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Maybe there isn’t one.
This is what I’m talking about: people think monopoly = bad, so if I say Valve has a monopoly, I must want them burned to the ground. Nah. They’re mostly fine. Having only one good option is precarious, but it is still a good option. For now.
But they’re still a monopoly. We should say so, because it’s true, and important. It shapes the entire PC gaming market.
None of that is what defines a monopoly.
There’s only one store that matters. They have unthreatened supermajority marketshare. Customers go there by default - sometimes exclusively. Developers can sell there, or they’re basically fucked.
What you’re concerned about are anti-competitive practices. But some businesses don’t need those, to lack any relevant competition. It can just happen. They didn’t do anything wrong. They’re still monopolies.
While many accuse Valve of monopolising the PC gaming market, others argue that Steam’s dominance is simply the result of doing things right.
These assertions do not contradict. I cannot overstress that.
This whole article is ‘Valve’s monopoly is fine because they did things right.’
Having one good store is not, in itself, a problem. But it does mean we’re one fuckup away from having no good stores.
Saying it’s a monopoly doesn’t mean it needs solving. Anti-competitive behavior is a problem - but being a monopoly doesn’t require that abuse, and you don’t need a monopoly to exercise that abuse.
Yet people get deeply fricking weird about saying it’s a monopoly.
It’s naked taboo. It’s people feeling icky about a word, and actively refusing to engage in rational argument about meaning. When someone has dogmatically internalized that monopoly=bad and Steam=good, the text doesn’t matter. Even pointing out things they just said gets dismissed as some kind of attack against The Good Store.™
We have to start from plain acknowledgement that Steam’s competitors do not matter. They are plentiful and irrelevant. Explaining why they are doesn’t change that they are.
So we’re acknowledging it’s a monopoly? Cool. Defense is still an acknowledgement. I’ve had the weirdest goddamn arguments with people insisting they’d never shop anywhere else, and if games aren’t on there it’s their own fault they’re doomed… but how dare anyone use the m-word! Obviously that can only mean one seller with absolute control, like how Standard Oil owned all 85% of the market.
Text generation is the least you can do. You can still fire up Photoshop and feed in a half-finished image. Diffusion turns whatever you have into whatever you describe. If it does decent scratches on metal, but won’t put them exactly where you want, then select them and move them, and the robot will smooth it over.
The very first article I read about Stable Diffusion, three years ago, had the author doodling mountains and flipping a spaceship. All the image-to-video stuff demands you provide art, as an input. Prompts alone are just a tech demo gone feral.
Software has won.
This was inevitable once ports looked the same and ran the same. Doubling your customer base, without developing the whole game twice? Obvious choice for any third party. First-party developers have taken longer, because their parent companies primarily own them to promote a hardware business. Microsoft’s hardware business has become vestigial. It always was, to some extent; the Xbox project was a 1990s scheme to PC-ify the console market. It worked.
Consoles don’t exist anymore. Do you want the green AMD laptop, or the blue AMD laptop? Even Nintendo rebadged an Android tablet. You can release some crazy new hardware unlike anything else, but the only third-party games will be multiplatform hits that run like garbage. Like on early PS3. The Helldivers 2 PSN fiasco sure looks like Sony found out how profitable they’d be as just another publisher and the answer scared the shit out of them. Without that service, they don’t have a platform, anymore. They sell a popular model of an IBM compatible. Asterisk on the compatible.
Nintendo can get away with that shit forever, because they own Pokemon. I don’t know how much longer you can cosplay that sort of first-party importance, on the strength of Horizon and… Death Stranding.
Nobody can “get” exclusives. They don’t exist anymore. There’s first-party games - there’s games the first party funded into existence - and everything else runs on whatever customers have.
Developers want to sell games… to people. Hardware is an obstacle. They don’t want to care which color of deliberately incompatible generic computer you bought. Shipping five near-identical versions of the same damn game is a button they push in Unreal 5, and that’s why they put up with Unreal 5.
Fuck software patents.
Copyright made sense when it was a decade or two. Industrial patents seem basically functional. Trademark’s mostly truth-in-advertising for consumer choice.
But software patents aren’t about how you do something - they’re claiming the entire concept, in the broadest possible terms, and killing it. Straight-up murdering that potential. It is denied the necessary iterative competition that turns dogshit first implementations into must-have features. Nobody’s gonna care in twenty years.
