to begin the download for free right after!.. or just $5 per download / $30/mo for unlimited ad free downloads for your whole family (up to 5 people on the same ip! geolocation restrictions apply. Max 1TB per account per month)
Valve isn’t in a vacuum. iOS, Xbox, PlayStation, Nintendo. All closed software ecosystems unlike a Linux machine or currently a Windows machine. Still waiting for that 2 minute advertisement to begin download or download fees on actual closed platforms. Waiting for public companies like Microsoft, Amazon, Sony, Nintendo, … to start charging download fees and pre-download advertisements on purchased games.
GFWL Gold subscription for online play is about 20 years old and failed spectacularly against a Steam that wasn’t even a tenth the userbase it has today. Now you’re losing hair over subscriptions to get advertisement free downloads of games you’ve purchased. Come back to reality of how the markets gone for PC gaming in the last 20 years
“everything else is shitty so they aren’t any worse” is not an argument man
My steam account is from 2003. I’m vividly aware of the overall DD market and it’s changes over time from a user perspective. I was here before it existed like so many others.
The last really good alternative to steam we had was Stardock’s Impulse… which they sold out because brad’s a tool and couldn’t stand up a team internally that was separate from his game development aspirations. If he did, they would be as big as valve today. Instead we have more shitty elemental games and more shitty galciv games and all their DLC.
Anywho, you’re still fucked no matter how much you suck valve’s dick once they enshittify. Can you truly say they will not enshittify?
No I can’t say they won’t enshitiffy but I’m not going to bitch all the times they’re not being dicks just so you can enjoy sucking your own dick. Go fight a battle that actually needs fighting right now because Steam is a waste of time and energy now. You’re fighting your imaginary enemy right now
Yes, that is the type of monopoly they have. It’s one that would probably not attract the attention of anti-trust regulators. If you’re not coming from the free software world I guess it looks like that’s the only way things can be.
You are not logged in. However you can subscribe from another Fediverse account, for example Lemmy or Mastodon. To do this, paste the following into the search field of your instance: [email protected]
No game suggestions, friend requests, surveys, or begging.
No Let’s Plays, streams, highlight reels/montages, random videos or shorts.
No off-topic posts/comments, within reason.
Use the original source, no clickbait titles, no duplicates.
(Submissions should be from the original source if possible, unless from paywalled or non-english sources.
If the title is clickbait or lacks context you may lightly edit the title.)
If we call Steam a monopoly, then we also shall name Nestle a monopoly.
Steam does a lot of shitty things — including using gambling mechanics on kids and failing to moderate the neo-nazi clubhouse that are their forums — but they are not a monopoly and do not behave in a monopolistic or anticompetitive manner whatsoever. Their success and market share is genuinely earned on merits.
Personally, I would prefer GOG, but many games don’t release there, or release there much later. Epic could compete, but their heart is clearly not in it as they refuse to give customers features they want out of a platform and do engage in anticompetitive practices.
TL;DW: execs assume monopoly from market dominance, without taking into account other stores could contest said market dominance.
It’s not stupid. Monopoly does not mean there’s no competition. Google has been legally declared a monopoly and they have tons of competition.
Yeah, that difference in market share could be used to declare Steam a monopoly. For devs it means they have to publish their games there and accept that Steam will take 30% ofthe revenue.
Technically a monopoly means that a singular entity has or produces all of something. So to meet the definition of a monopoly they would have to have 100% market share.
Google was declared a monopoly in practice because they were using their market dominance to negatively impact other companies despite not having 100% market share like Microsoft and a bunch of other companies before them. That was about being so dominant and abusing it that action will be taken to keep them from becoming a literal monopoly.
Maybe “technically”, but not practice or in law. Google was not being prevented from becoming a monopoly, they were declared a monopoly.
Technically but not technically…
Depends on the context.
alright then Valve uses their market dominance to negatively impact other companies, much better
Except they don’t do that, which is what separates valve from nearly every other comparable company with a massive market share.
They literally never went a millimeter out of their way to negatively impact another competing storefront.
Valve’s success can be almost summed up as “does nothing, wins” because the competition to steam has been piss poor.
That is not true. Valve requires that you do not sell your games cheaper on other platforms, hindering competition.
No, they don’t want you selling Steam keys for cheap on other platforms.
Valve actually doesn’t earn anything from steam key sales. They don’t take the 30% cut on those, only on sales made in the Steam store. The only requirement Valve puts up is that you don’t start selling these steam keys (which are provided for free) cheaper than you can purchase the game in the Steam store.
I don’t see that hindering competition at all. It basically allows other marketplaces to sell Steam games, enabling competition in the first place.
That has never been true.
You can even “buy” open source software on Steam that is available free from the home website.
You’re referring to the case with the developers of Lugaru, and they’ve been doing a great job of painting their fuckup as Valve barring platform competition.
Competition like GOG or itch isn’t “piss poor”, they offer exactly the features their customers expect.
The others have been improving for a bit but GOG and itch have been focused on niche markets while Steam has grown broadly using the money from valve’s early successes. If they want to step up to the kind of scale steam operates at, it will take a lot to overcome the innate loyalty of ‘I already have 1000 games worth of time and money invested in the steam system,’ and grow their repertoire outside their niches. Epic and Ubisoft also have tried, but they’re still trying to catch up to where steam has been plugging along for ages. Epic has tried to build out their own version of the ‘1000 games’ moat by giving out constant free games but their moat still isn’t that big, and ubisoft has been relying mostly on having a few exclusives, but that hasn’t really been a winning plan either because it’s not enough to get people to think ‘I want a game,’ means ‘go to origin,’ instead of ‘check to see if i already have it on steam.’
What does valve do to prevent itch and gog from having a fair shot at competiting if they scrounged up the investors to develop up a competing platform? They offer the features their customers expect and that customer base has so far proven to be a much smaller market
They’re not competing with Steam. They’re offering different services.
Competition is like EA Origins or the Epic store.
Given how anti capitalist Lenny is purported to be I’m surprised how vehemently valve gets defended. There’s no good billionaire
Most criticism of valve on Lemmy reads like blatant shilling.
Shilling for whom?
Other corpos who cry about Valve providing a good service.
People like you can’t seem to differentiate wanting solid criticisms of Valve and Steam rather than just theory crafting all the worst things that can happen with them. The Steam hysteria makes no sense when its a storefront on open software platforms and the ones that are on closed software platforms aren’t doing what people are gearing Valve would do whenever Gabe dies or if Valve went public
At least put effort into explaining why Steam will become this terribly blood sucking store on PC where people can download from numerous options as compared to platforms like Xbox, PlayStation, Nintendo, iOS where you don’t have freedom to install anything you want. As a developer you can’t just distribute software and have them installable.
If people that wanted to make people concerned about Steam put more effort into their arguments, maybe people on Lemmy would give their concerns more credence. It’s surprising that on Lemmy, people who seem to value art and expression so much are so bad at expressing why people should be concerned about what they are concern about
I ain’t reading all that. I’m happy for u tho. Or sorry that happened.
It’s 6 sentences.
The common speech of someone willfully ignorant. Get an education
I have 3 degrees
We don’t want to know your IQ. Sorry to hear it’s not even room temperature.
YouTube university where you don’t need the attention span for reading
“I came here to mindlessly complain about things I don’t understand, not have an intelligent conversation.”
Oh there’s plenty said about Valve, like their dirty skin gambling underbelly.
Lemmy is not a person
Technically, Lemmy was a person.
And this is not an argument.
God so many people dont understand what a monopoly actually is. Listen carefully: despite the name MONOPOLY DOESN’T MEAN ONE!
You boot licking capitalist just can’t get past this. God i wish the ghost of Teddy Roosevelt could arise to beat some sense into all of you.
A very “gamer” headline and title card. Not in a good way.
I guess then MS doesn’t have an OS monopoly, because you can not only buy an Apple computer, but also install Linux.
Um… Yeah. Microsoft absolutely doesn’t have an OS monopoly, as much as they’re trying.