Entire hardware form-factors have come and gone in a single decade. Can you imagine if swipe keyboards were still single-vendor, and still worked like in 2009? Or maybe Apple bought them, and endlessly bragged about how Android can’t do [blank], because fifty thousand dollars changed hands in the 3G era.
How many games would not exist, if Nintendo had decided they own sidescrollers? A whole genre, wiped out, because a piece of paper says those mechanics are theft.
Which is saying something.
Unreal 1 games are consistently fugly in ways that are difficult to place. Their design can be great - but the rendering, bluh. There’s just enough specularity and fake reflections to remind you most textures are chalk-flat. Detail noise improves big blurry texels, but your brain feels that band-gap between high and low frequency. Character animation, especially faces, feel very… Hanna-Barbara. There’s just enough physics for you to understand why Half-Life 2 blew people’s dicks off.
Basically, the engine has all the idiosyncrasies of a 1990s console. You know at a glance. And this PS2-ass parody of a mid-2000s HD remaster manages to feel more dated.
Right? Overwatch has the fat dwarf engineer, the chubby ice girl, the scrungly paraplegic pyromaniac, six distinct lesbians, and a gorilla. Wild variety of costume design and body type. It is almost impressive how every single character in Concord is… askew. They look like cheap cosplays of themselves.
Spend less money.
It’s genuinely that simple. Don’t expect 3x ROI on whatever you budget, and then pour eight hojillion dollars into a seven-year gamble. If all you have to work with is fifteen salaries for a year, I guaranfuckingtee you that’s enough to make a game, with drastically lower stakes for success or failure.
But of course these vultures actually mean, crunch crunch crunch, push out a real-money siphon, gamble on cloning last year’s hits. What do the kids like these days? Horse girls? Sure, let’s built a house opposite that moving ship.
I mean, the cult of MBAs expecting miracles from the hot new thing is a pattern we’ve seen before. The functionality of LLMs does not match Sam Altman’s fantasies - but it does function. People are getting use out of this tech. But they’re vastly outnumbered by some mixture of optimistic experimenters and trend-chasing dipshits.
Which does cause problems now that Google search is shit.
Every time ‘new tool makes old skills rusty’ is treated as novel, I’m reminded of The Gentleman’s Magazine:
Instead of simply reproducing the operations of man’s intelligence, the arithmometer relieves that intelligence from the necessity of making the operations. Instead of repeating responses dictated to it, this instrument instantaneously dictates the proper answer to the man who asks it a question. It is not matter producing material effects, but matter which thinks, reflects, reasons, calculates, and executes all the most difficult and complicated arithmetical operations with a rapidity and infallibility which defies all the calculators in the world. The arithmometer is, moreover, a simple instrument, of very little volume and easily portable. It is already used in many great financial establishments, where considerable economy is realized by its employment.
It will soon be considered as indispensable, and be as generally used as a clock, which was formerly only to be seen in palaces, and is now in every cottage.
This was a crank-powered adding machine. Numbers used levers instead of buttons because buttons hadn’t been invented yet. There were already people who expected it the next version would do everything for us - and people who thought that would be bad, somehow.
I’m curious how that subscription value is gonna look in a few years now that Microsoft has cancelled basically everything and fired a ton of talent.
That’s the best argument against trusting they have any idea what they’re doing. I’ve been saying for like a decade now, they could just not do another Xbox, and call it job-done for turning consoles into PCs. Every game’s on every system because they’re all the same. The goddamn Switch 2 has raytracing cores.
Part of any moustache-twirling capitalist scheme is, like… caring when things make money? Sony going “oops, nevermind” on a failed shooter that took eight years to make is a cutthroat decision. Microsoft killing a studio for releasing a beloved and successful game is just bastardry. Especially if they just bought them, specifically to make that game. Microsoft effectively bribed your publisher to shut you down. You come into work one day, with all the equipment and people still there, and it’s like, nope, the studio doesn’t exist anymore. Somehow.
I’m left wondering if Microsoft even needed to do anything, for the console market to go this way. They correctly spotted what GTA3’s multiplatform releases meant for the industry. But beyond forcing the inclusion of hard drives… did they contribute to that process?
The term specifically exists to describe material from the abuse of children.
You cannot abuse children who do not exist.
The entire point is distinguishing the kind of JPGs you go to prison for, versus a drawing of Bart Simpson’s dick. There’s a reason that only one of those things is readily available on popular websites. The other one’s a lot worse. Separating them is kind of important.
Complex x86 software on ARM is easily the most exciting part of this announcement.
Inside-out was the right answer ever since SulonQ, nine years ago.