This is exactly why it’s important for people to learn about how capitalism functions instead of how to identify morally condemnable behaviour. A liberal with think Steam is fine so long as they remain “horizontally” organized and Gaben remains the special boi he is, but will only be bad if it the company gets “greedy.” There is no benefit to PC game distribution being controlled privately; any media distribution.
Steam is 100% a monopoly, they just happen to be a benevolent monopoly… but like all, that can change.
I think the issue is, that if we’re going to call steam a monopoly (and maybe they are), then we’ve got to call Xbox, Playstation, Nintendo monopolies.
What I don’t want to see is legal attacks against steam while letting worse behavior off the hook.
Ehh, steam only is in the PC gaming market
In the console market, you do have 3 primary competitors, be that Microsoft, PlayStation, and Nintendo.
In the whole gaming market maybe steam doesn’t have a Monopoly, but within the PC marketplace…
I mean, the issue is these lines aren’t as concrete anymore. Is the Ps5 a console or a locked down pc?
Hell, this is probably controversial, but Apple and Google actually have the monopoly on PC gaming. Android and Ios make the most money out of any gaming ecosystem.
I think so too, but they are a fairly small company/group with a stable (50+%) owner & basically don’t bother with much (neither publisher or consumer side). Eg GOG is smaller but fights DRM a lot more actively (and achieving DRM-free deals even before Steam).
I hope before Gabe goes Gaben’t he makes Valve a proper nonprofit - bcs the service they offer is like a mass infrastructure thing (which are always scary).
As to why devs think they have a monopoly - it’s hard to succeeded without Steam, especially if you arent a AAA studio (and even a small mistake on Steam part for their game’s visibility on Steam Store can cost them everything), and Steam isn’t really fighting over devs to offer them a better deal than the competition, it’s the other way around (it’s clear who has the power).
So yes, they have quite a fair bit of monopoly.
Modern, especially tech, monopolies aren’t a single-provider-locked-in type of thing, look at Google, they hold a monopoly over so many markets without those prerequisites. And they fought, shaped the markets intentionally to eventually get to that position (that’s why they were valued that high even before the revenue kicked in).
They are a monopoly 100%, just believe me bro.
If you are interested, I provided a pretty comprehensive list of definitions of a monopoly below, which steam neatly fits into!
Or do you want me to believe steam 100% isn’t, just believe me bro.
You mean those same “comprehensive” definitions that failed with my argument?
No? I’m going to stick with the actual definitions you ignored, the same ones you stopped responding to while downvoting like my toddler.
The best you’ve managed so far is inventing your own definition where a company only counts as a monopoly if it behaves badly and takes “monopolistic actions,” which is a neat little tautology. And you still haven’t shown a single definition that includes any of that.
In case you managed to not see, or forget, where i previously brought this up, here’s a link so you can refresh yourself: https://lemmy.ca/post/55030092/20023839
I agree valve hasn’t done anything, but that isnt part of any definition of monopoly i’ve been able to discover, except for someone arguing in bad faith on the internet.
They’re not benevolent in the slightest.
Oh look, yet another person who doesn’t understand what monopoly means.
Sounds like Steam fits that description pretty well. I agree that steam isn’t a strict monopoly, there is competition, but they are so far and ahead they still function as a monopoly in their area.
Since you’d rather throw mud than talk terms, I guess that’s where this ends.
“Comodity controlled by one party”. Except it’s not controlled by one party.
Outsized market power, what left out are the actions taken to make such an outsized market power. Monopolies are not a passive that form all by themselves. They are created through expansion acquisition, and aggressive crushing of competition. Disney and Nintendo do these actions. Valve does basically… Nothing.
A single dominant seller, but again leaving out all the rest I have written above.
There is nothing Valve can stop doing to be less “a monopoly”. All they’ve done is provide a pretty decent service, and nobody else can be arsed to top that, even companies with the resources to do so.
That’s not a monopoly.
By your definition, lets imagine a world where Amazon had 100% of the market and there were no other competitors, even if it happened naturally, without malicious intent, they wouldn’t be a monopoly? Come on.
I dont see ‘has to act a specific way’ in any definitions of monopoly. A monopoly isnt about being evil, or ‘actions taken to make such an outsized market power’ even if thats often part of the result, but just describes their position in the field.
This isn’t about how a company got there, it’s about where they currently are. Steam may not have crushed competitors aggressively like Disney or Nintendo, but its market dominance and control over PC game distribution still fits the textbook definition of a monopoly.
Steam has ~79.5% of the PC gaming market, I’m one of their customers and love their service, but that doesnt change that “monopoly”fits them.
Damn never seen a sober man so confidently wrong on something so straight forward.
Yea, it’s pretty rough for tattorack, but that’s what happens when you ignore definitions and argue in bad faith. They ignore all contrary evidence and definitions, and insit their made up definition is accurate.
/Shrug, some people just aren’t open to discussion .
Im not the ones ignoring definitions, and calling Valve a monoply is bad faith in the first place.
That’s not my definition. That’s just the definition. And you’re using a corporation that is actively monopolising the logistics market, even so far as breaking the law to kill any competition, as an example. Nicely done.
Thanks, that was done intentionally, to highlight the absurdity of your argument. I assume we both agree that Amazon is an effective monopoly (though i have had people fight me on that too!)
You say its not your definition, but i linked three different definitions which didn’t use that language. in fact, in all my searching, not a SINGLE definition includes a discussion on how they got there, but on the **CURRENT **state of the market.
Here’s another source:
This is why I say Steam has an effective monopoly.
So yes, it seems like you’re using your personal definition, but it contradicts the actual, widely accepted definitions.
If you want to call me out and say “you initially said it WAS a monopoly, but its only an EFFECTIVE monopoly”, ill take that egg on my face, its earned and i should be more careful with my words.
Not on games per se but almost on mods. Yes, there are other platforms, but the majory and newest are on Workshop. And they make it hard to download them, if you don’t own the game on Steam (and Valve has it in their terms that they own the mods hosted on Workshop).
So one could argue that they use the indirect peer-pressure approach to market dominance, similiar to Google on Android.
I wouldn’t complain if they just had a “Download” button on their web version. But they don’t, you have to use the finicky
steamcmdintended for server administration.Workshop is kinda shit, I don’t even bother looking there. Just Google mods which 90% of the time winds up being Nexus
I do a fair bit of modding, and actually almost never interact with steam workshop. Nexus mods, thunderstore and r2modman, or something game specific like Everest (Celeste) or Lumafly mod manager (Hollow Knight). Not to mention modding like ReShade or OptiScaler, or custom proton versions with extra features.
I tend to associate Steam Workshop with very simple mods, like skin swaps, or mods with dedicated game support, like Rivals of Aether characters. Most of the more serious game modifications are hosted elsewhere, at least in my experience, and I usually forget to even bother checking what steam has available.
That said, I agree that an easier download button for using those mods on other platforms would be a good feature.
This. Steam Workshop I only use for my basic Witcher 3 mods being removing weight limits for inventory and stuff like horse sprinting stamina. I think it’s been over a year since witcher 3 workshop launched. There’s barely anything on there. Everything is on Nexus. All the ultra wide monitor support mods I grab off codeberg, GitHub, gitlab, or Nexus. I remember all the half life mods I used to get off modDB. Steam workshop is a far distant second to Nexus for mods for me. Close to GitHub for how much I use to download mods from
Keeping in mind Valve is a for profit company. Why would they host anything that adds extra bandwith cost and does not increase revenue on their platform? Alternative “appstores” on Android are not hosted by Google, as far as I know.
“Almost” a monopoly, by definition, is not a monopoly. Your concerns are valid, but there are legal ramifications associated with these terms.
I mean… There are so many games that use Nexus as their preferred platform. And for older games Mod.db is still king.
Didn’t forget loverslab
Steam will get the social media warrior upvote brigade on their side every time, despite being a single point of failure that at any moment can change it’s operations to restrict anything and everything they wish unless you pay up.
Already we can’t transfer ownership once we die. We can’t port out our licenses to anywhere else. We can’t even reinstall a game without an internet connection afaik. If I could port my entire library to GOG I would.
There’s no good competitors because the money isn’t there to build one. Developers don’t want to maintain yet another platform and gamers don’t want another application to manage all their shit. Would take tens of billions of dollars today to get in there on top of having near feature parity.
I’ve been worried for a long time about what will happen when GabeN dies and someone else takes the reins. The only reason why the platform isn’t royal shit is because it’s his company and no grubby MBAs have managed to take it public. That can change on a whim.
Potential enshittifications:
Subscriptions. MBAs love them!
Advertisements. Think on-launch forced ads that play in steam before launching a game unless you pony up perhaps $15/mo in platform fees to bypass it. Maybe they’ll start with a much lower insignificant price to make it whatever for users to add a credit card and allow autobilling… for later price increases.
Download fees. Watch this quick 2 minute advertisement to begin the download for free right after!.. or just $5 per download / $30/mo for unlimited ad free downloads for your whole family (up to 5 people on the same ip! geolocation restrictions apply. Max 1TB per account per month)
No good competitors because they don’t have money? Excuse me? Are you seriously trying to paint Epic Games as some poor small underdog company?
Yes, Steam will eventually go to shit. But it’s not shit right now, and the competition can’t even be bothered to have a shopping basket feature in their store, something every online store already had since the dawn of online stores 20 years ago.
I wouldn’t buy shit on Epic for so many fucking reasons. They’re not a realistic competitor in terms of their DD product. They make money on fortnite and their engine.
Their revenue for their games store for “3rd party titles” was $285 million in 2024, compared to Steam’s 10800 million overall revenue… only 37x higher, clearly epic is a strong competitor. Maybe you wanna claim something silly like valve’s first party sales were 10.5 billion or something.
And where are those millions going, pray tell? Because they’re sure as fuck not going into the development of a good storefront.
Epic has enough resources to make competition against Valve. They would rather cry about how they can’t get away with being cheap.
285m in revenue is not 285m in profits. Their publishing deals with companies probably don’t leave much left for actual income, and i’d be surprised if they operate with profit if you exclude first party titles.
Anywho… Why are you so hyper focused on epic, and not the market as a whole?
They’re one company and everybody hates them. I don’t give a shit about them. GOG is rocking ~40m in 2024 revenue… and they have a bit of a unique offering with 0 DRM and offline installers. Their nature keeps developers away since there’s an assumption that without DRM you won’t sell anything.
What else is there that is even remotely relevant compared to steam? I don’t know of any for PC games (windows/linux/mac) - mobile may make more money but that’s a separate market.
GOG is not a Steam competitor because they’re offering something different from Steam.
A customer that would buy a game from GOG is not a customer that would regularly buy something from Steam.
This is ridiculous bullshit. Epic had shitloads of money, they just couldn’t find their ass with both hands. It took them years to implement a freaking shopping cart.
Epic’s incompetence doesn’t matter to me. Find me another alternative that isn’t riding on the coattails of pre-existing billions in revenue.
Fortnite makes exponentially more than their DD platform.
GOG is the closest thing to a competitor imo but their philosophy restricts them from really competing on day 1 game sales outside of a minority of titles.
Everybody else is a seller of adult games, indie titles, or simply a key seller for steam games.
Why would I? I’m not making any claims myself, merely pointing out the ridiculousness of yours.
You didn’t do that though. I said for a competitor to come along that they would need to sink tens of billions of dollars, like uber did. I fail to see how this is a ridiculous statement. Epic being incompetent doesn’t have any relation to what a real competitor would need to do to gain a foothold with say a meager 25% of valve’s share.
Epic didn’t do enough to gain serious market share. They haven’t given up but I don’t see them making any inroads without further investment to the tune of tens of billions of dollars. They literally need to build up their platform to be substantially cheaper (e.g. by offering subsidies) while also making it fit for use (by spending way more money on quality devs.) They haven’t… and nobody cares except folks like you who think they’re a serious competitor as justification for white knighting for valve. lol
Love the ad hominems, do keep them coming 🙄
Yeah that’s exactly what my bashing of their pathetic excuse at a storefront was implying.
You’re comparing the cost of building a simple software platform (and face it, Steam isn’t THAT complicated to replicate from a technical perspective) to a company hiring tens of millions of people worldwide for billions of man hours and hardware depreciation. Your estimates are so unrealistic it’s hilarious.
Stop making excuses for every other company that has failed to compete with Valve. It has not been out of the price range for competition of other companies. Big publishers have been making storefronts for about 2 decades and proceeding to underfund and mismanage every attempt.
Steam was not the first digital storefront on PC. They were not a huge behemoth company by 2014. They were not bigger than Epic was by the time EGS launched. Not bigger than EA when Origin launched. Not bigger than Ubisoft when Uplay launched. Not bigger than Microsoft when GFWL launched. Not bigger than Amazon anytime these past 15 years of digital downloads from them. I doubt it took Valve tens of billions of dollars to make 2014 Steam right before SteamOS launched, 2014 because not a single storefront platform has reached feature parity with end of 2014 Steam.
Steam launched in 2003. A single ten billion dollars, I wouldn’t be surprised as about the accumulative revenue of Valve 2003-2014.
What is the policy of any other store. Of you want a solution here go lobby the government you live under to mandate inheritance of digital goods
This is a game by game case as it’s up to what DRM is implemented if any. A ton of games you can just copy the folder around and click the executable. We’re you not around during the SecuRom and StarForce days. GFWL install limit days.
Call people what you are yourself, a social media warrior, but that doesn’t make you any less ignorant of PC gaming markets than whomever you’re crying about. You won’t be taken seriously when you’re making excuses for a bunch of companies historically and a number to this day larger than Valve was when building Steam up
Valve isn’t in a vacuum. iOS, Xbox, PlayStation, Nintendo. All closed software ecosystems unlike a Linux machine or currently a Windows machine. Still waiting for that 2 minute advertisement to begin download or download fees on actual closed platforms. Waiting for public companies like Microsoft, Amazon, Sony, Nintendo, … to start charging download fees and pre-download advertisements on purchased games.
GFWL Gold subscription for online play is about 20 years old and failed spectacularly against a Steam that wasn’t even a tenth the userbase it has today. Now you’re losing hair over subscriptions to get advertisement free downloads of games you’ve purchased. Come back to reality of how the markets gone for PC gaming in the last 20 years
“everything else is shitty so they aren’t any worse” is not an argument man
My steam account is from 2003. I’m vividly aware of the overall DD market and it’s changes over time from a user perspective. I was here before it existed like so many others.
The last really good alternative to steam we had was Stardock’s Impulse… which they sold out because brad’s a tool and couldn’t stand up a team internally that was separate from his game development aspirations. If he did, they would be as big as valve today. Instead we have more shitty elemental games and more shitty galciv games and all their DLC.
Anywho, you’re still fucked no matter how much you suck valve’s dick once they enshittify. Can you truly say they will not enshittify?
No I can’t say they won’t enshitiffy but I’m not going to bitch all the times they’re not being dicks just so you can enjoy sucking your own dick. Go fight a battle that actually needs fighting right now because Steam is a waste of time and energy now. You’re fighting your imaginary enemy right now
Another round of bootlicking Lemmy’s favourite megacorp. Good job, guys.
It’s true though, Steam has a monopoly on Steam games.
Steam does not limit games to only steam.
No shit? Games released on the Xbox store, Xbox store has a monopoly on it. PSN store monopoly on PSN store games
What is a “steam game”?
Games that are linked with the Steam libraries, distributed through the Steam store, and launched through the Steam client.
So you’re saying Steam has a monopoly on the games people choose to buy on Steam?
…?
Yes, that is the type of monopoly they have. It’s one that would probably not attract the attention of anti-trust regulators. If you’re not coming from the free software world I guess it looks like that’s the only way things can be.
Every game iv bought on steam doesn’t require the client to launch expect for one. So not sure how well that point checks out…
Being a sole distributor of a specific product does not make you a monopoly by any stretch.